Dinah Birch

American black people describe their wildest girls as ‘womanish’. Alice Walker recalls that traditional usage in defining her own work: she is interested in ‘womanist’ rather than ‘feminist’ writing. ‘Womanist’ texts proclaim a double rebellion, fusing the long-suppressed anger of women with that of blacks. Alice Walker’s most forceful books to date (the novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, followed by a collection of essays, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, in 1983) locates the identity of black women in the troubled perspectives of the past. In this she shares in a wider movement. The growing body of black literature in America asserts a need to make good what has come to seem one of the most damaging depredations imposed by slavery and exploitation: the loss of a known place in history.

The image of a lost golden past is as old as literature. Certainly as old as English literature at any rate, for the earliest Anglo-Saxon texts look backwards, haunted by a sense of vanished affection and security. But English is neither the only tradition nor the first language to have grown up within these islands. One of Raymond William’s polemical purposes in People of the Black Mountains, his final fiction, is to affirm that Wales has its own distinct identity, founded in unremembered time which reaches beyond written records. People of the Black Mountains is in part an attempted answer to a question which occupied Williams throughout his creative life. How is history made? ‘Actual stories are told by both winners and losers. Yet what becomes history is a selection by the winners. This is trustingly read back into earlier times.’ Questioning this trust, Williams constructs a different-kind of history. People of the Black Mountains seeks out the origins of the land in which he was born, from the ancient hunters moving across the landscape before the last Ice Age to an emergence in the 15th century into something we are able to recognise as the modern world. ‘The Beginning’ represents the first part of this long story, ending with the invasion of the Romans.

It’s not long since the fairy story seemed the least political of genres. Not so today. A preoccupation with transformation and escape, coupled with a repudiation of the sober certainties of rationality, gives its narrative devices potent appeal to those placed by conviction, race or gender on the margins of the cultural establishment. Taking unfamiliar and ruthless forms, traditional tales have acquired new status in contemporary fiction. And we ought not, now, to need convincing that the public reverberations of privately refashioned legends can travel a long way. After The Satanic Verses, fantasy will never look cosy again.

What do the lives and thoughts of other people feel like? We’ll never really know, but fiction offers as good an approximation of knowing as we’re likely to come across. That absorbing illusion of a world elsewhere, with its promised distraction from the irksomeness of our own reality, has always been the most seductive reason for picking up novels and short stories. But like all pleasurable diversions, it has to be paid for. The practice of narrative has a hard history of moral ambition, and is as much concerned with what people ought to be as with what they are. Writers tend to agree that the two conditions rarely coincide. There isn’t a more complete guide to the ubiquity of human failure, cruelty and stupidity than the one you’ll find sitting on the fiction shelves of any bookshop. No matter how exotic their settings, or bizarre the doings of their characters, the lessons of novelists follow disconcertingly familiar patterns. The cumulative implications are clear: people’s lives have more in common than we might like to suppose.

Given the contemporary standing of spiritualism, you might suppose that only the gullible or feeble-minded among Victorian seekers after truth would have had any truck with its activities. But you’d be wrong. Some of the most sober luminaries of the age (Gladstone, Ruskin, even Queen Victoria) were prepared to accept, or at least to explore, the possibility of traffic with the dead. You wouldn’t, however, always guess as much from the biographies and memoirs that cluster round such eminent lives. The intellectual status of spiritualism was once appreciable, but it has long since dwindled to a point that diminishes the prestige of anyone known to have been drawn to its doctrines. One consequence of this fall from grace is that the story of spiritualism has commonly been bundled out of sight, like a batty old aunt at a family gathering.