Postmodernism and the Notion of Historiographic Metafiction

 

On a literary level, “postmodernism” denotes a literary theory and practice, which criticizes and overcomes both traditional narrative forms, interpretations and methods of analysis as well as their “modern” counterparts. Consequently, while we may assume that literary modernism shares a methodological unity because of the fact that it puts a lot of emphasis on the way or the form of presentation, postmodernism is characterized by diversity – a diversity that often does not even attempt to create a structured impression. Unquestionably, the literary concept of postmodernism is in close relation with the historical term “postmodern”: several authors have pointed out that the genesis of the term “postmodernity” is closely related to the two major catastrophes of the 20^th century: World War II and the annihilation of cultural, ethnic, and social minorities in the Nazi’s concentration camps. Lyotard, who can be considered the founder of the theory of the postmodern, argues that these two catastrophes fundamentally shattered the then still prevalent unquestionable belief in rationality as the source of humanism, development, and morality [11, p. 12].

In postmodern literary text, the idea of originality and authenticity is undermined and parodied. Postmodern literary work does not pretend to be new and original, but uses the old literary forms, genres, and kinds of literature and art, kitsch, quotation, allusion and other means to recontextualize their meaning in a different linguistic and cultural contexts to show a difference between the past and present as well as between the past and present forms of representation as was mentioned in famous John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”in which he points out “an exhaustion” of the old forms of art and suggests a creative potential of the use of the old forms, genres and styles [9, p. 63]. Postmodern authors intentionally build the meaning on the use not only of the old forms and genres, but also by a deliberate use of plagiarism, kitsch, false or pretended quotations from well-known literary and other texts (by false or pretended I mean the authors’ close imitation of the ideas or style of famous authors, works or philosophers without giving a bibliographical note). Plagiarism is not meant to “steal” the authors’ ideas, but to evoke a parody effect and an ironic distance from these texts. Some critics speak not about plagiarism, but pla(y)giarismin a postmodern literary work, that is a creative use and recontextualization of already existing texts through the use of techniques reminiscent of plagiarism (unjustified use of these texts) and their further modification by the use of linguistic and textual play [15, p. 252].

Radical plurality and relativismof postmodernismis associated with distrust to the possibility of reason to understand and explain the world either objectively or subjectively, to any unified visions of the world, to any eternal truths, any unifying concepts of truth. What is only possible is a reflection or a creative and intuitive rather than rational response to reality and experience. This reflection is never finished, unified, stable or eternal, but only provisional, open and can always be changed, transformed, modified or even undermined by different versions or reality. “The postmodern mind refuses to limit truth to its rational dimension and thus dethrones the human intellect as the arbiter of truth. There are other valid paths to knowledge besides reason [...] including the emotions and the intuition [...] the postmodern mind no longer accepts the Enlightenment belief that knowledge is objective. Knowledge cannot be merely objective [...] because the universe is not mechanistic and dualistic but rather historical, relational and personal. The world is not simply an objective given that is “out there”, waiting to be discovered and known; reality is relative, indeterminate, and participatory [...] The postmodern worldview operates with a community-based understanding of truth. It affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate [...] the postmodern worldview affirms that this relativity extends beyond our perceptions of truth to its essence: there is no absolute truth; rather, truth is relative to the community in which we participate... On the basis of this assumption, postmodern thinkers have given up Enlightenment quest for any one universal, supracultural, timeless truth. They focus instead on what is held to be true within a specific community” [17, p. 7–8].

On the level of a text, radical plurality often “manifests itself not only in a depiction of formerly marginalized and outcast characters (different ethnic groups, but also various kinds of losers, junkies, prostitutes, lesbians, homosexuals and deviants) depicted as rather positive characters, but also in the use of multiple, often alternative or overlapping narrative voices offering the version of reality and the vision of the world which is equal to the other voice’s interpretation; in the use of different genres and styles typical of other kinds of literature and genres (detective story, pornography, love story, essay, diary, cookery book, receipt, letter, newspaper clip) but each of which contributes to the stylistic hybridity and mixing of genres in the literary texts”. The mixing of genres is not a new narrative technique, but postmodern literary works use it deliberately as part of their systematic building of the postmodern meaning. “Although generic “mixtures” are typical especially for the contemporary artistic scene, in fact it has never been simple to strictly define features typical for individual genres, for great literary works have always been complex and resistant to systematizing efforts” [17, p. 78].

Postmodern literary work often questions its own fictional status thus becoming metafictional.Metafictional means that a “literary work refers to itself and the principles of its construction by using various techniques and narrative devices. Simplistic understanding of metafiction is that “metafiction is a fiction about fiction”, but postmodern fictional work is far more and about more issues than only about fiction” [54, 59]. The term was coined by an American author and critic William Gass, but it can have various meanings. Metafiction, metafictional elements, and metafictionality is a dominant feature of a postmodern literary work. Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction is the most suitable one. In her view, metafiction is “…a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictitiousness of the world outside the literary/fictional text” [59, p. 2]. Nevertheless, metafictioncan be expressed not only through a direct addressing a reader, but also through other means such as a quotation, allusion, false, fake quotation, paraphrasing, parody, pastiche, irony, intertextualityand many others.

Definitely, metafiction existed before the advent of postmodernism, but what makes postmodernism special is its constant questioning of the “politics”. As other metafictional novels, postmodernist novels use the “novel within the novel” technique, but rather to ask questions about the use of representation and not about what is being represented. “In metafiction, the novel-within-the-novel device serves to undermined, rather than to establish, the conventional distinctions between the real and the imaginary domains. The teller-within-the-tale constellation shifts the emphasis away from a representation and imitation of reality ...towards an exploration of the workings of the imagination, of the self-generating story-telling voice, and thus towards a throwing into relief of the literary process [40, p. 226].

Metafiction is a fiction which talks about itself, showing out its structure, demonstrating itself as fiction. The author asks her/his readers for their willing suspension of disbelief: they have not to believe in fiction, they have not to passively enter the fictional world. The world that metafiction portrays is not the real world that it resembles. Malcolm Bradbury suggests that the “novelist today may feel himself under a growing need to present his fictions as fictive – because the problems of presenting the structure of a novel as authoritative or somehow co-equal with life are intensified and obscured where there are no communal myths or ethics. Novelists use language to explore contingent reality and not to create systematic orders. There is not a necessary order to present any longer” [14, p. 164].

Moreover, postmodernism entails a critical return to history, questioning the notion of historical knowledge. History is not discredited, yet its modes and meanings are diversified. Postmodernism forces us to review and reconsider our idea of what history is exploring, the cultural presumptions on which any account of history is founded. What has changed within postmodernism is the way we conceive history, with the increasing awareness of the limits and faults of any construction and representation of the past. Contemporary writers who deal with the rewriting of history are motivated by a need to highlight the gap between the real past and any representation of it.

Linda Hutcheon in her “Poetics of Postmodernism”labels postmodern historical novels as “historiographic metafictions” since they thematize the theory of contemporary historiography and problematize the distinction between history and fiction. She explains her reason for such a label as follows: “[historiographic metafiction] puts into question, at the same time as it exploits the grounding of historical knowledge in the past real. This is why I have been calling this historiography metafiction” [39, p. 92]. In attempt to offer a definition of historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon suggests: “by this I mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” [39, p. 5]. Hutcheon’s definition puts stress especially on postmodernist historical novels “intense self-consciousness about the way in which all this is done” [39, p. 113]. Her definition is governed by the paradox created by the intermingling of metafictional self-reflexivity and historical reality in novels. For Hutcheon, “the meeting of metafiction and historiography produces a new kind of experimental writing uniquely capable of fulfilling the poetics of postmodernism” [38, p. 71]. And though historical novels in the postmodern era have been discussed under different labels by various critics; nonetheless, Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” is regarded as an all-encompassing term. For example, Brian McHale, although establishing his own theory of historical novels in the postmodern age and labelling them as “postmodernist revisionalist historical novels” in his study “Postmodernist Fiction”, observes no distinction in his later work “Constructing Postmodernism”between this and Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, and he groups the novels of the sort under Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction”: “a historical novel of the postmodernist type, the type that Hutcheon has called ‘historiographic metafiction’” [47, p. 152]. In addition to singling out the mixing of historical figures and fiction and the rewriting of alternative versions, Hutcheon’s term also helps treat a text as a “subversive tool by foregrounding its realism-undermining metafictionality”.

The term historiographic reveals the critical interest in history and in the writing of history. It follows that historiographic metafiction uses “metafictional techniques to underscore that history is a construction, not something natural that tallies with the past, but a literary artefact. It draws attention to the fact that we know the past through other texts, that all historical sources are intertextual. Intertextuality plays a fundamental role in postmodern literature: historiographic metafiction turns to the intertexts of both history and literature” [38, p. 109]. Postmodernism argues that we can only know reality as it is “produced and sustained by cultural representations of it; we experience the world through our past and present narratives of it. Historiographic metafiction teaches us that we know the past only through its traces, relics, its textualised remains” [38, p. 110]. The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction offers a “sense of the presence of the past, but a past that can be known only from its texts. […] To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. And this is the postmodern paradox” [38, p. 111].

A postmodernist theory of history, as it has been stated previously, helps us understand that history invents stories about past events and it foregrounds certain events while suppressing some others for ideological reasons. Accordingly, in the analysis of postmodern historical novels, the metafictive elements, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, non-linear narrative and parodic intention foreground this process. Historiographic metafictions attempt to use historical material within the parodic self-reflexivity of metafiction which aims at undermining realism. Historiographic metafiction is not only concerned with the question of the truth-value of objective historical representation but with the issue of who controls history. Therefore, in historiographic metafictions, the idea that historical “facts” are constructed ideologically is particularly emphasized. Hutcheon says: “All past “events” are potential historical “facts”, but the ones that become facts are those that are chosen to be narrated. […] This distinction between brute event and meaning-granted fact is one with which postmodern fiction seems obsessed” [39, p. 75]. Thus, one of the attempts of historiographic metafiction is to focus on past events and historical personages which history chooses not to include. The excluded events are foregrounded, their stories are retold and alternative histories are composed in historiographic metafictions. As a result, a multiplicity of histories is achieved since historiographic metafictions write alternative versions to the already accepted one.

Historical novels in the postmodern age present the potential of offering multiple historical possibilities in contrast to a single possibility sustained through the suppression of alternatives. As such official history is seen as a monologic discourse representing only the viewpoints of the dominant ideology which in turn creates history as a monolithic discourse. As we have seen, historiography, while turning real past events into facts, singles out certain real events while omitting some others. To Hayden White, historical writing consists of “the arrangement of selected events […] into a story” [63, p. 7]. Such an arrangement is carried out according to the dominant discourse since historical knowledge has come to be seen as an ideological construction to sustain its hegemony. In contrast to this, postmodern historical novels “rewrite history from the perspectives of groups of people that have been excluded from the making and writing of history […]. They do not merely foreground groups about which official historiography tends to remain silent, but also allot them more power than they actually possessed” [62, p. 162].

The subversion of postmodern historical fiction, as described by Elisabeth Wesseling, attempts “to inscribe the losers of history in our historical memory. To counter canonized history with apocryphal versions aims at […] strengthening the position of subordinated groups in the present and at suggesting possibilities for equality in the future” [39, p. 206]. Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, as well, verbalizes the silenced histories of marginalized groups by means of subverting the already accepted interpretation in order to force it out of the centre and to reveal the decentralized histories of the ex-centric others. Linda Hutcheon declares the aim of historiographic metafiction as “to note the dispersing interplay of different, heterogeneous discourses,” and she adds that what has surfaced is something different from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it: “[in historiographic metafiction] we now get the histories of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much sung few, and […] of women as well as men” [38, p. 66].

Historiographic metafiction answers the double need to reflect on history and reality, and to question the ability to represent them. Historiographic metafiction is obsessed by history; it is concerned with historical events, it makes history its subject and reflects on historiography. It combines metafictional elements with particular and deep attention to history, including three genres, literature, history and theory, as one. It is exactly the literary, self-conscious combination of history and fiction. Postmodern theory challenges the separation of the literary and the historical they are both modes of writing, linguistic constructs and intertextual. On the basis that history and fiction are human constructs, historiographic metafiction dedicates itself to a “rethinking and reworking of the forms and the contents of the past” [39, p. 105]. It raises the issue of what writing about history implicates, questioning the sense and the various possible interpretations of the past. Hutcheon argues that historiographic metafiction is inherently contradictory: it works within conventions in order to subvert them. While claiming reference to the historical world, it doubts and plays with such a world. Historiographic metafiction must live with the double awareness of its fictionality and its foundation in real events.

One of the central questions of historiographic metafictionis that of the “(im)possibility of knowing anything about past events from a contemporary perspective” [38, p. 47]. The genre thus voices the postmodern conviction that the respective meta-narrative of each story has to be questioned – a “questioning that problematizes rather than discredits”. Hutcheon’s example for this thesis is “history as a science”, which needs “meta-narratives in order to paint a coherent picture of the various events by giving them structure and orientation”. By questioning unifying, totalizing meta-narratives, historiographic novels “...structurally both install and subvert the teleology, closure, and causality of narrative, both historical and fictive” [38, p. 64]. Her use of the term “politics of representation” alludes to the teleological motivation for using a specific meta-narrative. The resulting instability of representation is not only a characteristic feature of post-industrial societies: “Historical meaning may thus be seen today as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional, but postmodernism argues that, in fact, it has always been so” [39, p. 67]. On the level of narrative technique, this position is reflected by the fact that the reader is often presented with a certain interpretation which is undermined later on. Furthermore, historiographic metafiction is conscious of the fact that the representation of past events occurs in the present, and consequently it is marked by a frequent use of anachronistic characterizations. The main goal of employing these narrative techniques is to point out the problematic status of so-called “historical documents”, which no longer allow for an unmediated, direct access to the facts they represent; in contrast, they cry for an interpretation of their own fundamental principles. In contrast to post-structuralism, postmodernism does not claim that all past events are “textual constructs” that never have existed outside representation. It is rather marked by the dialectic conviction that “...past events existed empirically, but in epistemological terms we can only know them today through texts” [38, p. 81]. The term “politics of representation” summarizes the theoretical points discussed so far, because what postmodernist texts highlight is the motivation of an “author” to decide on one specific way of representation: “[R]epresentation is always alteration, be it in language or images, and it always has its politics” [38, p. 92]. What is central here is, of course, the goals of an author: “If representations do not represent the world they must represent something else and in doing so they will inevitably be political, always emerging within a time- and place-bound ideological framework” [10, p. 6].

However, one should understand that postmodern historical novels are not just about history, they historically reflect on the making of historical narrative, observing how the times in which we live shape the way we understand the past. They reconnect the past to the present.