Cataphora and meaning

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has only one distinguishing formal characteristic: like an arc of tendus extending toward a single point up-stage, the pronoun "he" nearly always refers to Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

Mark Rylance, Wolf Hall (PBS)

This referential anchor can be counted on even when there's a nearer potential antecedent; it's a wrinkle in the surface of Mantel's otherwise glabrous realism. The disorientation is grammatical and historical. Some center has migrated, and heads are still jerking to catch it. The novel itself is premised on a shift in focus from the divine in its monarchical incarnation to a man best described as a fixer - a lawyer and erstwhile ruffian and agent of the Reformation who reads Tyndale's bible and muses in limpid free indirect discourse about siccing his "banker friends" on a troublesome courtier.

Grammatical insistence

This historical shift into the modern is conjugated through the peculiar novelistic device of cataphora. Mantel's cataphora tells us again and again that a low-born individual's psychological depth and social mobility are the referential anchor not only in particular syntactic units, but across the narrative. It's a gesture that points always to the side, turning a question of narrative point of view into a question of epistemology. Wolf Hall's "he"'s ask not only Where do we look?, but How do we look in order to see historical meaning? The question Mantel's cataphora asks is not about who has power at any given moment, but about who can be believed to both generate meaning and fix it in his own person.

In the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel switches to "he, Cromwell," which somewhat disperses the uncanny consistency of the "he" pronoun as both reference and focalizing center. Cataphora in Wolf Hall is stranger for making humanist individualism strange.