The Pitfalls of Historical and Exotic Fiction

I’ve been watching Mad Men. It frequently underwhelms me. It’s also frustrating, and the reason for my frustration overlaps onto some fiction.

One of my main problems is that the show doesn’t portray a historical period as much as luridly exhibits all the aspects of that historical period that seem offensive. The misogyny, the ubiquitous smoking, the entrenched racial divides, the bifurcated gender roles — all of it is displayed with such frequency that the show hits you over the head with its condemnation.

The show is perfect for those with a fetish for the atavistic. Matthew Weiner never tries to describe the period as it actually existed but only from the heavily tinted perspective of the 21st century. You could argue that we cannot help but view that time period from our 21st century perch, and you would be right, but my argument is that it’s such a narrow representation it skews a fuller understanding of the period.

At root, this perspective is one of superiority. The underlying assumption is that our period trumps the 50s and 60s. It’s like a call and reply melody: “Look at silly they were back then!” (“aren’t we so much better than that now?”). Watching the show permits a smug superiority over those primitive cultural standards. I doubt anyone is so naive as to believe those cultural problems (gender inequality, etc) don’t haunt us even now, but they certainly aren’t in such high relief, and viewers take comfort in that.

Not to mention that the show only seems good because television offers such a desert of high-quality literary storytelling. It’s good because of the lack of competition in its genre. But if you go outside the genre, you’ll find that the halcyon image of the mid-century family has been deconstructed to the nines by everyone in the novelistic world — Revolutionary Road, Something Happened, Little Children, a chunk of John Updike, John Cheever. Matthew Weiner admits Revolutionary Road in particular was the godfather to Mad Men, saying, “If I had read [Revolutionary Road] before I wrote the show, I never would have written the show.”

Fiction, Granta, and Exotic Fiction

But I bring up Mad Men only to segue to a similar problem with fiction. I was recently reading Granta’s latest issue, the one on Pakistan with the brilliantly designed cover. It was pleasant to see it twice, because due to some promotional snafu, they seem to insist on sending me two copies. Two copies lying around doubles the chances that I’ll crack the pages though, so perhaps this is not a mistake on their part.

With Granta, it wasn’t historical fiction that was in question, but what I’ll call exotic fiction, for lack of a better term. I mean fiction that describes a part of the world foreign to Western readers. What exotic fiction and historical fiction share is a distance — a distance from the reader to the text. One is a distance of geography and the other a distance of time, but both are inaccessible, and because of this inaccessibility, peculiar flaws creep into the storytelling.

With Granta 112, the details in stories (such as the novella “Leila in the Wilderness” by Nadeem Aslam), felt designed to make me focus on the exotic locale and quirky cultural customs. I couldn’t get over the authorial intention, those designs upon my Western sensibilities. It felt like someone was poking my rib and trying to make me say how exotic it felt. I felt cajoled into admitting how odd it was that female babies were slaughtered or given away.

The text was voyeuristic. It came from that same lofty position of superiority. Aren’t we glad that we don’t push women into forced marriages and allow husbands to enslave their wives and beat them at will? Just as Mad Men makes us feel security in the modernistic myth of “progress,” telling us we’ve advanced so far since the dark middle ages of last century, so “Leila” confirms our cultural superiority over more elementary customs.

“Leila in the Wilderness” feels like its written by an author who has travelled widely outside Pakistan, and has been studied or at least lived in the West, and is trying to explain his country to Western viewers rather than merely telling the story from the perspective of someone who takes those cultural flaws for granted. For someone who has grown up in a culture of forced marriage and spousal abuse and infantcide, those details are no longer a novelty. Think about the two young fish that meet the older fish who asks how the water is, and one of the younger fishes asks, “What’s water?” Those immersed in the culture don’t see those cultural habits — the habits are so normal they evade perception.

But this story has portrayed Pakistani culture as a novelty. The narrator is still looking in with the rest of us, as a polished cosmopolitan, rather than telling a story from the exotic and limited perspective itself.

Don’t get me wrong — “Leila in the Wilderness” was quite an entertaining story, and Nadeem Aslam is quite talented. And many of the other stories in the issue are worth your time, and some don’t commit this misstep. But I think I read it in conjunction with other stories and media that committed the same flaw, and all the flaws together added up into this spiel of a blog post which is already too long.

The Solution (a heading somewhat tongue-in-cheek, given the complexity of the topic and the relative impossibility of resolving such a problem in such a short space)

Okay, so I’ve made some far-reaching claims about storytelling, and said how it shouldn’t be done. But how should it be done? How should historical fiction note the differences between the current age and the described one, and how should exotic fiction note the differences between our culture and land and the described one?

For starters, the story should be told from the perspective of that historical period or that exotic place, rather than told as an outsider. Mad Men feels like it’s written by someone in the 21st century trying to make parallels with our current situation and help up realize how far our culture has progressed, and that glaring POV shift alienates the series from its own time period. And the same for “Leila in the Wilderness” (see chunky paragraph above).

If this is done, I think the reader/viewer will feel less manipulated. They’ll also get a much better concept of the culture in its true state — i.e. how a member of that culture viewed it, rather than how a tourist viewed it.

Any other ideas from readers? If you think this is an actual problem, what would you suggest to the writer?