Linda Hutcheon The Politics of Postmodernism London:
Routledge, 1989.
Relevant quotations from especially regarding historical
metafiction:
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Historians, like novelists, are said to be interested not in ''recounting
the facts, but [in] recounting that they are recounting them.' (48)
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Postmodern denaturalizing: ''the simultaneous inscribing and subverting of
the conventions of narrative.'' 48
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'Novels do not depict life, they depict life as it is represented by ideology'.
Ideology --how culture represents itself to itself--'doxifies' or naturalizes
narrative representation, making it appear as natural or common-sensical;
it represents what is really constructed meaning or something
inherent in that which is being represented. 49
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In challenging the seamless quality of the history/fiction (or world/art)
join implied by realist narrative, postmodern fiction does not, however,
disconnect itself from history or the world. It foregrounds and thus contests
the conventionality and unacknowledged ideology of that assumption of
seamlessness and asks its readers to question the processes by which we represent
our selves and our world to ourselves and to became aware of the means by
which we make sense of and construct order out of experience
in our particular culture. We cannot avoid representation. we can try to
avoid fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be transhistorical and
transcultural. We can also study how representation legitimizes and privileges
certain kinds of knowledge -- including certain kinds of historical knowledge.
53-4
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Among the consequences of the postmodern desire to denaturalize history is
a new self-consciousness about the distinction between the brute
events of the past and historical facts we construct out of
them. Facts are events to which we have given meaning. Different historical
perspectives therefore derive different facts from the same events. ...Postmodern
fiction often thematizes this process of turning events into facts through
the filtering and interpreting of archival documents. ...In historiographic
metafiction the very process of turning events into facts through the
interpretation of archival evidence is shown to be a process of turning the
traces of the past (our only access to those events today) into historical
representation. In so doing, such postmodern fiction underlines the realization
that 'the past is not an ''it'' in the sense of a n objectified entity that
may either be neutrally represented in and for itself or projectively reprocessed
in terms of our own narrowly ''presentist'' interests'. While these are the
words of a historian writing about historical representation, they also describe
well the postmodern lessons about fictionalized representation.
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The issue of representation in both fiction and history has usually been
dealt with in epistemological terms, in terms of how we know the past. The
past is not something to be escaped, avoided, or controlled -- as various
forms of modernist art suggest through their implicit view of the 'nightmare'
of history. The past is something with which we must come to terms and such
a confrontation involves an acknowledgment of limitation s well as power.
WE only have access to the past today through its traces -- its documents,
the testimony of witnesses, and other archival materials. In other words,
we only have representations of the past from which to construct our narratives
or explanations. In a very real sense, postmodernism reveals a desire to
understand present culture as the product of previous representations. The
representations of history becomes the history of representation. What this
means is that postmodern art acknowledges and accepts the challenge of tradition:
the history of representation cannot be escaped but it can be both exploited
and commented on critically through irony and parody. 57-8
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There is an urge to foreground, by means of contradiction, the paradox of
the desire for and the suspicion of narrative mastery -- and master narratives.
Historiography is no longer considered the objective and disinterested recording
of the past; it is more an attempt to comprehend and master it by means of
some working (narrative/explanatory) model that, in fact, is precisely what
grants a particular meaning to the past. ...Historiographic
metafictions...ask...whether the historian discovers or invents
the totalizing narrative form or model used. Of course, both discovery
and invention would involve some recourse to artifice and imagination, but
there is a significant difference in the epistemological value traditionally
attached to the two acts. It is this distinction that postmodernism
problematizes. 64
Chris Baldick. The Dictionary of Literary Terms.
London: Oxford, 1990.