On F. T. Kola's "In the Garden": Historical Narrative as List
Abstract: I provide a brief critique of F. T. Kola’s short story, “In the Garden”; I further use Kola’s story as the basis to critique a more general trend in historical literature that involves the creation and deployment of literary “lists.”
The original story appeared in Granta Magazine:
https://granta.com/in-the-garden/
Some thoughts on reading F.T. Kola’s short story “In the Garden”:
Firstly, I can’t say that I enjoyed this story—or, rather, I enjoyed it on the terms it offered, which were superficial. I think it is ambitious to take on a subject matter like the young Cleopatra, and Kola seems ultimately too young in her skills to really shoulder the weight of expectation: one might say that the more steeped in popular history a figure is, the more a writer’s raw skill must supersede the regular threshold—hence, I think, the trend in choosing lesser known/commentated upon figures, which offer greater room for creative maneuverability without stepping on too many opining throats. Especially newer authors ought to shy away from this type of hubristic overreaching, which is always, always, always felt by sensitive readers. Most of the story is told (without good reason) from the perspective of a nameless eunuch scribe (a wallflower-voice that reminded me vaguely of Ishiguro’s Stevens) who oversees Cleopatra and who possesses a bizarre, unexplained, almost supernatural relation to Cleopatra. The story is essentially a narrative exegesis on what Umberto Eco might call “the infinity of lists”—it built and rebuilt scene and tone, opting for that aurea aetas of nostalgia that is drawn, like water in a well, from the ancient world: one feels that even her words are gilded, her sentences plated in platinum and rose-gold and dipped in sand and myrrh, sprinkled with a bit of Arabian dust and spread across a black Roman mosaic—e.g. deeply overdone, grandiose, and overwrought, trying to capture the “feel” and “spirit” of ancient deserts and marble sarcophagi but locked into lists of the same clichéd accoutrements.
It seems to me that one can only deploy a romantic language, a language of lacquered, ancient grandiosity, only in an age of romance, in an era of human youth. Otherwise the ironic and the overdone are too felt. Kola suffers gravely from this irony; I compare her to triumphs of historical narrative, such as Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, Williams’ Augustus, Graves’ Claudius set, Yourcenir’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, and so forth—here, we might say, is the genre difference between three forms of narrativizing the past, each used to different dramatic and ironic effect: 1. Literary history, which we might use to describe academic historians who achieve a certain narrative consistency (Eugen Weber, Richard Hofstadter are good examples); 2. The literaturization of anecdotes (Paul Fleming and Haydn White come to the fore here) and the aestheticization of lists, which is where Kola falls; and 3. Historical literature (Sienkiewicz, Williams, etc.). I find Kola’s experiment ultimately just a form of literary pretentiousness; I had to watch Russell Crowe’s Gladiator shortly thereafter, if only to balance out a self-serious, overwrought treatment of antiquity with an equilibrium-calibrating self-joking, pitch-perfect treatment.