Volume 39, Number 17 · October 22, 1992
Looking for Napoleon
By P.N. Furbank
The Death of Napoleon
by Simon Leys, translated by Patricia Clancy. the author
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 130 pp., $15.00
The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P.
by Brian O'Doherty
Pantheon, 228 pp., $19.00
The Emperor's Last Island: A Journey to St. Helena
by Julia Blackburn
Pantheon, 277 pp., $22.00
Napoleon: An Intimate Account of the Years of Supremacy
produced and edited by Proctor Patterson Jones
Random House, 450 pp., $85.00
Two historical novels, one about Mesmer and the other about Napoleon, together with a book about Napoleon, The Emperor's Last Island, that might easily (all too easily?) have become a historical novel: with such books before him the reviewer asks himself, not for the first time, what he feels about historical fiction. A theory that comes to his mind, suggested by some masterpieces in this genre, is that there is nothing historical about the historical novel. The proper subject for a historical novel, the matter with which it most naturally works, would seem to be not the past, but rather some myth about the past, some legend that we now entertain about it—that is to say a modern, not a historical, entity. It requires a historian, working with a historian's methods, to fumble for the truth about Napoleon, and much of this truth will defy capture; but we can all of us, very completely, possess the Napoleonic myth. It is the myth of the '45, a shared possession, that sustains Scott's Waverley, and again a myth, of a more complicated kind—a literary myth, about the relationship of Lotte Buffe to the Lotte of The Sorrows of Young Werther—that informs Thomas Mann's wonderful Lotte in Weimar.
Review, 5062 words
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