The Journal of Historical Fictions
published by the Historical Fictions Research Network
Volume 7, Issue 1: “The Metamodernist Historical Novel: The Case of Asko Sahlberg” by Mika Hallila, pp. 59-78, 2026.
Abstract: This paper discusses the transformation of the historical novel in 2000s and the relationship between this transformation and metamodernism. Theory and research on metamodernism seek to explain what has happened in global cultures and societies in the aftermath of postmodernism. The contemporary historical novel, meanwhile, has emerged stronger and, following the irony and playfulness of postmodernism, has shifted toward the ethics of truth-telling in understanding history and its influence on the present world. After postmodernism, the approach to historicity has also been refined, and a new kind of historical novel, which is not historiographic metafiction, has emerged. In this article, the return of historicity and its varying modalities are the central perspectives through which this relationship between the historical novel and metamodernism is analysed. The analysis focuses on two novels by the Finnish author Asko Sahlberg: Herodes (’Herod’, 2013) and Pilatus (’Pilate’, 2016). The key objective is to explore whether we may be dealing today with a new type of historical novel: the metamodernist historical novel.
Within the last two decades, there have been many signs of a new replenishment of the historical novel. In 2019, The New York Times journalist Megan O’Grady even declared that we are now living in ‘the golden age of historical fiction’ (May 7, 2019). She was particularly referring to such contemporary historical novels as Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (2018) and Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio(2019), which emphasise the ethics of truth telling in understanding history and its influence on the present world. Such examples suggest that history as a developing continuum—which in postmodernism was considered absent, missing or questioned—has returned to contemporary fiction and is taken increasingly seriously in the attempt to understand the world today and in history. Interestingly, the recent replenishment of the historical novel in the 2000s coincides with the rise of metamodernism, the alleged new period in contemporary global cultures and societies. Namely, metamodernism seeks to restore historicity and takes seriously the links between the past, present, and future.
In this paper, I will analyse selected examples of contemporary historical novels in the context of metamodernism to explore how this shift affects the way in which historical novels are written. The focus of analysis is on the notion of history in fiction by one contemporary Finnish author, Asko Sahlberg. I will consider how the new interest in history and historicity appears both throughout Sahlberg’s oeuvre and, especially, in his novels Herodes (2013, ‘Herod’) and Pilatus (2016, ‘Pilate’), which rewrite and revise historical narratives taken from the New Testament Gospels. Based on the analysis of these novels, I ask whether it is possible that there is a genre such as the metamodernist historical novel. I begin by framing the analysis with a discussion of the theories of metamodernism and the historical novel.
Metamodernism and Historicity
The concept of metamodernism refers to the cultural and social condition after postmodernism and represents an effort to understand present global developments. The first decade of the 21st century marked a slew of remarkable societal and cultural changes, including global challenges, such as the financial crisis and accelerating climate change. This shift implied also the decline of the postmodern era, and, accordingly, the ironic ethos of postmodernism was understood to no longer capture the ideologies, values, and attitudes of the present world. Instead of ironic distancing, the reactions, say, for instance, to the coronavirus pandemic, the environmental crisis, the refugee crisis, political polarization, or economic inequality are rooted in sincerity. Metamodernism is a concept and a theoretical approach that refers to this very change and the new cultural and societal era that is theorised to follow postmodernism.
According to theorists of the term, a metamodernist oscillation between modernism and postmodernism appears in contemporary culture, which explains, for instance, how complicatedly cultural products, arts, and literature express the zeitgeist of our time. The idea of metamodernist oscillation was presented by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. In their seminal essay on metamodern theory, titled ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ (2010), as well as in their later ‘Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism’ (2017), they discuss metamodernism as a never-ending oscillation between the ideas, attitudes and values of modernism and postmodernism. According to them, metamodernism is a state of uncertainty, which is like an asymmetric pendulum movement between many different poles and refuses to make a final choice between ‘a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony’ or between any other opposition of modernism and postmodernism (Notes, 5-6). Nonetheless, as part of this oscillation, metamodernism sincerely seeks genuine values of humanity, meaningfulness, reality, and truth—in contrast both to modernist trust or belief and postmodern relativity or nihilism.
Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that metamodernism, which started to emerge in the 2000s, is both the cultural logic of (the latest phase of) late capitalism and the dominant contemporary structure of feeling of the era; that is to say, a generally shared mode of cultural experience in the 2000s. Metamodern theory thus comments as well as builds on the cultural sociology of literary and cultural scholars Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams; and furthermore, it applies their theories to the investigation of contemporary global societies, cultures, and arts (Periodising, 6-12). Metamodern theory intends to map, explain and define the social and cultural phenomena that seek to surpass postmodern irony by evoking more sincere and sensitive attitudes towards humanity, reality and truthfulness. This very transition from postmodern irony to a metamodern pursuit of sincerity also has implications for contemporary understanding of history.
In the era of metamodernism, the perception of history as a continuum, problems of authenticity and factuality, and the questions of historical origins and progress have all characterised a new sensibility towards historicity. Accordingly, the postmodern end of history (Fukuyama) has been cancelled, as historicity provides the possibility to (re)interpret the past and outline possible future(s).While pursuing a new kind of sensibility, metamodernism to all appearances represents the same transformation in the notion of history as contemporary historical fiction in its new forms. Robin van den Akker argues, with reference to François Hartog’s book Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (2016, [2003]), that the 2000s represent a new regime of historicity:
Our current historical moment—or, rather, social situation (in a more spatial sense)—has seen the emergence of a new ‘regime of historicity’ in culture, to borrow Hartog’s (2016) insightful notion. A regime of historicity can be defined as the specific modality in which ‘man is present to himself as being in history’ (Ricoeur, cited in Hartog 2016, 53). This entails, in other words, that there are various modalities in which one can relate past, present, and future (or be in history) and that these modalities vary over time and across cultures. [–] In this social situation, we can observe a new metamodern regime of historicity that has, as a defining trait, that its present opens onto—in an attempt to bring within its fold—past possibilities and possible futures [–]. (21-22)
In order to link questions concerning the historical novel and metamodernism, I would argue that the historical novels published in the era of metamodernism, or in this new ‘regime of historicity’, differ from the historical novels of former historical periods. These new novels represent the metamodernist notion of history, metamodern sensibility, and a sense of historicity containing the idea of varying modalities. In this regard, there might exist a new form of historical novel in the twenty-first century; perhaps a genre we could define as the metamodernist historical novel. In what follows, I will both place this form in the context of the tradition of the historical novel and analyse the novels by Sahlberg as examples of this new form.
The Ever-Changing Historical Novel
According to most scholars in the research field, the first modern historical novels were written by Sir Walter Scott, and they have had a remarkable and long-lasting influence on the genre. Scott’s novels provide a model in which the national narrative and national identity were the central organising principles of the historical novel. After the long period of historical realism created by Scott, modernism in the beginning of the twentieth century meant a transformation of the historical novel by bringing out new artistic and subjective perspectives, as in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. History as well as social reality, time, and knowledge were understood as subjective experiences. The genre continued to change in the postwar world under the influence of postmodern irony and parody in novels such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997). Postmodernism meant a rethinking of the whole idea of the historical novel, as it emphasized the nature of history as a construction, textual or narrative. (See e.g. de Groot; Hamnett; Hutcheon; Lukács). Today, it appears that the genre is undergoing a revival once again and that we are witnessing a new form of the historical novel.
When considering how this new form of historical novel differs from its predecessors, it should be taken into account that, in fact, the historical novel as a literary form or genre appears to be elastic throughout its history. Looking through the lenses of different theories of the form, say, from Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1989[1937]) to Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism(1988), the historical novel has already proven very flexible in changing its forms and functions. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the historical novel shifts because of fundamental changes in terms of the ideas of history, historiography, representation and poetics. For instance, while Lukács, in his work on the novels of Scott, argues that the historical novels are ‘artistic demonstration[s] of historical reality’ (43), for Hutcheon historiographic metafiction, a postmodernist form of historical fiction, ‘shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured’ (120).
It is challenging or almost impossible to define the heterogeneous genre of historical novel comprehensively. Nevertheless, it is very clear what all historical novels have in common: they all tell of the past and they all have some connection to actual history. Yet while there are always some actual and historical facts planted in historical novels, the characters or the plots do not necessarily have to have factual backgrounds. Typically, however, the temporal and spatial settings of the historical novels are representations known from historiography. According to Brian Hamnett, there are three questions concerning the definition of the historical novel: ‘(i) how far back should it go to qualify as history? (ii) what should be the proportion of extent of the mixture between real history and invention? (iii) does there need to be at least one historical character in the plot?’ (34.) Hence, the historical novel is always a mixture of fiction and historical facts containing the three elements implied in Hamnett’s questions: temporal coordinates of real historical time; facts and/in fiction; and actual historical character(s).
In his The Historical Novel (2010), Jerome de Groot traces the different forms and historical changes of the genre and summarises something very essential about them as follows:
A historical novel might consider the articulation of nationhood via the past, highlight the subjectivism of narratives of History, underline the importance of the realist mode of writing to notions of authenticity, question writing itself, and attack historiographical convention. The form manages to hold within itself conservatism, dissidence, complication and simplicity; it attracts multiple, complex, dynamic audiences; it is a particular and complex genre hiding in plain sight on the shelves of the bookshop. (2)
Compared to many other genres of literature, the historical novel is a very popular form, probably because history in general is considered as a fascinating subject, and because the historical novel can offer both a sense of history and the narrative that can, for instance, be intriguing, amusing, experimental, realistic or non-realistic. As de Groot remarks, many representatives of the genre are still based on national histories. He writes that ‘it tends to be the case, primarily, presumably, because of access to source material, of language problems, or lack of confidence, that historical novelists keep within their own national historical boundaries.’ (95) Nevertheless, it does not necessarily have to be like this and there are many exceptions, but one important feature of the historical novel is implied here: most often authors need some source materials, some documentation of history from which they can (re)construct the historical settings of their narratives.
Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism is a seminal work on postmodernism; in it, Hutcheon argues that historiographic metafiction is postmodernist literature par excellence, a form of fiction that is ‘rethinking and reworking the forms and contents of the past’ (5). Fiction has had a crucial role in redefining the relationship between the present and the past by showing how also histories are constructed artificial narratives and therefore not so different from fictional narratives. In a sense, in postmodern historiographic metafiction history is fictionalised and fiction is historised, and it is relevant even to ask whether historiographic metafiction is at all the same thing as the historical novel (Nünning). Jerome de Groot argues that historiographic metafiction ‘is characterised by contrariness, and in this self-reflexiveness, subversiveness, and particularly in its meditation upon history and identity, is found the key expression of postmodern sensibility’ (119). According to de Groot it is not clear whether postmodernist historiographic metafiction represents the historical novel genre as such:
Is there a relationship between the historical novels of Scott and the fictions of postmodernism? Certainly there has been a shift in conceptualisations of ‘History’ itself, and the purposes and virtues of such a style of writing. Postmodern writings using the past may not strictly be ‘historical novels’, but they are highly influential way of meditating upon history through fiction [–]. (119-120)
De Groot emphasises that the relationship between postmodernism and history is a contemplation in which postmodernist fiction reflects history for its own contemporary purposes. Furthermore, Elisabeth Wesseling in Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (1991) claims that, on the one hand, the postmodernist historical novel is more about utopia(nism) than about the past because it does not deal with history by striving for historicity, but rather with its own time and the possibilities of the future. Nevertheless, this does not negate historiographic metafiction’s status as historical fiction. As Wesseling argues, this makes sense only if ‘we view genres as literary types that change through time, whereby novels from separate periods may be grouped together as embodiments of the same generic model in different stages of its historical development’ (17).
Considering the historical novel as one genre is not the same as considering it as unchangeable but, on the contrary, as a constantly shifting literary type. Hence, it is worth asking how contemporary historical novels fit into this definition and characterization of the genre. The following analysis of Asko Sahlberg’s novels will address this question in the context of metamodernism.
Asko Sahlberg and His Histories
Asko Sahlberg (born 1964) is a Finnish author who lives in Sweden in the city of Gothenburg. Even though he immigrated from Finland to Sweden in 1994 and published his first novel six year later in 2000, his career as a fiction writer has been very Finnish; his eighteen thus far published novels have all been written in Finnish and published at first in Finland by a Finnish publisher. Furthermore, in many of his works he writes about Finnish history, although contemporary Swedish society, immigration, and alienation alike are also common themes in his novels. Sahlberg is a canonical author both in Finland and Sweden and known also in some English-speaking countries as one of his novels, The Brothers (2012), has been fully translated in English. In addition to this novel, which was a candidate for the Dublin Literary Award in 2014, there was an English translation of extracts of the novel Helsinki Nocturne published in 2017 in The Riveter (Edition Three, October 2017).
Sahlberg’s historical novels are Tammilehto (‘The Oak Grove’, 2004), Yhdyntä (Helsinki Nocturne, 2005), He (The Brothers, 2010/2012), Häväistyt (‘The Dishonoured’, 2011), Herodes (‘Herod’, 2013), Pilatus (‘Pilate’, 2016), and Pompeius (‘Pompey’, 2024). Furthermore, two of his novels—Yö nielee päivät (2014) (‘The Night Swallows the Days’) and Irinan kuolemat (‘The Deaths of Irina’, 2015)—have at least certain elements of historical fiction as they tell individual histories that go back in time from the present to the 1940s and 1970s. Apart from Herodes, Pilatus and Pompeius, the novels depict Finnish history: the story of Tammilehto takes place during the Finnish Civil War in 1918, Helsinki Nocturne during the Continuation War in 1941–1944, The Brothers is a narrative from the 1600s, and events of the novel Häväistyt take place in the beginning of the 1900s.
The main themes of Sahlberg’s novels are such topics as the solitude of human beings, especially the feelings of being an outsider, the theme of fate and chance, and especially the theme of temporality. In Finland, Sahlberg’s fiction is usually considered as some kind of neo-existentialism, new psychological realism, or contemporary modernism. This interpretation is due to the fact that, for instance, the influence of such authors as Albert Camus, Alfred Döblin, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky is very obvious in his fiction. Sahlberg’s novels combine, in an original and exceptional manner, the elements and devices of realism, modernism, and postmodernism without clearly being representative of any of them, and thus his novels cannot be defined as either one of these periods, styles, or genres. Now, this essay poses the question of whether Sahlberg is a metamodernist author of historical fiction—a possibility that would explain many of the most original dimensions of his novels.
The narratives of Sahlberg’s novels are without exception microhistories, and most often, the protagonists are marginalised anti-heroes alienated from society. Whereas the great historical events of Finnish history, such as the Finnish Civil War or the Continuation War, are only distant backgrounds in the narratives, the everyday life, joys and (especially existential) suffering of the characters are foregrounded. In Sahlberg’s fiction, the sense of history is usually based on the experiences of small and insignificant people, which provides a microhistorical perspective on the great events of history. Representing life in the middle of historical events as ordinary rather than exceptional strengthens the significance of historicity in the novels. History is seen as a continuum of everyday living and thus the fictitious representation of history enables the reader to determine ‘past possibilities and possible futures’ (see van den Akker 2017, 22). The characters of the novels represent living and experiencing men and women of and within history, which also emphasises that the reader too is a historical being. This is one side of the notion of history in Sahlberg’s fiction: the emphasis is on subject’s experience of historicity on the level of microhistory.
The other side of the notion of history implied in Sahlberg’s fiction is the idea that history cannot be obtained as such, because it is always mediated via our experiences of contemporaneity. It is not possible to avoid anachronisms when representing historical characters as they are inevitably ambivalent entities (see also Lukács 1989, 63): they resemble historical living persons on the one hand and the subjects of contemporaneity—us living in the world today—on the other. History in historical novels is written always afterwards; the interpretations of the used source materials and the imagination of the author represent at the same time both the historical setting of the novel and the historical context of the writer. The zeitgeist, episteme, or the structure of feeling of the time of the writer leaks into the novel’s fictitious world causing ambivalence. It is characteristic for Sahlberg’s fiction that this ambivalence is foregrounded especially in the characters’ anachronistic inner subjectivity. Nevertheless, this does not lead to ignoring the meaning of historicity, but, on the contrary, it emphasises that history should be taken seriously as filled with meaningful human lives and not only as a constructed narrative of the past (cf. Elias 2001). Being in history is an experience, not an artefactual construction.
When highlighting the fundamentality of experience in history, the novels apparently have a modern approach—but, simultaneously, their overt anachronism demonstrates a postmodern stance. At the same moment the novels both pursue ethically acceptable means to tell truthful stories about history and accept that this task inevitably leads to anachronisms: historical novels are novels of history and novels of our time. This condition is an integral part of the anachronistic turn in contemporary culture, as pointed out by Stephanie Russo in her book The Anachronistic Turn: Historical Fiction, Drama, Film and Television (2024). Furthermore, it is here where metamodernism and the metamodernist oscillation come into the picture; in Sahlberg’s historical fiction, the approach to history is metamodernist because his works simultaneously highlight that history should be understood as experienced human life—and reveal that this is not possible as such. Modern belief in the experiential accessibility of history and a postmodern ironic stance toward any serious endeavor to reach historical truth oscillate in historical fiction by Asko Sahlberg. This oscillation reflects the oscillating forces of metamodernism, the dominant structure of feeling of our time. It is especially pronounced in Herodes andPilatus, the novels that I will analyse below.
The True Fiction of History
Herodes and Pilatus are very long novels that retell events from the beginning of Christianity from the viewpoints of the title characters of the novels. The protagonists, tetrarch Herod Antipas and Governor Pontius Pilate, are both real historical characters to whom Sahlberg gives a voice as first-person narrators in the middle of the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus. When Herodes was published in the year 2013, Sahlberg was already an established author to whose oeuvre this novel signified a shift. As it resembles the conventional historical novels of Mika Waltari, Walter Scott, and the like, it differs in many ways from the earlier works of the author. Nevertheless, there are still left many traces of the Sahlbergian themes listed above—they can be found under the surface of the conventional narrative since thematically Herodes is an extremely multi-level novel of history.
As the narrator and main character of the novel, the tetrarch Herod Antipas is an ambivalent person who, on one hand, tries to do good deeds for his people, but who, on the other hand, uses unlimited power arbitrarily and is able to destroy and kill whomever he wants without consequences. He therefore represents at the same time both the ancient sovereign and the modern subject; Herod often thinks and feels as a contemporary man but acts like an ancient sovereign. Like a modern human, he suffers because of social inequality and inequity, and at the same time as an ancient despotic king he is ready to destroy anyone who opposes him.
The release of Pilatus followed three years later, and in some sense the novel repeats and continues the same story that was told in Herodes. This holds true also in terms of the subjectivity of the narrator, Pontius Pilate. Similar to Herod Antipas, Pilate represents both ancient and modern human at the same time. The ambivalence of the first-person narrator is an effective narrative strategy producing an original and unconventional viewpoint to the well-known story of the rise of Christianity because the focus of both narratives is not on Christianity but on the personal histories of the protagonists and particularly on their relationships with Roman power. In the tradition of the historical novel, it is not conventional to have the rulers, kings, emperors or the like as main characters or first-person narrators. Instead of having the power to affect history, the protagonists typically—like Sinuhe in Mika Waltari’s Sinuhe the Egyptian (1945), the internationally best-known Finnish historical novel—live close to power as eyewitnesses to the lives and actions of those who have it. Unconventionally, as the historical novel’s protagonists both Herod and Pilate have significant power since Herod is the king of his Jewish people and Pilate governs the Province of Judaea as a representative of the Roman Empire.
Firstly, when comparing Sahlberg’s novels to the tradition of fictive narratives of ancient and early history, the change of the status of the protagonist indicates a transformation of the genre. The voice is given to those who have had the power in history. Secondly, it is important to pay attention to the fact that the events in Herodes and Pilatus take place at the dawn of the Common era, which is a universal, not a national topic. Writing a fictional historiography of rulers complicit in the fate of Christ is more a comment on Western and global cultural heritage than an effort to address specific or national historical events. Thirdly, it is noteworthy that not much historical evidence or source materials exist concerning the protagonists and episodes of the novels. Apart from what appears in the Bible, the life of Pontius Pilate, in particular, is very little known. In fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1966) precedes Sahlberg’s Pilate-representation as a source for speculations of the historical character’s life and personality. And although there are biographical materials on Herod Antipas, he is also best known from the short episodes of the New Testament. Thus, history based on facts provides only a framework for the narrative, as the source material offers the author very little support, and at the same time, the novels imitate historical narratives based on more reliable historical documentation.
Contrary to historiographic metafiction and postmodernist novels in general, Herodes and Pilatus are, at least on the surface, quite traditional narratives mostly following the aesthetics and poetics of realist fiction. Their storyworlds are realistic, and their first-person narrators resemble those of many novels whose reliability depends on their limited perspective. Unlike historiographic metafiction, the representation of the era and historical events strives for verisimilitude. The Sahlbergian notion of history obviously ignores constructivism and the idea that reality, history, and fiction are the same kinds of constructions and thus emphasises the meaning of historicity. Even if imagined from the basis of very tenuous historical evidence, the narrative of the novel is about living and being in the told era rather than about the contemporary ways of reflecting the past without a connection to it (cf. Hutcheon; Elias). To the extent that it is possible in fiction, Herod and Pilate are represented as flesh and blood subjects: their narrating voices are human filled with suffering, joy, love, and hate. Although both are immoral and vile persons and even killers, they are also more complex entities than simply criminals of history for us to judge. By hearing their (fictive and anachronistic but human) voices from distant history, the reader is put into a position where the well-known historical events of the beginning of Christianity are—after two millennia—retold and reinterpreted from different viewpoints: from the center perspective of political and social power of the narrated era and, at the same time, from the margins of the master narrative of Christianity.
According to the novels, there is a historical link between us living today and Herod and Pilate. Knowledge of the lives and deaths of Jesus and John the Baptist in the early days of Christianity is part of Western cultural heritage, as are the Gospels that tell their stories. We have learned that the protagonists of this story are Jesus and his disciples and successors. In the main historical narrative, there are such minor and marginal characters as, say, Lazarus, the good Samaritan, Barabbas, the high priest Caiaphas, Herod the tetrarch and the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate. Some of the minor characters are morally good, and some bad, some are heroic, and some anti-heroic. It is clear that Pilate and especially Herod belong to the categories of the anti-heroes of the history of Christianity. Of course, the situation is exceptional as in the narrated era the roles were opposite: Jesus and his companions were anti-heroes, of sorts, and represented the marginal, whereas the rulers represent the center. From our temporal and historical perspective, to rewrite historical events of the era from the viewpoint of the powerful is to position the marginal in the center. Consequently, in Herodes and Pilatus Asko Sahlberg does the same as in his other historical novels: he lets the marginalised anti-heroes be the protagonists of the narrative and tell us a narrative history from their viewpoint. In the novels, Herod and Pilate narrate their own microhistory according to their own experiences, but the context within which the reader (at least the Western reader) undoubtedly interprets them is the history of Christianity. Nonetheless, these Sahlbergian historical rewritings have many effects and functions beyond the reinterpretation of the Gospels.
Both novels consist to a large extent of the life stories of the protagonists, and in both of them, the birth of Christianity is a subplot that affects the protagonist’s destiny. For Herod, John the Baptist, ‘the Prophet’, is a problem because the people follow him, and Herod is concerned for his own power. Furthermore, his wife Herodias and stepdaughter Princess Salome both are rumored to be followers of John. The famous decapitation of John the Baptist results from this. Herod is very drunk when Princess Salome after her equally famous dance asks to see prisoned John the Baptist (not his head). As Herod narrates it, Salome’s dance itself is not spectacular at all; Herod dislikes both the dance and the dancer. Herod calls the dance ‘grotesque fidgeting’ (503, translation mine). After the dance the dialogue shows what Salome desires:
‘I would like to see the Prophet John.’
‘John?’ I [Herod] was taken aback. ‘Why? Hasn’t there been enough trouble because of him already?’
‘It is just that I would like to watch him in the eyes.’ (503, translation mine)
Instead of letting Salome meet John, Herod orders his servant to cut off the Prophet’s head. Even though this episode is only a minor subplot in the novel, regretting and doubting the justification of it troubles Herod for the rest of his life. In the citation below, an elderly Herod talks with his much older friend and benefactor Gallus about the killing of the prophet:
I turn my head down. ‘I know. I was once afraid of one prophet and it made me to order to kill him. Yet I have never stopped regretting it, but I do not know whether the greatest crime was against him or myself.’
‘Probably you made the biggest crime against yourself. Dying is never difficult as such, but to wait it is. And compunctions can make anyone lose his mind.’
‘I have already experienced that. I would resurrect the Prophet if I could.’ (554, translation mine)
In Pilatus, Pilate tells of his life from youth to old age. Unlike Jewish Herod, a tetrarch of noble birth, Pilate is a Roman citizen from a quite modest family. His path to power is a manifestation of his good fortune, but towards the end of his life he has governed the Judaean province and been both the favorite and the enemy of the changing Emperors of Rome. As John to Herod, Jesus and his destiny is to Pilate a minor episode in his governorship yet shadows the rest of his personal life. For instance, his wife and son turn to Christianity and Pilate himself has mystical religious experiences he does not understand. The first contact with this inner experience is when Pilate goes with his family to listen to Jesus’ sermon to find out if there would be any threat against the empire:
While listening to the mindless speech of Jeshua [Jesus], I was almost bursting into laughter. What prevented me was my wife’s seriousness, the incomprehensible devotedness of the people surrounding us and, above all, the feeling that crept into my mind like an almost indistinguishable rising shadow in the darkness – it was a feeling that deep inside me a boulder was moving dangerously; the weight of that boulder was until that moment upheld a construction that was me. The stone did not roll to move, it settled down, but already that little move was enough to rouse an outpouring of presentiments of breaking walls, collapsing towers, floodwaters, and earthquakes. (254, translation mine)
In this context where the master narrative of Christianity is turned upside down by foregrounding the power of Roman Empire and its representatives, the historicity of the events is more important than their religious meaning or value. Sahlberg’s historical fiction lets us imagine and play with the idea of how the beginning of the Common era as a true historical moment touched those living and experiencing subjects who were not in the leading roles of the biblical narrative. It is a history of those who, like us in our contemporaneity, were at that moment of life present to themselves as beings in history. In this sense, Herodes and Pilatus reflect a modern belief in the accessibility of history.
However, there is another side of the story in the postmodern ironic stance toward historical truth: the subjectivities of the first-person narrator protagonists are historically ambivalent, which ironically undermines the strive for verisimilitude. For example, this ambivalence can be seen in Herodes in an episode where Herod and Pilate meet, and when Herod thinks about the similarities between them:
Our relationship was grown up since our first encounter. It was not merely friendly, but there was certain trust between us. After all, there were more similarities between us that one could think: we both hoped peaceful conditions, we both secretly despised the hypocrite priests of Jerusalem, we both lost our temper due to any effort of rebellion; we both felt the heavy burden of responsibility. [–] People thought we were men to whom was given the great power, but inside we were both conscious of our weaknesses and nothingness. (527, translation mine)
As the characters of historical novels, Herod and Pilate are anomalies and anachronisms representing simultaneously historical subjects of the narrated era and the subjectivity of our time. Many of their thoughts of the world and human life are not reliable in the narrated historical context, while at the same time they remain bound to this context. When interpreted as a metamodernist oscillation−between modern and postmodern attitude towards history or historiography, between past and present, between historical reliability and anachronism− this also highlights a sense of historicity and the idea of varying modalities as a theme of the novel. It emphasises how we too, the inhabitants of the present-day world are (like any other) experiencing subjects in history.
Although it is not possible to reach history as such, from the oscillating vantage point of metamodernism it is still possible to sincerely seek ethical and truthful ways to fictionalise history and estimate its influences on us and on the present world. This is what the historical novel of today seems to pursue. With respect to the genre and the metamodernist notion of historicity, the analysed novels of Sahlberg are an interesting pair that provide possibilities to determine the condition of the historical novel after postmodernism and to consider how the genre has after the dominance of historiographic metafiction once again changed. If not providing a definition or a conclusive proof of the genre, my analysis nonetheless leads to sharpen the question whether there exists such a thing as the metamodernist historical novel—suggesting a paradigmatic genre of ‘the golden age of historical fiction’ in ‘the regime of historicity’.
Works Cited
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