Hilary Mantel's historical novels about Thomas Cromwell: traditions and innovations

Hilary Mantel's Historical Novels about Thomas Cromwell: Traditions and Innovations

Boris Proskurnin

Perm State University

It is a well-known fact that English literature (or rather, literature in English if we remember the nationality of the founder of the genre) presented the world with the genre of historical novel. What is more, in the works of Sir Walter Scott,

according to the critics and literary historians who thought and wrote about the 'Scottish magician' (in Alexander Pushkin's appraisal), the very model of the historical novel was exemplified. Many writers of the next generations throughout the world followed his example, t though sometimes stepping over the limits of the model. If we look, for example, at the novels of Alessandro Manzoni (I Promessi Sposi; 1827), Prosper Merimee (Chronique du regne de Charles IX; 1829), Alexander Pushkin (Капитанская дочка; 1836), Edward Bulwer Lytton (The Last of the Barons, 1843) we may see how close to the model and how pioneering (in terms of their national literatures) they were. These ideas may be applied to many other patterns of the genre in other national literatures and in other periods of the history of world literature. In Russian literary criticism since the 1960s there has been existed the opinion that a historical novel is a narrative based on the reconstruction of some past by means of literary images; this artistic 'reconstruction' is a story of the fate of a human being within the system of complicated socio-political and moral and psychological alternatives of former times as seen and understood by the writer. By estimation of some leading academics of that time (Boris Reizov, Anna Elistratova, Alexander Belskiy), those alternatives and their interweaving should turn into a conflict, the sharper the better for the genre. The very existence of this conflict was supposed by those academics to be an indispensable condition of the genre, its conceptual and artistic centre. For example, A.Belskiy doubted that Victor Hugo's 'L'Homme qui rit ' (1869) is a historical novel just because he did not see in the novel 'the main thing, without which, generally speaking, no historical novel is possible, - historical conflict' [Вельский 1968: 137]. A.Belskiy, and many other academics of the 1960s -1970s, as followers of George Lukacs and his ' The Historical Novel' (1955), think that the writer's plunging into the past times is not enough for making a historical novel; he writes that not only historical novels could be written on the basis of this immersion in the past, but 'novels of society, morals and manners, and adventure novels' [Ibid: 139]. Though, to tell the truth, A.Belskiy in his later book ' The English Novel of the 1820S when analyzing multi-genre structures of Walter Scott's 'fvanhoe' (1819) and 'Redgauntlet. A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (1824), spoke already about the optional role of an explicit historical (mostly interpreted as a political) conflict in the works of Walter Scott of his later period of writing. It should be noted that the critic argued that this situation leads to weakening of social and epic principles in later Scott's novels [see: Вельский 1975: 14; 193]. The investigator, due to his rigid aesthetic views, did not notice the artistic realization of historical aspects via depicting characters with a much deeper psychological approach. The English history of the genre is quite long and intensive. Since 1810s it has had its ups and downs. By the 1910s Ernest Baker (see his 'History of Fiction', 1908) listed about 1,900 historical novels around the world, and the majority of them were in English. Among these ups and downs occurs a sort of genre oblivion in the period of modernism and 'history obsession' of postmodernism. Nevertheless, beginning with the Victorian obsession with history as progress [see: Purchase 2006: 166] narrative experiments with the past, present and future become permanent things in English literature irrespective of the periods of its development. The idea of literary study of a human being's fate in the process of dynamic (i.e. political, economical cultural, moral, etc.) 'protuberances' of history is relevant to all stages of English literature.

Jerome de Groot, a well-known specialist among Anglicists, argues that just during Modernism the historical novel seemed to become a sort of 'sub-genre' which left the mainstream of literature. But at the same time, he rightly stresses that modernists, and Virginia Woolf among them, 'by creating a sense of history as something navigable and fluid' 'signalled new cultural modes of thinking about the past and contributed to the literary move away from 'then' to a predilection with 'now' [de Groot 2010: 44]. By my understanding, a good historical novel is always inspired by urgent aspects of the times when the novel is created (I call it 'a historical novel parabola'), but nevertheless the idea of the mutual penetration of the past and the present in any narrative about 'then', an idea tremendously popular with postmodernists, has established itself in its generality. When we think about that seeming oblivion of the genre in the modernism times, we should remember the early work of Herbert Butterfield The Historical Novel: An Essay (1924) where he tries to look at the genre as a means for the existence of history itself, i.e. the convergence of history as an academic study and historical novel through the idea that both are just 'mental pictures' (or, by postmodernists, 'tales') [Butterfield 1924: 3]. After the modernists, one of the obvious novelties was a new role for the author who stops even pretending to be an omniscient narrator who knows exactly in what way the history and, thus, the plot of the novel develops; instead, the author either invents a narrator with a peculiar individual view of the past, like the Claudius of Robert Graves' I Claudius; 1934) or uses the third person narration but this narrative 'he' and/or she' practically is 'I', as if the author had erased the distance between him/her and the main character. It leads to the domination of the character's point of view and everybody and everything gets quite a personal interpretation. This does not exclude the writer's interpretation of the history period depicted: in twentieth and twenty-first century literature writers try not to impose author's understanding of history on readers directly using the means of the author's voice, it is mostly being done indirectly through the personages in which the author's ideas of history are 'put'.

It is obvious, for example in Orlando (1928) of Virginia Woolf. We all know that the main hero/heroine of the novel travels through the history of England beginning in the Tudor times up to early 1920s. This plot-making principle, based on so called 'over-historicity', is used by Woolf to develop her ideas of eternity of human existence, of dialectics of masculine and feminine beginnings in a human being, of beauty, of culture and etc. It produces some new understanding of history which is very well formulated by Jerome de Groot: 'a space of flux and possibility', 'possibilities and potentialities' [de Groot 2010:

43]. But this space is not a chaos, it is organized, framed and structured by culture, in this very novel - by English culture which acts as the means of the main character's selfunderstanding and self-estimation. De Groot is right when referring to the book of Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, he states that the novel of Woolf brings 'the tradition of the English historical novel to a self-conscious close' [de Groot 201: 44].

Here we come to another 'after-modernist' novelty in the development of historical novel, which is not actually so new and revolutionary. I mean the predominance in the process of the artistic reconstructing of the past of cultural ties of the past times. The brilliant attempts to look at history not through social and political movements but via movements of thoughts and cultural paradigms had already happened in literature before the modernists: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) by Hugo, Salambo (1862) by Flaubert, the novels of Dmitriy Merezhkovskiy (Христос и Антихрист; 1896 - 1905); quite remarkably Merezhkovskiy is called one of the founders of so called 'historiosophical novel', i.e. the novel which depicts history mainly as the movement ofthoughts and ideas but not deeds.

The Mantel novels we are speaking about - Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) - put together these two novelties which were discussed above.

By my understanding, these novels (and the whole future trilogy, I guess) develop the theme of the emergence of a new England which happened in the reign of Henry VIII when the political and ideological collapses of the feudal paradigm in the country were accompanied by an ideological revolution. Inspired by the breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, Protestantism and therefore a Protestant way of thinking and organizing life began its history in England. We may say that the novels refer to the period of cultural breakthrough in the country. Hilary Mantel's version of Thomas Cromwell is a personage in English history who not only began the process of moving in that direction (new way of life), but who marked the image of this new England in his very personality and his way of thinking about life, about people and the laws which regulated current terrestrial being. When we think what conflicts the plots of the novels about a very important period of English history are based on, we see that the events and characters move through some essential, not only political or religious, contradictions (oppositions) of the time: new versus old, real versus ideal, practical versus visionary. In terms of the collisions by means of which these contradictions are realized in the plot, all of them are focused on the figure of Thomas Cromwell through whose point of view we look at the events of the 1520s and 1530s.

The main confrontation is that between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More; it moves through both novels, and in the first one it is given as a direct confrontation (and thus dramatizes the narration), in the second novel it is the imaginary argument of Cromwell with More, who was beheaded at the end of Wolf Hall. This collision is of ideological and - broader - cultural origin; two approaches to life contradict here: one (Thomas More) - idealizing, rigid and dogmatic, the second (Cromwell) -practical, mobile and flexible, sometimes cynical. Once this novel is narrated from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, all collisions are based on the depicting of something that marks the birth of a new England, and in all of them Cromwell is the first and indispensable element: Thomas Cromwell versus Katherine of Aragon (the problem of the male heir of Henry VIII as the pledge of a new era in England's history); Thomas Cromwell versus the old nobility (as the reflection of the new social structure in England due to the protestant ideology); Thomas Cromwell versus Anne Boleyn (as the reflection of the problem of the male heir the birth of whom should bring peace and prosperity for new England); Thomas Cromwell versus Henry VIII (as the sign of autocracy and its costs for an individual and as a sign of the limits for potentialities and possibilities within any autocratic paradigm).

The plot is constructed as Thomas Cromwell's own account of moving up the political and social ladder; so it is his version of his own life. In other words, to agree with Colin

Burrow from London Review of Books, Wolf Hall, (but no doubt it works in the second novel too) 'constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew' [Burrow]. And what is more, we may say that this epoch-making period of English history is poured out into the hero's internal world and is shown as such: all significant and not significant events, facts and personalities in terms of 'big history' are 'boiled' in the mind of Cromwell.

In Bring Up the Bodies, for example, we read: 'These are sounds of Austin Friars, in the autumn of 1535: the singing children rehearsing a motet, breaking off, beginning again. The voices of these children, small boys, calling out to each other from staircases, and nearer at hand the scrabbling of dogs' paws on the boards. The chink of gold pieces into a chest. The susurration, tapestry-muffled, of polyglot conversation. The whisper of ink across paper. Beyond the walls the noises of the city: the milling of the crowds at his gate, distant cries from the river. His inner monologue, running on, soft-voiced: it is in public rooms that he thinks of the cardinal, his footsteps echoing in lofty vaulted chambers. It is in private spaces that he thinks of his wife Elizabeth. She is a blur now in his mind, a whisk of skirts around the corner. That last morning of her life, as he left the house he thought he saw her following him, caught a flash of her white cap. He had half turned, saying to her, 'Go back to bed': but no one was there. By the time he came home that night her jaw was bound and there were candles at her head and feet. <...> And now night falls on Austin Friars. Snap of bolts, click of key in lock, rattle of strong chain across wicket, and the great bar fallen across the main gate. The boy, Dick Purser, lets out the watchdogs. They pounce and race, they snap at the moonlight, they flop under the fruit trees, heads on paws and ears twitching. When the house is quiet - when all his houses are quiet - then dead people walk about on the stairs' [Mantel 2012: 73 - 74].

There are several things to be mentioned here. The first, and the most important one, is that everything that is told is being passed through the mind of Thomas Cromwell, and thus both time and space are narratively 'organized' by his inner world. Then, Mantel brilliantly expands time and space when we, readers, are being moved beyond Cromwell's private space and time, when we feel, hear, see, guess the pulse of life of the house, street, river, city, country. In other words private and public, single and general are congruent. But this congruency is mostly and quite sharply felt by the protagonist - Thomas Cromwell.

The plots of both novels are constructed not around famous historical events but around their reflection in the mind of Thomas Cromwell. As Bettany Hughes points out, readers are 'seeing with Cromwell's eyes, hearing with his ears' [Hughes. The Daily Telegraph]. Michael Caines argues, the image of Cromwell is based on the gathering together of his "past selves" and, inevitably, on putting together the variety of historical facts and events [Caines]. In terms of time-structure, the plot is based mainly (using Mikhail Bakhtin's term), on biographical time -that of Thomas Cromwell. This biographical time constructs temporal cantilena of the whole narration. It is quite noteworthy and meaningful that Wolf Hall begins with the scene when Thomas's father brutally beats his teenage son. After this cruelty Thomas makes up his mind to flee from his father and England, and the idea of both indirect and direct revenge upon his father and the life paradigm in which such brutality is just a norm organizes the whole narration. At the same time, this opening scene determines the borders within which the narration will be taking place, i.e. Thomas Cromwell's personal living through the period of the birth of England's future. It just unites two novels in one big narrative, joins two plots (besides chronological continuity and recurring personages), allows readers to 'travel' along, back and forth, Thomas Cromwell's life-time line which is English history at the same time.

The idea to organize narration as a sort of personal account explains one more striking peculiarity of Mantel's writing art in these novels, the use of the Present Simple Time. Mantel uses it in a masterly fashion, on the one hand, to produce the effect of vivid scenes (many critics think highly of her art here; see David

Hughes, for example [Hughes: The New Yorker]), on the other, to put readers as close as possible to the hero and even to unite them with him in terms of the artistic space.

Next day is early for the meeting of the king's council. The Duke of Norfolk takes his place at the head of the table, then shifts out when word comes that the king himself will preside. 'And Warham is here', someone says; the door opens, nothing happens, then slowly very slowly the ancient prelate shuffles in. He takes his seat. His hands tremble as they rest on the cloth before him. His head trembles on his neck. His skin is parchment-coloured, like the drawing that Hans made of him. He looks around the table with a slow lizard blink' [Mantel 2009: 379]. Michael Caines when reviewing Wolf Hall uses a very exact metaphor to define the effect of the use of the Present Simple: 'Grammatical intimacy is thrust upon us' [Caines]. Amy Boesky in her review of Bring Up the Bodies develops the same thought and asserts, that the Present Simple in Mantel's novel serves to bind the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. [Boesky]. It is especially understandable when we remember that the main theme of the novels is the difficult birth of a new England, a reformed England, the England which began to march into the future (which readers happen to know and in which they exist at the moment of reading the novel). Cromwell happily believes that 'in a generation everything can change' [Mantel 2009: 450]. Amy Boesky, rightly speaking about the England in the second novel as a sadder and a grimmer one, but 'teeming with beauty' stresses that Cromwell has 'the oblique gaze of a modern'.

One of the most crucial points is that 'Cromwell is made to sound ahead of his time' [Caines]) in that Mantel arms her hero with a new and much more adequate understanding who and where are actually history is being done. We read in the novel:

'The world is not run from where he [Percy. - B.P.] thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bulge but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot' [Mantel 2009: 378].

In other words, history, as we understand while reading both novels, is not only politics, political events, but something that is broader, deeper, more both substantial and general in terms of depicting the bulk of the past: that is why there are so many 'realias', artifacts among them, in the author's picture of the sixteenth century.

Let us look at the depicting of Anne Boleyn's coronation:

'Her procession is led by the retinue of the French ambassador. The judges in scarlet follow, the Knights of the Bath in blue-violet of antique cut, then the bishops, Lord Chancellor Audley and his retinue, the great lords in crimson velvet. Sixteen knights carry Anne in a white litter hung with silver bells which ring at each step, at each breath; the queen is in white, her body shimmering in its strange skin, her face held in a conscious solemn smile, her hair loose beneath a circle of gems. After her, ladies on palfreys trapped with white velvet; and ancient dowagers in their chariots, their faces acidulated [Mantel 2009: 463].

In addition to Mantel's attention to fashion which is excellent throughout the whole novel, we immediately feel the attitude of old courtiers, dames first of all, to the new marriage of the king: the final 'their faces acidulated' brings in live human atmosphere. This 'human dimension' governs the ways of the reconstruction of the past used by Mantel.

The author of the novels tries to stress how multi-sided life in England of the 1520s and1530s was. Cromwell fits much more than anybody else this new life, which he understands. He is a sort of renaissance polymath, well-educated, secular in all his thoughts and deeds. James Wood argues that Bring Up the Bodies has a distinctively Protestant, not to say secular, tone

[Wood]. Protestantism helps us to argue how much of the historical novel of culture there is in these novels.

When we think about Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels and analyze their artistic structures centralized by the inner life of the hero which absorbs all the peculiarities of the English world speeding up a new socio-cultural paradigm, we understand that, on the one hand, they bear the key genre tropes, but on the other, they demonstrate how peculiar in terms ofplot-construction and narration they are. We understand that the novels' peculiarities are connected both with the originality of Hilary Mantel's artistic thinking and the 'experiences' which the genre of historical novel lived through, especially during the postmodernist experiments in narrative on history (Umberto Eco, Julian Barnes, A.S.Byatt, etc.), magic realism's work with the genre (Marquez's    great novel, Rushdie's Midnight's

Children, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, Anatoliy Ivanov's In the Heart of Parma) classical historical novel's re-incarnation (Rose Tremain's Restoration), and polemical 'alternative' history in, for example, Ackroyd's novels The Testament of Oscar Wilde and Milton in America or Stephen Fry's Making History or Philip Roth' s The Plot Against America.       In

Мantel's novels we have the tendency of the plotted history: when the whole bulk of the English history with its turning and decisive points is just a part of an individual's history mostly reconstructed in the mind of a protagonist and narrated by him ('privatization' of history). We have a synthesis of the past, present and future, especially the thing, which I call 'the pluperfectness' (Plusquamperfekt) of history when the past actively 'participates' in the forming and existence of the present (this is the ideology ofthe image of Thomas Cromwell).

This issue leads us to another point of the literary work with history established itself after modernists and postmodernists - subjectivization of history. The subject (and the object simultaneously) here, Thomas Cromwell, represents not just political history but cultural upheavals undergone by England in the sixteenth century. If a troop of wandering actors in Barry Unsworth's Morality Play when changing the content and form of the theatre performance helps the author to show historically inevitable movement of the life as an integrity, in Hilary Mantel's two novels this inevitable movement of the world (she seems to be a progressist in her historiosophy) is concentrated in the complicated figure of Cromwell. We may definitely say, that his image is quite a specific one. Because of him we have in the novel a peculiar object of an artistic study -the culture-creating activities of a individual, which bring in a new form and new content of life and history. His figure and the ways in which it is depicted gives us a right to say that Mantel's novels demonstrate the unity of two (to name a few) structural dominants in contemporary English novel: the reflexive and the psychological (self-knowledgeable and self-analytical) characteristics. It brings Mantel's novels into both the national land international lines of remarkable examples of the genre in the XX and XXI centuries.