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Adam Thirlwell on the Meeting Points of the Past and the Present in Fiction

Posted on 8th August 2023 by Anna Orhanen

Bright, bold and thrillingly original, The Future Future – the new novel from the two-time Granta Best of Young British Novelists alumnus Adam Thirlwell – revolves around an obnoxious eighteenth-century smear campaign and a woman on an urgent and remarkably modern quest to clear her name. In this exclusive piece, the author talks about how he came to write this captivating historical novel that finds itself in constant dialogue with the defects of our contemporary world. 

I wasn’t supposed to write a historical novel. Somehow I’d grown up thinking that every novel I’d write would be about the present moment. But then I happened on what I guess you could call two scenes from the eighteenth century, before and after the French revolution.
 
The first of these scenes was a grubby world of shyster hustling writers – exiled Parisian journalists and critics living in London who liked to write libellous and pornographic pamphlets about the women of the aristocracy, with titles like Secret Memoirs or Nighttime Activities. In this scene were characters like Beaumarchais, before he was famous for writing The Marriage of Figaro, acting as a double agent for the French government, then becoming a gunrunner for the American revolution under the Spanish pseudonym of Roderigue Hortalez; or the Chevalier d’Eon, a transgender diplomat living in London; or Brissot, a super unsuccessful critic, who was sent to the Bastille for a period, got out, came up with various hustles that went nowhere, shipped himself to America, then ended up in the revolution where he became the leader of the Girondin faction and was eventually executed by Robespierre. This scene, in other words, was a wild international world of writers and police and politicians, of language and power, and of writers hating their lives so much that they could publish despairing sentences like these: ‘you see yourselves the misfortunes that my miserable attempt at literature has caused me, and how much I must loathe literature now. I vow nothing frightens me so much as hearing myself called “author”!’  
 
That world, of course, was hyper masculine. Whereas the other scene was the world of the pornographically trash-talked women themselves – the salons run by Madame du Pompadour and Madame Geoffrin and others, which were of course run on money that was dependent on colonial and class exploitation, but which in themselves were also places of female resistance to the general masculine violence. In their conversation they invented ways of using language not to destroy or inflame but to extend and multiply friendship or tenderness, and I found myself loving this scene more and more.
 
These two scenes, it seemed, led everywhere else, into hundreds of miniature stories. There was Madame de la Tour du Pin, who escaped the terror of the revolution and ended up working a farm in New York State, where she bought moccasins off the Mohawk people whose land had been stolen by the Americans. Or there was Napoleon becoming interested in garden design. Or the fact that Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the slave revolution in Haiti, liked to eat sponge cake because he had no front teeth, and his favourite phrase was let’s not waste time here. In these stories everything became related to everything else: this moment of revolution was also a moment, I began to think more and more, when the world was becoming high on wider and wider networks of power relations, from Oceania to America via Africa and Europe.
 
It was at that point that I realised how much these stories of power were also stories of the contemporary. Here it was, a supercharged information era of colonial violence and resistance, where language was proliferating everywhere and anything could be said about anyone. It was as if this moment was some kind of genealogy for our crazy present moment, so that in writing about the past you would also be writing about the contemporary after all.
 
It’s a kind of rule, I know, that what’s most to be avoided in historical fiction is anachronism. But maybe that’s to be too limited in our idea of timespan. To an alien from the future, after all, there would surely be no difference between 2023 and 1773… So I began to imagine a novel that was about the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century, simultaneously. Everything would hover between the present and the past.
 
One of my inspirations or permissions for this was Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary voyage through time and gender and space. Another was a Latin American novel called Zama by Antonio di Benedetto, published in 1956 (and made into a movie by Lucrecia Martel in 2017). This novel is about a minor Spanish official, Don Diego de Zama, posted in the late eighteenth century to Paraguay, and desperate to be transferred to Buenos Aires, where the action was. But di Benedetto’s novel wasn’t really historical: its language hardly mentioned any doubloons or rapiers. Instead it was a novel that described a very modern feeling – of waiting for something to change your life, of feeling that true life was elsewhere. It was an existential novel pretending to be historical! And I wondered if I could do something similar with the vocabulary – of neutralising historical detail a little, so that characters didn’t travel in carriages but vehicles, and didn’t send each other notes by courier but messaged with each other.
 
That’s how I began The Future Future. It was a novel about a scene, of women talking with each other and developing networks of friendship, while all around them they were being described by the other scene, the masculine world of deadbeat writers. At the centre, where they overlapped, was a single woman, Celine, who somehow electrified all these networks. After all, if you want to think about power, it’s probably most interesting if you think about where power is applied, and how someone might try to resist it and preserve or even expand their sense of self. It seemed the most urgent question to ask about that moment in the eighteenth century – or also the twenty-first century, or in fact any century in the future.

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JH
28th September 2023
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