Anjuli Pandavar on Historical Fiction

As part of the Faculty Lunch Speaker Series (FLSS) talk on September 29, Dr. Anjuli Pandavar, NYU Shanghai Lecturer of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), shared the challenges of researching and writing historical fiction and her quest for historical truth in “The Night Journey,” her novel in progress.

Tell us a bit about the novel you’re working on. In what specific historical context or time period are your readers immersed?

“The Night Journey” is set in the 12th century, which happens to be my favorite century--that’s where I’d go back to.  My novel follows two women's escape from their respective societies after social changes had rendered them "out of their time." Tomoe Gozen, a historical figure in feudal Japan who lived in the latter half of the 12 century, flees to China after her side lost the Genpei War. She was one of the few female samurai in Japan, and probably the most famous one. At that time in Japan, Buddhism and Shinto were syncretized--more or less working together as one fused religion, and so her religion is kind of Shinto and kind of Buddhist as it was for most people at that time. I pick up her story at the point where the historical records end--it’s said that little is known about her after the end of the Genpei War.

The other woman is Munira bint Juhanah, brought up in Baghdad, whence she first flees after religion eclipsed reason, and her work as a translator becomes unfeasible. She is the last woman of four translators who still managed to hang in there after the great Translation Movement had long passed, and disparaging of the intellect had long become the order of the day. She is also a Shia Isma'ili, a Muslim sect suffering heavy persecution at the time. She eventually ends up in Hamadan, from where she finally flees Persia.

My novel starts with Tomoe's arrival in Persia, outside the city of Hamadan, after having crossed the whole of China over the course of almost 3 years on horseback. She is on a hill, overlooking Hamadan and it’s all dark. The only light that she sees from this hilltop is a string of white-orange-yellow light in the dark from where she knows Hamadan is, and snaking into the landscape from there. Inside the city, Munira, disguised as a man, is making her way out under cover of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, triggered by Salah ad-Din's capture of that city a week earlier. The two women pass each other under the great arch of the city gate of Hamadan, making the strangest of contacts, and after they pass each other, are never to encounter again.

What are the challenges of writing historical fiction?

The situation here is we’re dealing with a 12th century reality that I’m trying to capture and understand and convey to my readers. The challenges that come with exploring fiction in an age and in a place that is not your own is that of course you’re trying to understand people the way they understood themselves in that place and that time. I’m trying to convey to a readership--neither of that place or time--things that speak to them as human beings. In these characters they find a common ground, a recognition of parts of their own lives, struggles and dilemmas.

I’m trying to write as Tomoe perceived her world, as it was real to her. Of course what she first sees is a black dragon's breath in the night, as she goes further down the hill and gets closer, transforms into a river of flame. And as she draws even nearer, it becomes people with lanterns. In her reality, it was all those things, it wasn’t that she had mistaken it for something else. These are the kinds of things that I’m trying to convey, through all my characters. Often people mistake this for fantasy or magical realism. I’m doing neither of those things. I am capturing reality as it was for my characters at that time, at least, that's what I'm trying to do.

If someone a thousand years into the future were to write a historical novel set today, that writer might say ‘these people went to a special building on one day of the week and there they went down on their knees and they spoke some words to somebody they believed existed somewhere in the universe that was going to interfere in their lives, preferably in their favor, and they called this being God.’ People in the future will say, ‘Okay that’s a nice fantasy, that’s magical realism or something.’ If we read that novel today--of people going into the special building, going down on their knees--I would say, ‘They’re going to church on a Sunday and they're praying to God’. Nobody would claim that as magical realism or fantasy. This is the real of now presented to people who work in the real of now. This lays out the problem that I face as a writer, trying to convey the reality of the 12th century as perceived by people at the time and trying to bring that to a 21st century readership.

So how do I differentiate between what they perceived as real and not real? And how do I help my twenty-first century reader know that the line between reality and not reality lies in a different place, and where, exactly it lies? One way writers normally do this is to overload the real with minute detail, but remain sketchy about what isn't real. I'd have to treat dreams, for example, in the same amount of detail as lived experience, because dreams in the twelfth century were as meaningful and objectively significant as physical experience. You'd think nothing of killing someone who had insulted your honour in a dream. Similarly, if someone were insane, is it a spirit speaking through them, or is their brain unwell? Well, in the twelfth century, spirits did that sort of thing. It was real. It was a matter of whether the spirit was good or bad. I have to treat it that way. Because "magic" and the supernatural were integral parts of reality, it was pretty much only lies, misapprehensions, imaginings and illusions that were not real. Yet I must avoid the label "fantasy."

I have to figure out a way to sufficiently build the world for the reader so that they appreciate this world, yet have enough fiction, that is, truth, for the story to run and evolve, and for us to recognise ourselves in them, empathise with them, and have a stake in their growth and development. The solution I’ve found so far, is to start the story in medias res, action right in the middle of the story—I can use the context in which the story is unfolding to both describe the world and also at the same time to go back and put into place things that explain how the character came to be where they are and anticipate how things will develop from this point forward, but make the action strong enough to carry the reader through all the tricky exposition.

What is your process for background research on people and events of the time period you are writing about?

I have read literature of the time, letters of the time, and studies of the time, finding at what stage was the evolution of religion at that point and what was the relationship between religion and society at that time. I researched how people explained what happened around them with the means that they had at their disposal and how they related to one another.

There are also two main supernatural characters: Lucifer and Susano-o. Again, I need to treat them in the same way as, say, God is treated in the Bible or the Qur'an, two major sources for my work, along with the Mahabharata.

I’ve done research in Japan at a Shinto temple. I’ve read materials that date back to that era, looking to parts of Paradise Lost, “The Tale of Heike,” "The Tale of Genji," "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," works from India, One Thousand and One Nights, documents from mediaeval Cairo, biographies of the various historical figures, paintings, everyday objects, weapons, etc., all of these are the sources that sketch to me how people thought and lived at this time.

When I read or examine these works, I am looking for understanding how people made sense of their world—one translator may say one thing and another says something else, but once I have a notion, a sense of how they work together, these detail will instruct me into another kind of writing. I look across the landscape of scholarly studies of work, fiction of the time and later fiction looking back towards that time. Combining these gives me enough to feel my way through to what is feasible.  It’s an ongoing development and it’s a process of looking back and forth and finding the compromise that works best at the moment, hoping for better compromises later.

Are there boundaries as a writer of historical fiction on how far you can bend the authenticity of nonfiction events? Where do you draw the line?

I'd rather leave things out than bend them, taking advantage of the ambiguity created. I think of the quote ‘None of it happened, all of it is true,’ to describe fiction. It's a great quote, but in historical fiction, some of it actually did happen. And it’s the stuff that did happen that you’ve got to get right. Often the critics are a little bit unfair, they criticise the fiction for flaws in the facts; they criticise the exploration of what people are feeling and the engagement with their world and one another. The writer of fiction writes truth unencumbered by facts, both in that they are free to ignore facts entirely, and also in the sense that the facts that they do choose to use tend not to be subjected to forensic scrutiny. The writer of historical fiction, by contrast, chooses those facts that would best help the writing of truth. Facts used in historical fiction, though, tend to draw down upon them a meticulousness of scrutiny that sometimes obliterates the nature of the work as that of fiction, often leading to judgements as to the quality of the fiction. This misses the point that the truth of historical fiction is not to be sought in the facts, but between them. Nevertheless, the more you can avoid getting pulled up for getting historical details wrong, the more readers can concentrate on and enjoy the truth of the fiction.

When can we read your book?

The current projection end is 2018.