The Guardian
recently published a list of the “top ten historical novels” (http://bit.lyL1v7QU). One of the most
encouraging things about it was the number of readers’ comments received,
almost all of them complaining about omissions (Tolstoy is included, along with
Robert Graves, Hilary Mantel and Andrew Miller, but not William Golding, Gore
Vidal or Rosemary Sutcliff…): this hardly suggests a genre untouched by
greatness. A common criticism, however, was its Anglophone bias (War and Peace and The Leopard were the only non-English choices).
Jean Rouaud’s Préhistoires
is not a novel as such (indeed many of his works defy conventional
classification), but it is a vision of the remote past conceived by one of
Europe’s leading writers of fiction. It has never been translated into English
in its entirety (I might turn my hand to this at some stage). In the second of
his three vignettes, “La Caverne Fantome,” he explores the possible motivations
of the people who created the world’s first paintings, in the caves of southern
France and northern Spain, between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago.
“Even we can read
signs in the sky. When rain is threatening, we smell it; we take in our laundry;
if we are on a walk, we turn around. When the leaves change colour, we do not
need a calendar to tell us that winter is on its way…So for people who spent
all their time outdoors, it must have been second nature. They would have
learned to read these signs that were before their eyes, to notice any change;
a scent on the air; a hoarse cry in a thicket; a white disc around the moon; a
haze on the horizon…This learning process cannot have been without its setbacks,
nor can it have been without fear. How could such people fail to shudder
beneath the onslaught of a storm in which a golden arrow, loosed from the heart
of a black cloud, was able to split a tree and set a scrubland ablaze?
Unseen powers lurked
behind each of these phenomena. Powers that had to be interpreted, placed in
the context of a narrative, a coherent story that would make sense of these
strange powers of nature. It was necessary to give a name to these creatures of
the shadows, to give them a history, to understand their behaviour…
…They could expect few
favours from the sky: snow, rain, hail, storms, it always sent something to fall
on their heads. It made sense to protect themselves. Often they found refuge
beneath the ground, within the earth that must have seemed to them like a
mother…
…To placate the forces
of the Earth, which was pregnant with all the things on which they depended:
vegetables; fruits; animals; they sought a passage into its very womb, crawling
through narrow passages until they reached a larger chamber. In this imagined
womb, this cave of the treasures of life, they placed their hands against the
wall…The imprints they left on those walls signify their rights of access; they
are signs of a transmission of energy; a form of devotion…
…As they explored the
veins and arteries of the great body of the Earth, orange flames flickering
from the juniper wicks of the stone lamps they held in their hands, stone lamps
in their hands, they saw shadows come to life on the walls…In a bulge of stone,
like a baby’s foot pressing on the inside of a woman’s belly, they recognised
the hoof of a bison; in a groove in the rock, they saw the neck of a horse; in
a pebble of flint, protruding from the chalk, someone imagined the eyelid of an
old mammoth; and then, in a depression in the rock, they created the image of a
cow…And so it was done, and beautifully done: and one might have wondered who
had contributed most to this process of reproduction: the Earth herself, or the
masters of the caves. Because it really was a matter of reproduction, and they
reproduced everything that, to their eyes, represented excellence: power,
fertility, vivacity, endurance; whether in the bison, the bull, the horse or
the mammoth…The human mastery of the world was beginning…
…These silent acts,
which populated the realm of shadows with a fabulous menagerie of
spirit-beings; this trembling expression in the face of the mysteries of birth
and death, was to continue on the hidden walls of caves for more than twenty
thousand years.”[1]
