Historiographic Metafiction

With postmodern scepticism came the idea that everything is open to interpretation, including history. As former British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965) reportedly reminded us, history is told by the victors. The other side of the story often remains untold. Once considered a single, linear stream, history these days is regarded more like a channel that carries multiple voices and accounts of the past.

Historiography has thus evolved to accommodate alternate stories of what has been told from a single perspective. French historian Arlette Farge (b. 1941) remarks in her book The Allure of the Archives (1989) how archives allow us to unearth new, unheard voices from the past and how historiography should make way for these untold stories. Can you think of history as a story that can be adapted and retold? Film and literature have found ways to do that. While some are faithful retellings, others take more creative liberty to fictionalise history. We can call a text like that a 'historiographic metafiction'. Let's take a look at the definition and some examples of historiographic metafiction.

Historiographic metafiction: definition

The name historiographic metafiction was coined by the Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (b. 1947) in the book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). In historiographic metafiction, writers use historical events and figures as a basis for their stories but also call attention to the act of writing itself and the subjectivity of historical interpretation. They may include footnotes, multiple narrators, and other devices that challenge the traditional notion of a single, objective truth.

The British literary critic Patricia Waugh (b. 1956) has also done an important analysis of historical fiction. The discussion of historiographic metafiction by both of these theorists is informed by postmodern theorisations of history. The rise of postmodernist literature showed the breaking down of the differentiation between history and fiction. Hutcheon argued that both history and literature are types of discourses whose boundaries are not always watertight.

Postmodern criticism considers history writing as an act of reconstructing a story of the past. Rather than destabilising the historical novel, it seeks to destabilise the exclusive stream of historiography by drawing attention to history as a textual narrative rather than 'reality'. Historiographic metafiction, therefore, is located within the open discourse that sees history as a narrative.

Historiographic metafiction brings to light the prejudices and misconceptions latent in historiography. It is called metafiction as it is self-reflexive and yet references historical events.

Historiographic metafiction is often described as contradictory and politically charged as it raises questions about historiography and representation.

Historiographic metafiction: characteristics

As a genre, historiographic metafiction is more concerned with whose truth is told rather than how it is told. In historiographic metafiction, history is purposefully treated as a subjective retelling of the past using a deliberate and ironic play on historical facts and incidents. As a result, we get a fictionalised account of history in a historiographic metafiction.

Historiographic metafiction represents the postmodern paradox in that it is undeniably grounded in historical realities yet questions and subverts the authority of those realities.

Some more features of historiographic metafiction include:

• presenting multiple perspectives on history
• emphasise, mock, conflate, satirise or omit incidents and names in history
• include invented characters and events, change historical timelines or present anachronisms in the narrative
• use protagonists who are ordinary people of little historical significance
• include real historical personalities in parodic or comic roles
• use multiple narrative modes to emphasise the problem of subjectivity
• have a dominant, sometimes unreliable first-person narrator who struggles to situate themselves in history
• use parody, irony, intertextuality, and pastiche
• use subversive narrations intended to highlight suppressed voices and points of view and redefine mainstream reality
• carry a mocking, ironic tone that criticises established ideologies, including law, individualism, progress, and government
• include characters, especially famous personalities, who are caricatures instead of realistic portrayals
• include depictions of historical periods and places in a surreal manner

Historiographic metafiction: example

The classic nineteenth-century historical novel presents the contemporary way of life and worldview using devices of realism. Postmodern fiction broke away from other literature of the twentieth century that maintained the separation between fiction and historiography. The encounter between metafiction and history was a recurring pattern in the literature from the 1970s and the 1980s.

Fig.1 - Historiographic metafiction blurs the boundaries between history and fiction.

Postmodern novels like Flaubert's Parrot (1984) by Julian Barnes (b. 1946) and A Maggot (1985) by John Fowles (1926–2005) explore the plurality of truths based on how reality is framed. Books such as The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890–1979), Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) belong to the category of fiction that examines the past through fiction.

1980s

Novels from the 1980s set the stage for explorations of these questions in the upcoming decade. These include:

• The White Hotel (1981) by D. M. Thomas (b. 1935)
• Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
• Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift (b. 1949)
• Cassandra (1983) by Christa Wolf (1929–2011)
• Watchmen (1986) by Alan Moore (b. 1953)
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison (1931–2019)
• Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959)
• Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006)

1990s

Notable works from the 1990s include:

• Possession: A Romance (1990) by A. S. Byatt (b. 1936)
• Sacred Hunger (1992) by Barry Unsworth (1930–2012)
• The Volcano Lover (1992) by Susan Sontag (1933–2004)
• The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943)
• The Pope's Rhinoceros (1996) by Lawrence Norfolk (b. 1963)
• Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier (b. 1950)
• The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940)
• The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by Peter Carey (b. 1943)

With the rise of feminism, writers actively used writing to explore and reassess women's status in society and history, along with questions about the authenticity and truthfulness of history. This led to the rise of 'new histories' along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Recently published books like The Long Song (2010) by Andrea Levy (1956–2019) and Blonde Roots (2008) by Bernadine Evaristo (b. 1959) are retellings of history that offer new historical perspectives and challenge the absence of black stories in mainstream historiography.

Difference between metafiction and historiographic metafiction

Historiographic metafiction is a self-conscious work of fiction that is related to history and the process of writing history. Metafiction, on the other hand, is a work of fiction that challenges literary realism by exposing the creative processes behind its own making.

Metafictional novels are based on the opposition between constructing a fictional illusion and exposing that illusion. It aims to lay bare that illusion by making authorial statements about creation itself. It also functions to point out that our perception of reality is a negotiation. Similarly, historiographic metafiction uses metafictional or self-referential techniques to remind us that history is a construction rather than an exact representation of what happened. History is nothing but a narrative that is recreated based on documentation.

Historiographic metafiction includes novels and short fiction that raise questions such as:

• What is history? What is the difference between history and fiction?
• What is the relationship between history and memory?
• How do fiction and history serve the collective memory?
• How much of the past has been retained in the historical record?
• What are the political forces that influence our understanding of history or how much we remember from the past?