Historiographic_Metafiction

"Historiographic metafiction is the only credible way for the contemporary novel to attempt realism". Do you think that this statement misrepresents both historiographic metafiction and the practice of contemporary realism' The debate over realism is one which has existed since the time of Plato and Aristotle and it is even now a dominant frame of reference for literary criticism and evaluation. Linda Hutcheon describes the postmodern as the "contradictory phenomenon that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges - be it in literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, television, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics or historiography" (1987: 10). Similarly Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition characterises the postmodern as possessing an "incredulity toward metanarratives" (1984: xxiv). This analysis will merely seek to illustrate how British postmodern fiction plays with the structures of authority and in this case with the traditional notions of history, and challenges the realist convention by suggesting that this authority and its relation to experience are at least under interrogation. Through this subversion, British authors explore an ironic re-visitation of the past by analyzing not the events of history, but its discourses in search for the ever-evading "truth". The last decades have witnessed a return of history in the novel, a proliferation of fictional narratives that address historical issues, events and characters. These fictions are protean in form and in many ways depart from the epistemology and the narrative strategies that characterised historical fiction at the height of its popularity. The realist aesthetic tended to distinguish between "lying literature" and "true" literature, "objective" history and to ascribe a moral value to fact. History was seen as accessible as pure fact, independent of individual perception, ideology, or the process of selection necessitated simply by creating a written narrative. Many historical fictions use history to impart a certain amount of knowledge through fictionalization rather than a mirroring of events of the past. History is not part of the plot but a glamorous background against which to depict stereotyped heroes and villains, who embody the eternal and natural human features and characteristics. Most of the metafiction novels are a-historic because their concern is for the universal and the natural beyond or outside history. In historiographic metafiction more conventional literary devices are designed to give the illusion of reality, include the framing of one story within another, a fictional editor and end-notes which although they give details of the "real" historical events in the fictions, in most cases providing accurate detail on social events, characters and situations, serve mainly to highlight the fictiveness of those events as they appear in the novels. Hayden White argues that the way in which we know the past is through historiography which is subject to the same creative processes as fiction. The writing of history, as he points out, in "The Fictions of Factual Representation", is a "poetic process" (Lee, pg34). In "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact" he argues that historical narratives are "verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences" (Lee, pg34). White places historiography on the same plane as fiction but denigrates neither. White goes on to exclaim that "the contents [of historical narratives] are as much invented as found"(Lee pg34). Northrop Frye elaborates on this saying "when a historian's scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensiveness it gets mythical in shape, and so approaches the poetic in its structure" (Lee, pg34) and he even speaks of different kinds of myths such as the Romance myth, the comic myth, the tragic myth and the ironic myth. Frye likewise locates the fictive in the space between the mythic and the historical and White builds on this stating that "viewed in a purely formal way, a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition" (Lee pg88) The idea of history as discursive practice is informed by the linguistic theories which challenge the traditional position that language is transparent and in the postmodern novels similarly history is used both as a reference to the real past and as a text or discursive construct. While the skeleton of factual information is filled in with fictional flesh in order to make it more presentable, there is never any doubt as to the factual or structural make-up of the skeleton. The very form of these novels borrows from traditional narrative history in its linearity, examination of cause and effect, and emphasis on the primacy of the individual subject. Recent metafictional texts create an illusion of reality but representing people places and events which are historically viable as, for example, Gustave Flaubert in Flaubert's Parrot, Nicholas Hawksmoor's six London churches in Hawksmoor; the Indian language riots in Midnight's Children. The use of real names, places and events is asserted and rendered almost immediately problematic. Some of these novels borrow from the nineteenth century tradition of displacement in that they appear to present themselves not as novels but as biography, autobiography, memoir and documentary history. In "Narcissistic Narrative", Linda Hutcheon calls these narratives "historiographic metafictions" and they are particularly, in their play with Realist conventions, paradoxical. While they use Realist conventions they simultaneously seek to subvert them. Yet they do so from within precisely those conventions which they are clearly trying to undermine. Like all metafictional texts historiographic metafiction puts the reader in a contradictory position. Hutcheon explains: "on the one hand, [the reader] is forced to acknowledge the artifice, the art, of what he is reading; on the other, explicit demands are made upon him, as co-creator, for intellectual and affective responses comparable in scope and intensity to those of his life experience. In fact, these responses are shown to be part of his life experience. In this light metafiction is less a departure from the mimetic novelistic tradition than a reworking of it." (1984 pg 5). Since the novels present themselves as documentary history and as artifice, the reader must come to terms with the referential and non-referential nature of the literature at the same time. Midnight's Children raises two closely related issues, which are central to historiographic metafiction which, are subjectivity and the ontology of real characters who appear in fictional works. Instead of the historical characters and events proving the truth of the fiction they point to the indeterminacy of historical knowledge. As Patricia Waugh argues in "Metafiction", "fiction is quasi-referential in that it can never imitate or represent the world, but always imitates or represents the discourses which in turn construct that world."(1984: 100). Because the agenda of the postmodern text is a paradoxical one in their simultaneous presentation and subversion of Realist conventions there is a constant tension between past and present, presence and absence, construction and destruction. An example of this can be seen in Ackroyd's Hawksmoor who is himself torn amongst these differences that are thematised through him. Postmodern narrative has many examinations of the nature of narrative as a major human system of understanding. Historiographic metafiction is written today in the context of a serious contemporary interrogating of the nature of representation in historiography. In authors like Garcia Marquez the novel does not merely revel in its fabulation but is also a narrative representation of a historical and political act. Postmodern narrative also attempts to go beyond the traditional representational forms of both fictional and historical narration. Ultimately postmodernism challenges the reader to question the processes by which we represent ourselves and our world to ourselves, and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct order out of experience in our particular culture so that ultimately we cannot avoid representation. In a very real sense, postmodernism reveals a desire to understand present culture as the product of previous representations, which really implies that postmodernism accepts the challenge of tradition and decide to exploit it. The exploitation can vary from the parodic and historic forms to the oral histories described in Russell Hoban's transcribed oral histories. Hutcheon claims "For artists, the postmodern is said to involve a rummaging through the image reserves of the past in such a way as to show the history of the representations their parody calls to our attention." (1988: pg93). The going back to the past is always critical and demonstrates how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference. BIBLIOGRAPHY: * Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (New York and London: 1984, Methuen). * Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism. (New York and London: 1988, Routledge). * Lee, Alison, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. (London: 1990, Routledge). * Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition. (Minneapolis: 1984, University of Minneapolis Press). * Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of self-Conscious Fiction. (London and New York: 1984, Methuen). * White, Hayden, Metahistory: The historical imagination in Nineteenth century Europe (Baltimore: 1973, John Hopkins University Press).