This time last year I was reading Sebald, Solnit, Barrera, Bachelard; ruminative essays dealing with movement through time and otherwise, external spaces and our internalized relationships with them, liminal spaces, waitingwaitingwaiting and isolation and solitude. I was using literature and reading in an attempt to embrace some form of Keatsian negative capability.
Not so much these days. Now I’ve been uncharacteristically drawn towards historical fiction. Fiction-with-a-capital-F in general, really. Spending so much time in my own existential introspection leaves the idea of diving into someone else’s — fictional or otherwise —unappealing at best, unbearable at worst. If the introspective novel is like bleeding out internally, then Fiction-capital-F is like the cauterizing of a wound. Too much? Let’s say this, then: stories are a balm. The predictive story is comforting in a reality that feels batshit insane. Good winning out over evil, redemptive character arcs, and light tension with a clear-cut resolution are easier to stomach than open-ended questions that beget more questions without answers.
Because honestly, I don’t want to live in my own head right now, let alone someone else’s. Give me the omniscience of a third person narrative and the conventions of a predictable plot. Give me that inevitability of good triumphing over evil, something easily swallowed that doesn’t get caught in the throat. Give me low-stakes escapism.
Maybe there’s also something to the predictability of the historical novel specifically. This has already happened, after all. We know how this ends, there’s nothing left to question. Maybe there will be a few creative liberties, but largely we know the outcome. And even the alternative history offers this: the chance to re-write that which maybe you wish hadn’t happened. There’s certainly enough from this past year that I’d like to re-write or erase, and I feel emptied out in my own way of generating anything inspired, new or revelatory, so I understand the impulse to build where a foundation is already laid.
I can’t say when the winds of change will blow and I’ll find myself back in the company of essayists, philosophers, and the askers of life’s great questions. For now, I’m content to circumvent reality with books whose intrinsic message is this: everything is going to be okay.