making private of history

In The Historical Novel, Lukács criticizes Flaubert’s novel Salammbô for presenting an inadequate representation of history, “unhistorical or antihistorical conception of the feelings, ideas and thoughts of men” rather than “actual existence.” He writes:

In Salammbô all the tendencies of decline in the historical novel appear in concentrated form: the decorative monumentalization, the devitalizing, dehumanizing and at the same time making private of history. History becomes a large, imposing scene for purely private, intimate and subjective happenings.

Lukács condemns the ‘making private of history.’ But Woolf, and Gumby, provide a counter-model that demonstrates the historical potential of the intimate, private realm. Woolf and Gumby, each creating from historical positions of being excluded from the hegemonic public realm, work to point out the connections between their private realms and larger historical forces. Thus, Gumby’s private correspondence becomes part of the historical record, alongside government publications and newspaper articles, in his Negro as a Soldier scrapbook. Thus, Woolf’s imagined Society of Outsiders rejects the pageantry of the public realm, of History (in the capital-H Hegelian/Glissantian sense), and collects private beauty in order to “make visible to all.” In fiction and in essays, Woolf works to show institutions of power from the point of view of the Outsider, in the private realm, in order to reveal a decidedly socio-historical structure.