On Blinking and Cocksuckers: Notes on Writing Historical Dialogue
“I cannot blink it.”
If you don’t know what that means, I don’t blame you. I don’t rightly know what it means, either. “Blink” has meant about what it means today—a quick fluttering of the eyelids—since at least the 1330s. Blinking is something that eyes do, not something that takes a direct object. If we dig deeply enough into the Oxford English Dictionary, we can find a transitive use for blink—“that dog never blinked a bird in her life”—which means to turn away from, or to avoid, which is roughly how it’s being used in the line of dialogue above. But that usage is from 1742, and it’s from a specifically sporting context. It is not from 1692.
(Katherine Howe: On the Golden Age of Piracy.)
Yet, if you recognize that phrase, it’s likely because you have read it in The Crucible. Arthur Miller used “blink” artificially, as a verb that takes a direct object, but more importantly he used it as a signifier, a performance of archaic speech that was not, itself, archaic. It is supposed to jar on our modern ears, to indicate to us that the text is operating in a different time. We accept Miller’s invention of “I cannot blink it” because we are willing to trust him, to participate in his representation of Salem in 1692. The phrase’s wrongness, or meaninglessness, might irritate a historical novelist (ahem), but it achieves its larger purpose: situating the reader within a remote period of time, without obscuring its intended meaning. Any writer working in a historical period not her own will confront a similar challenge—the balance of writing dialogue that seems historically accurate, while still being decipherable to the reader.
I say “seems” deliberately, because in some instances, words have older usages than we expect. But in many respects, the actual historical accuracy of a given piece of dialogue is irrelevant to the writer’s project. It’s no use to argue that “cool” has meant classy, fashionable, or attractive since 1918, for instance. If a writer were to deploy “cool” that way in dialogue in a story set in 1919, the word would fail. It would feel like an anachronism despite not being one. But the feeling is enough—a reader would trip over “cool” in 1919 and in so doing, be pushed out of the story. The writer would have sacrificed verisimilitude for accuracy.
One path toward writing effective historical dialogue is to read primary sources that contain historical dialogue. Abigail Williams, in the course of the public examination of Rebecca Nurse during the Salem panic, says “Yes, she beat me this morning.” Rebecca Nurse replies “I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency.” Spend enough time in the primary sources of Salem, and the speakers’ voices emerge clearly—historical, yes, but not with the stiff formality or fakeness of a Masterpiece Theater performance. People living in the past were people, after all. They used slang. They felt emotions. Rebecca Nurse comes across as more formal, more reflective and educated—“You do not know my heart,” she says at one point—because that is what she was, an older woman, long a member of the church, accustomed to a certain degree of authority. Abigail comes off as a child, enraged and disempowered, which is what she was, being 11 years old and bound out to service—“she beat me! She hurt and pinched me!” In most cases, spend enough time reading and studying the way people actually talked, and the dialogue will come naturally.
But not always. In some cases, the emotional impact of a way of speaking in the past won’t necessarily translate in the present, and for a writer of historical fiction, emotional impact is key. The best example I can think of which grapples successfully with this problem is Deadwood, the HBO series set in a Gold Rush mining camp in the 1870s.
On Deadwood, every other word seems to be “cocksucker.” It’s the lingua franca of this extralegal settlement of grifters and swindlers. People shout it at each other in rage, they mutter it in resentment. And because the word is so evocative, so visceral, even our relatively jaded—or perhaps inured—21st Century ears never fully acclimate to it. Each use of “cocksucker” shocks us, reminding us that we are absorbing a story set in a lawless place, among desperate and often dangerous people. But it also feels period-appropriate. It’s not an insult we commonly wield today. We mutter enraged curses under our breath at people who cut us off in traffic, but most of us—I’m willing to bet—don’t mutter “cocksucker.” The word accomplishes what the show’s writers need it to do, by shocking our sensibilities while also rooting us in the story’s moment in time.
However, I wouldn’t call Deadwood’s use of “cocksucker” accurate exactly. More accurate, if we trust what the sources have to say, would be to have the characters say, “God damn” or “God damned.” That’s how this population of people would have actually talked, peppering their discourse with casual curses of a more explicitly Christian variety. But our sense of the impact of “God damn” has changed in the past 150 years. While we might still live in communities that caution against taking the Lord’s name in vain, for the most part “God damn” or even “goddam” is a curse that has lost its power to shock. It doesn’t stop us short anymore, not the way it would have in the 1870s. (Recently I slipped up and used the phrase “God damn” in an upper school assembly at a high school in the South, and it took me a minute to understand why the kids all tittered when I said it.)
When writing the dialogue in A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, my challenge was to create the sensation of reading an 18th Century adventure story without creating a replica. Actual 18th Century books can be a bear to read, with great blocks of text unbroken into paragraphs, sprinkled with repetitive Biblical references, and all dialogue recounted. When Hannah finds herself in amongst a lot of dangerous pirates in 1726, I block out all the instances of “damn” because that’s what would have happened in an 18th Century text, but the dialogue and setting is written with the immediacy that a 21st readership demands. Verisimilitude takes precedence over accuracy. The reader’s sensation, both emotional and historical, is of greater importance than the fidelity to the archive, even if my gut instinct, as a historian, is to privilege what the primary sources have to say. But the reader will out. The book, this book, is what matters.
I could not blink it otherwise.
Check out Katherine Howe’s A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself here:
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