Outlander: Notable Moment #1

I am currently re-reading the first in a series of books that first embarrassed me, then engrossed me, and finally inspired me.  I have now--in the course of a very few months--read every work of fiction that author Diana Gabaldon has produced.  This is a blushworthy admission, since some all of the books are quite blushworthy, at least in part.  But--I hasten to add--that is not all that's going on in them.

By way of description, I will refer you to the author's own web site.  To give some context, I will say that they are not for all readers--if they were muted down to, say, PG-13, perhaps.  But I would not advocate that, and I'll reveal why in the course of rereading and writing about them.  I will further say that they involve time travel.  A woman from the 1940s finds herself--quite unexpectedly, and with an unraveling explanation--in the 1740s in Scotland.  And the conflicts that arise because of this displacement form the context for my first "notable moment."

When I first read the book, while still feeling rather sure that I was reading a romance novel, part of my brain was trying very hard to justify reading it.  My first observation was that this novel has moments when it is quite reactionary.  Perspectives that we comfortably take for granted in the 21st Century, the novel subverts quite neatly by reintroducing historicity.  That is, Gabaldon doesn't stretch historical plausibility to help our heroine get along in 18th Century Scotland (well, not much).  Things that could have happened, happen.  When the protagonist, Claire, acts like a 20th Century woman (albeit an early 20th Century woman), consequences ensue.

So as I was rereading, I was struck by the particular way in which the narrative--through the consciousness of Claire--inducts the reader into this way of thinking about historical practices.  A young boy has been accused of theft.  The likely punishment will be to lose a hand or an ear.  A lesser punishment would be to have his ear nailed to the post.  Claire is horrified by the barbarity, but has to face her situation practically. She has little opportunity to influence the outcome (though what opportunity she has, she does exercise).

As she is ruminating on the unfolding event, she turns first to her knowledge of history:

Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens.  And earlier authors, as well, with their descriptions of the pitiless justice of those times, meted out to all ill-doers, regardless of age or circumstance.  But to read, from a cozy distance of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few feet above such an occurrence. (170)

 This is something akin to saying, "This isn't something that you have to worry about, dear reader," without the direct narrative address.  We are sitting pretty; our character is not.  She has been jostled out of her comfort zone, and the narrative endeavors to jostle us as well, even if we are sitting pretty in our fluffy couches reading about horrors.  And let me tell you--this narrative will jostle you.  And it even jostles a bit as, not quite content with distant historical context, Gabaldon brings the reader a little closer in to the process of looking back on historical events:

Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany: the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings.  And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, "How could the people have let it happen? They mist have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and the smoke.  How could they stand by and do nothing?" Well, now I knew. (170)

 In the space of a page, the reader has moved from 18th Century Scotland, to 19th Century England, to 20th Century Germany, as the narrative asks her to consider the power of an individual conscience in the face of overwhelming cultural and social opposition in each separate context.  Suddenly, the judgments that contemporary readers are content to pass on the past from positions of relative complacency are called into question.  And that is a nice rhetorical move.