Costumes and creation in the novels of Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell

To speak about costume in fiction means to speak about detail in literature on the one hand; on the other hand it means to speak about the world of things and its reconstruction in fiction by means of word images. James Wood in his famous ‘How Fiction Works’ rightly asserts that ‘in life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail’, but, he continues, life is amorphously full of details, and rarely directs us toward it. Whereas literature teaches us to notice’ [Wood 2008: 52].

Roland Barthes characterized the milieu of a man, in particular – of a nowadays man, as the ‘world of goods’ [quote from Freedgood 2006: 4]. In

the XIX century literature, this world, by Elaine Freedgood, ‘got used to itself and things began to demand visibility’ [quote from Freedgood 2006: 9], or/and, as Wood writes, ‘palpability’ [Wood 2008: 56]. Remember the idea of James Wood, ‘So during the nineteenth century, the novel became more painterly’ [Wood 2008: 62]. It happened mostly because of the art of detail and its cult, so obvious in Balzac, Zola, Hardy, Turgenev, Chekhov, James, etc.

On the whole, novelistic art in the XIX‒XX centuries moved towards the reduction of the quantity of details in narration (the marks of the world of goods, by Barthes), so it moved towards deletion of the staff (things) which just exists in the bulk of the novel and does not demand readers’ interpretation and which does not bear any subtextual meaning (metonymical or, more, metaphorical). Rolland Barthes wrote about it: ‘many objects lie around in the realist novel to signify a generic real rather than to suggest something particular about it’ [quote from Freedgood 2008: 9].

Lessening of the number of depicted things (objects) in the novel leads to fetishising of the ones which are left, in other words – to making larger the artistic fullness of the things which are used by the author for depicting, it leads to increasing its plot significance (James Wood rightly attributes it to post-Flaubertian tradition; [Wood 2006: 58]). So, we may say that lessening of the number of things incorporated into narration leads to, figuratively speaking, turning a thing into a detail; Wood directly connects the history of the novel as a literary genre with the rise of detail’s role [Wood 2006: 58]; in other words we may say that fetishising of detail increases the trope character of literary text; it leads to using more metaphors and other means of artistic condensation of the text. By Freedgood, our reading becomes more and more ‘a kind of reflexive, thematic reading that derives from picking out metaphors…’ [Freedgood 2006: 7].

Contemporary literature is more selective in things to be depicted than, say, the XIX century literature. Gerard Gennette stressed that quite often a narrator is governed by what could be called ‘mock reality’, ‘imaginative reality’, or ‘referential illusion’ (as Barthes defines) which he/she constructs ‘by the presence of what is there and what demands to be shown [Freedgood 2006: 9]. It means that contextual, narrative, character-making, plot-making roles of the details which a writer uses go up. Here happens what Paul Ricoeur describes as follows: ‘[s]ome objects, in other words, are removed from the work of producing the text’s referential illusion and are promoted to metaphors’ [quote from: Freedgood 2006: 10]. As Wood stresses, in literature (especially beginning from the XIX century) ‘mostly detail is functional or symbolic’ [Wood 2006: 69]. It does not contradict to the assertion of Geoffrey Leech who writes in his Style in Fiction that ‘the contribution of a specific detail may be both symbolic and realistic at once’ and that ‘symbolism and verisimilitude’ are not opposed to one another because due some ‘unforeseen combination of attributes’ ‘literature achieves both generality and uniqueness’ [Leech 2007: 125].

Costume exists and operates mostly as the detail of a portrait of a personage; one of the aims of a writer when he/she uses costume as a portraiture detail is to evoke reader’s visual concept of a personage, and more – to strengthen figurative intensity of the text.

What do art-specialists mean while using the term ‘a costume’? By them [see Захаржевская 2005], a costume is a type of clothes which reflects social, national, regional, historical affiliation of a person. Costume and its history is one of the keys to comprehend customs, traditions, folkways, rites of a people. Costume in the arts is the means to recreate an epoch. One of the famous Russian specialists in the role of a detail in literature, Boris Galanov, in the book ‘Painting by Words: Portrait, Landscape, Thing’, exclaims on the matter of costumes in arts in general and literature too, ‘magnificent emphatic power of the clothes’ [Галанов1974: 100].