The Politics of Postmodernism
LINDA HUTCHEON
Photographic discourse
As a visual medium, photography has a long history of being both politically
useful and politically suspect: think of Brecht or Benjamin, or of Heartfield’s
photomontages. A recent show of three Vancouver photographers (Arni
Runar Haraldsson, Harold Ursuliak, and Michael Lawlor) called A Linear
Narration: Post Phallocentrism offered examples of sophisticated satirical
socio-political critiques of dominant cultural representations. Lawlor’s
media-derived photomontages are most reminiscent of Heartfield’s
technique, if not his virulence: Two Queens features roughly torn-out images
of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and of a newspaper photo of Queen Elizabeth
II. This conjunction suggests a particularly Canadian irony directed against
Canada’s double colonialization, historical (British royalty) and present
(American media).
Photography today is one of the major forms of discourse through which
we are seen and see ourselves. Frequently what I want to call postmodern
photography foregrounds the notion of ideology as representation by
appropriating recognizable images from that omnipresent visual discourse,
almost as an act of retaliation for its (unacknowledged) political nature or its
(unacknowledged) constructing of those images of ourselves and our world.
Photography, precisely because of its massmedia ubiquity, allows what are
considered high-art representations – like those of Nigel Scott, Barbara
Kruger, or Richard Prince – to speak to and against those of the more visible
vernacular and to exploit the seduction of those images. But postmodern
photography also addresses the medium’s history and it does so in a way that
goes beyond obvious journalistic instrumentality and capitalist seduction:
for instance, modernism’s formalist art-photography and the documentary
‘victim’ photography of the 1930s are made rather politically problematic in
the work of Sherrie Levine and Martha Rosler, respectively; the
44 The Politics of Postmodernism
transparently referential conventions of portraiture get both installed and
subverted in Cindy Sherman’s self-posed self-portraits; the relation of
narrative to photographic sequences gets destabilized in the work of Duane
Michals and Victor Burgin (see Crimp 1980; Starenko 1983; Thornton
1979).
What is common to all these postmodern challengesto convention is their
simultaneous exploitation of the power of that convention and their reliance
on the viewers’ knowledge of its particulars. In most cases, this reliance does
not necessarily lead to elitist exclusion, because the convention being
evoked has usuallybecome partof the common representational vocabulary
of newspapers, magazines, and advertising – even if its history is more
extensive. In photographer Sarah Charlesworth’s words: ‘The reason why I
use what are commonly called “appropriated images”, images drawn from
popular culture, is that I wish to describe and address a state of mind that is a
direct product of living in a common world’ (in Clarkson 1987–8: 14). Many
video and performance artists have used similar methods to address social
and political issues from within the discourse of that larger field of cultural
representations that includes television, Hollywood movies, and
commercial advertising. There are, of course, other ways of achieving this
end, ones that artists in other media have explored: the theory-informed art
of postmodern painting is a good example, but it is also one that does indeed
raise the question of exclusivity. As we shall see in a later chapter,
postmodern photographers have often tried to avoid this danger by
introducing didactic verbal texts into their works.
Reappropriating existing representations that are effective precisely
because they are loaded with pre-existing meaning and putting them into
new and ironic contexts is a typical form of postmodern photographic
complicitous critique: while exploiting the power of familiar images, it also
de-naturalizes them, makes visible the concealed mechanisms which work
to make them seem transparent, and brings to the fore their politics, that is to
say, the interests in which they operate and the power they wield (Folland
1988: 60). Both any (realist) documentary value and any formal (modernist)
pleasure that such a practice may invoke are inscribed, even as they are
undercut. So too is any notion of individuality or authenticity – for work or
Postmodernist representation 45
artist – but that has always been problematic for photography as a
mechanically reproductive medium. This technological aspect has other
implications too. Commentators as diverse as Annette Kuhn, Susan Sontag,
and Roland Barthes have remarked on photography’s ambivalences: it is in
no way innocent of cultural formation (or innocent of forming culture) yet it
is in a very real sense technically tied to the real, or at least, to the visual and
the actual. And this is what postmodernist use of this medium exposes, even
as it exploits what Kuhn calls the ideology of ‘the visible as evidence.’ It also
exposes what may be the major photographic code, the one that pretends to
look uncoded.
If the postmodern photographer is more the manipulator of signs than the
producer of an art object and the viewer is more the active decoder of
messages than the passive consumer or contemplator of aesthetic beauty
(Foster 1985: 100), the difference is one of the politics of representation.
However, postmodern photography is often overtly about the representation
of politics too. The work of Hans Haacke on multinational corporations or of
Martha Rosler on the poverty of New York’s Bowery suggests a material and
maybe even materialist critique of the modernist art establishment’s
separation of the political and the aesthetic and of the art gallery/museum’s
neutralization ofany possible sense of art as resistance, much less revolution.
Yet Barbara Kruger’s use of the lenticular screen, in which viewers see two
different images depending on their position, directly addresses this issue. It
is a literalization and materialization of the notion of the positioning of the
body in ideology: what we see depends on where we are. As mentioned
earlier, Sherrie Levine’s re-presentation of famous photos of both the
modernist-formalist and realist-documentary traditions suggests that what
we see depends on context and perhaps even that we cannot avoid
approaching some subjects primarily through our culturally accepted
representations of them. This is not only true of poor farmers in 1930s’
America or of blacks or Asians or Native Peoples, but of women too.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argued that a woman ‘comes to consider
the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always
distinct elements of her identity as woman’ (Berger 1972a: 46). That ‘I/her’
or even ‘I/you’ split is exactly what a feminist and postmodern photographer
46 The Politics of Postmodernism
like Barbara Kruger explores in her enigmatic but powerful verbal/ visual
photographic collages: the words ‘You thrive on mistaken identity’ sit atop
an image of a stereotypically glamorous woman, but as photographed
through distorting patterned glass. The word ‘mistaken’ is placed directly
over her eyes. Kruger’s black and white works clearly echo Russian
constructivism, Heartfield’s photomontages, generic 1940s and 1950s
images (Bois et al. 1987: 199), and their message about the politics of
representation is as explicit as that of some of the even more didactic
postmodern representations of politics: Hans Haacke’s attacks on Mobil or
Alcan or Klaus Staeck’s ironic photomontages in aid of causes like the lack
of housing for the elderly (a photo of Durer’s famous drawing of his aged
mother with the caption: ‘Would you rent a room to this woman?’) or the
social inequalities in 1980s’ Britain (a parody of a political poster, featuring
the photo of an enormous Rolls Royce driving down a narrow alley in a poor
area, accompanied by the text: ‘For wider streets vote Conservative’).
Photography may legitimize and normalize existing power relations, but it
can also be used against itself to ‘de-doxify’ that authority and power and to
reveal how its representational strategies construct an ‘imaginary economy’
(Sekula 1987: 115) that might usefully be deconstructed.
Once again I should repeat that it is not only photography that both does
and undoes this ‘economy.’ Canadian artist Stan Douglas uses multi-media
installations to study representation in terms of the relations of culture to
technology, especially film technology. He disassembles film into its
constituent parts (sounds; stills projected as slides) in order to make opaque
the supposed ability of film to be a transparent recording/representation of
reality. The artists known as General Idea (A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz, and
Jorge Zontal) have taken a different tack: their 1984 Miss General Idea
Pageant made the high-art world into a beauty pageant, literalizing art’s
relation to displaced desire and to commodity acquisition and in the process
problematizing our culture’s notions of the erotic and of sexual ‘possession’
in relation to capitalist values.
What these artists share with the postmodern photographers I have
mentioned is a focus on the ways in which art overlaps and interacts with the
social system of the present and the past. All representations have a politics;
Postmodernist representation 47
they also have a history. The conjunction of these two concerns in what has
been calledthe New Art Historyhas meant that issues like gender, class, race,
ethnicity, and sexual orientation are now part of the discourse of the visual
arts, as they are of the literary ones. Social history cannot be separated from
the history of art; there is no value-neutral, much less value-free, place from
which to represent in any art form. And there never was.
Telling stories: fiction and history
In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale has noted that both modernist and
postmodernist fiction show an affinity for cinematic models, and certainly
the work of Manuel Puig or SalmanRushdie would support such a claim. But
historiographic metafiction, obsessed with the question of how we can come
to know the past today, also shows an attractionto photographic models –and
to photographs – either as physically present (in Michael Ondaatje’s Coming
Through Slaughter) or as the narrativized trappings of the historical archive
(in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, or
Gayl Jones’s Corregidora). In raising (and making problematic) the issue of
photographic representation, postmodern fiction often points
metaphorically to the related issue of narrative representation – its powers
and its limitations. Here, too, there is no transparency, only opacity. The
narrator in John Berger’s novel G. tries to describe an actual historical and
political event, but ends up in despair: ‘Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is
unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do
that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean’
(Berger 1972b: 75). The politics of narrative representation can apparently
sometimes be of limited efficacy when it comes to the representation of
politics.
It is not surprising that this should be the case, especially with historical
representation, for the question of historiography’s representational powers
is a matter of current concern in a number of discourses but most obviously,
perhaps, in historiographic metafiction. Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme is a
typical, if extreme, example of this. El Supremo (Jose Gaspar Rodriguez
48 The Politics of Postmodernism
Francia) did exist and did rule Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, but the novel we
read opens with a story about the instability of even a dictator’s power over
his self-representation in the documents of history: he discovers that his
decrees are frequently parodied so well and so thoroughly that ‘even the truth
appears to be a lie’ (Roa Bastos 1986: 5) and the competence of the scribe to
whom the dictator ‘dictates’ his text is suspect. This novel disorients its
readers on the level of its narration (who speaks? is the text written? oral?
transcribed?), its plot and temporal structures, and even its material
existence (parts of the text are said to have been burned): ‘Forms disappear,
words remain, to signify the impossible. No story can ever be told’ (11),
especially, perhaps, the story of absolute power.
‘I the Supreme’ and I the Supreme equally distrust history’s ability and
will to convey ‘truth’: ‘The words ofpower, ofauthority, words above words,
will be transformed into clever words, lying words. Words below words’
(Roa Bastos 1986: 29). Historians, like novelists, are said to be interested not
in ‘recounting the facts, but [in] recounting that they are recounting them’
(32). Yet the text does provide a narrative of the historical past of Paraguay,
albeit one recounted in anachronistic wording that underlines the present
time of the recounting to the (doubly dictated-to) scribe who writes down
what he is told to. Or does he? He openly admits to not understanding the
meaning of what he transcribes, and, therefore, to misplacing words, to
writing ‘backwards’ (35). The text metafictionally includes even a reference
to Roa Bastos and his novel: ‘One or another of those emigre-scribblers will
doubtless take advantage of the impunity of distance and be so bold as to
cynically affix his signature’ to the text we read (35). And so he does.
I the Supreme is a novel about power, about history-writing, and about the
oral tradition of story-telling. It thematizes the postmodern concern with the
radically indeterminate and unstable nature of textuality and subjectivity,
two notions seen as inseparable: ‘I must dictate/write; note it down
somewhere. That is the only way I have of proving that I still exist’ (Roa
Bastos 1986: 45). Writing here is not ‘the art of tracing flowery figures’ but
that of ‘deflowering signs’ (58). Or, as the text explicitly states: ‘This is
representation. Literature. Representation of writing as representation’ (60).
However, the power of literary representation is as provisional as that of
Postmodernist representation 49
historiography: ‘readers do not know if they [Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza] are fables, true stories, pretended truths. The same will come to pass
with us. We too will pass for real-unreal beings’ (60).
The entire novel is full of such remarks about representation – in the
narratives of both fiction and history. The ‘Final Compiler’s Note’ states:
The reader will already have notedthat, unlike ordinary texts, this one was
read first and written later. Instead of saying and writing something new,
it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by
others. . . . [T]he re-scriptor declares, in the words of a contemporary
author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that
the story that should have been told in them has not been told. As a
consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned,
through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and
autonomous existence in the service of the no less fictitious and
autonomous reader.
(Roa Bastos 1986: 435)
This is postmodern de-naturalizing – the simultaneous inscribing and
subverting of the conventions of narrative.
Coinciding with this kind of challenge in the novels themselves, there
have been many theoretical examinations of the nature of narrative as a
major human system of understanding – in fiction, but also in history,
philosophy, anthropology, and so on. Peter Brooks (1984: xii) has claimed
that with the advent of romanticism, narrative became a dominant mode of
representation, though one might wonder what the status of the classical epic
and the Bible might be. He is likely right to say, however, that in the twentieth
century there has been an increasing suspicion of narrative plot and its
artifice, yet no diminishing of our reliance on plotting, however ironized or
parodied (7). We may no longer have recourse to the grand narratives that
once made sense of life for us, but we still have recourse to narrative
representations of some kind in most of our verbal discourses, and one of the
reasons may be political.
50 The Politics of Postmodernism
Lennard Davis describes the politics of novelistic narrative
representation in this way: ‘Novels do not depict life, they depict life as it is
represented by ideology’ (L. Davis 1987: 24). Ideology – how a culture
represents itself to itself – ‘doxifies’ or naturalizes narrative representation,
making it appear as natural or common-sensical (25); it presents what is
really constructed meaning as something inherent in that which is being
represented. But this is precisely what postmodern novels like Peter
Ackroyd’s Chatterton or Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme or Graham Swift’s
Waterland are about. And in none of these cases is there ever what Jameson
associates with the postmodern: ‘a repudiation of representation, a
“revolutionary” break with the (repressive) ideology of storytelling
generally’ (Jameson 1984c: 54). This misconception shows the danger of
defining the postmodern in terms of (French or American) antirepresentational
late modernism, as so many do. In these novels, there is no
dissolution or repudiation of representation; but there is a problematizing of
it.
Historiographic metafiction is written today in the context of a serious
contemporary interrogating of the nature ofrepresentation in historiography.
There has been much interest recently in narrative – its forms, its function,
its powers, and its limitations – in many fields, but especially in history.
Hayden White has even asserted that the postmodern is ‘informed by a
programmatic, if ironic, commitment to the return to narrative as one of its
enabling presuppositions’ (White 1987: xi). If this is the case, his own work
has done much to make it so. Articles like ‘The value of narrativity in the
representation of reality’ have been influential in raising questions about
narrative representation and its politics in both history and literature. From a
different angle, the work of Dominick LaCapra has acted to de-naturalize
notions of historical documents as representations of the past and of the way
such archival traces of historical events are used within historiographic and
fictive representations. Documents are not inert or innocent, but may indeed
have ‘critical or even potentially transformative relations to phenomena
“represented” in them’ (LaCapra 1985: 38). But this is the subject of the next
chapter.
Postmodernist representation 51
Of course, it is not just historiographic theory that has deconstructed
narrativerepresentation. Feminist thought, such asthat of Teresa de Lauretis,
has done much to deconstruct it as well. It has explored how ‘narrative and
narrativity . . . are mechanisms to be employed strategically and tactically in
the effort to construct other forms of coherence, to shift the terms of
representation, to produce the conditions of representability of another – and
gendered – social subject’ (de Lauretis 1987: 109). Narrative is indeed a
‘socially symbolicact,’ as Jameson claims,but it isalso the outcome of social
interaction. In the work of Maxine Hong Kingston or Gayl Jones, storytelling
is not presented as a privatized form of experience but as asserting a
communicational bond between the teller and the told within a context that
is historical, social, and political, as well as intertextual.
The same is true in the postmodern fiction of Salman Rushdie or Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. It is not simply a case of novels metafictionally revelling in
their own narrativity or fabulation; here narrative representation – storytelling
– is a historical and a political act. Perhaps it always is. Peter Brooks
argues: ‘We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the
meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects,
situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed’
(1984: 3). In Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the hero does just
this – at great length – and the contemporary narrator interrupts to forestall
our objections in the name of a kind of postmodern mimesis of process,
reminding us that we too do this constantly. While it is undoubtedly true that
modernism had already challenged the conventions of what could/should be
narrated and had already explored the limits of narrative’s ability to represent
‘life,’ it is postmodern culture at large that may have become ‘novelistic.’ As
Stephen Heath has argued, it mass-produces narratives (for television, radio,
film, video, magazines, comic books, novels), thereby creating a situation in
which we must consume ‘the constant narration of the social relations of
individuals, the ordering of meanings for the individual in society’ (Heath
1982: 85). Perhaps this is why story-telling has returned – but as a problem,
not as a given.
It is still a truism of anti-postmodernist criticism that this return has been
at the expense of a sense of history. But perhaps it just depends on your
52 The Politics of Postmodernism
definition of history – or History. We may indeed get few postmodern
narrative representations of the heroic victors who have traditionally defined
who and what made it into History. Often we get instead both the story and
the story-telling of the non-combatants or the losers: the Canadian Indians of
Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear or Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful
Losers; the women of Troy in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra; the blacks of South
Africa or America in the work of J.M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Toni Morrison,
or Ishmael Reed.
Equally interesting are the postmodern attempts to go beyond the
traditional representational forms of both fictional and historical narration:
Patrick Suskind’s Perfume offers the fictionalized history of eighteenthcentury
France in all its olfactory glory, though it must do so through verbal
representations of the physical sense that narrative so rarely records. The
novel offers the sense of smell as the vehicle not only for its historical and
social contextualizing but also for its metafictional commentary, since this is
the tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the product of French peasant misery
who is born an ‘abomination’ – with no bodily odor himself, but with the
most discerning nose in the world. The story’s narrator is omniscient and
controlling, as well as being our contemporary and in complicity with us as
readers. He uses this power and position to emphasize from the start the
limits of his (and our) language. As a boy Grenouille has trouble learning the
words of things that have no smell: ‘He could not retain them, confused them
with one another, and even as an adult used them unwillingly and often
incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude,
etc. – what these were meant to express remained a mystery to him’ (Suskind
1986: 25). This may not be surprising, perhaps, for the protagonist of a novel
subtitled: The Story of a Murderer.
Grenouille is constantly aware of the discrepancy between the ‘richness
of the world perceivable by smell’ and ‘the poverty of language’ (Suskind
1986: 26). The narrator suggests that this linguistic impoverishment
accounts for our normal inability to make anything other than gross
distinctions in the ‘smellable world’ (125). The text links the failure of
language to Grenouille’s creativity as the distiller and creator of the greatest
perfumes in the world, and yet, as readers, we can never forget that we know
Postmodernist representation 53
of this only through the very language of the novel. The postmodern paradox
of inscription and subversion governs the metafictive reflexivity. It also
structures the plot, for this is a novel about power: the power the poor peasant
was not born into; the power he acquires in serving others with his gifts (as a
master of scents); the power to kill (for the perfect scent); the power that
perfect scent wields over others. His executioners and the crowd gathered to
witness justice done to this multiple murderer suddenly fall into an ecstatic
orgy of love for their victim – when he applies the ‘perfume’ distilled from
the murdered girl who had possessed the most powerful smell in the world:
‘A power stronger than the power of money or the power of terror or the
power of death: the invincible power to command the love of mankind’
(252).
Perfume points to the absence of the representation of the sense of smell
in historical, social, or fictional narratives. The olfactory density of the novel
– recounted through verbal representation, of course – ishistorically specific
and accurate and also socially significant. This is historiographic
metafiction, fictionalized history with a parodic twist. The form this twist
takes may vary from novel to novel, but it is always present: Mario Vargas
Llosa’s The War of the End of the World represents the history of the 1896
Canudos War in northeastern Brazil, but its parody shows how traditional
narrative models – both historiographical and fictional – that are based on
European models of continuous chronology and cause-and-effect relations
are utterly inadequate to the task of narrating the history of the New World.
Such a clashing of various possible discourses of narrative representation
is one way of signalling the postmodern use and abuse of convention that
works to ‘de-doxify’ any sense of the seamlessness of the join between the
natural and the cultural, the world and the text, thereby making us aware of
the irreducible ideological nature of every representation – of past or present.
This complexity of clashing discourses can be seen in many historiographic
metafictions. In Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’ as we shall see in the last
chapter, the discourses of male erotic representation of woman and those of
female and colonial self-representations are juxtaposed with a certain
political efficacy. Similarly, confrontations between contemporary narrators
and their narrated historical contexts occur in novels as diverse as Banville’s
54 The Politics of Postmodernism
Doctor Copernicus and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or A
Maggot.
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 become 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. As
Perfume implies, our access through narrative to the world of experience –
past or present – is always mediated by the powers and limits of our
representations of it. This is as true of historiographical narrative as it is of
fictional.
In his review article, ‘The question of narrative in contemporary
historical theory,’ Hayden White outlines the role assigned to narrative
representation in the various schools of thought about the theory of history.
Given that narrative has become problematic in historiography as well as
fiction, what is interesting is that the same issues arise: narrative
representation as a mode of knowledge and explanation, as unavoidably
ideological, as a localizable code. One way of outlining some of these
parallel concerns would be to look at a historiographic metafiction that
directly addresses the intersection of the debates about representation in both
the novel and history: Graham Swift’s Waterland, a didactic fictive lesson or
a meditation on history – or both. No historical characters populate this book,
but it is a profoundly historical work none the less, in both form and content.
Its first (unattributed) epigraph conditions our entry into the novel and
prepares us for the ‘de-doxifying’ of narrative representation that it proceeds
to enact: ‘Historia, ae, f. 1. inquiry, investigation, learning. 2. a) a narrative
of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, tale, story.’ The
novel’s action opens in the ‘fairy tale’ landscape of the fen country of
Postmodernist representation 55
England, a land so flat that it drives its inhabitants either to ‘unquiet’ or to
telling stories, especially to calm the fears of children. This is a land ‘both
palpable and unreal’ (Swift 1983: 6), an apt, self-reflexive setting for any
fiction. The narrator, Tom Crick, comes from a family that has the ‘knack for
telling stories’ of all kinds: true or made up, believable or unbelievable –
‘stories which were neither one thing nor another’ (1–2). This is a fitting
description, too, of Waterland itself.
However, the second chapter is called ‘About the end of history.’ It is
addressed to the second-person plural ‘Children’ by Crick, their history
teacher, who has spent his life trying to ‘unravel the mysteries of the past’
(Swift 1983: 4), but who is now to be retired because of some personal
embarrassment, though the official reason is that his school is ‘cutting back
on history.’ Crick’s response is to defend his discipline – and his personal
past: ‘sack me, don’t dismiss what I stand for. Don’t banish my history’ (18).
But his students seem little interested in his subject; for them history is a
‘fairy tale’ (5) and they prefer to learn of the ‘here and now’ of a world
threatened by nuclear annihilation. From the opening pages of the novel,
both history-telling and story-telling are thus linked to fear.
They are also connected to the marshy, reclaimed land of the fen country,
primarily through the major historical metaphor of the novel: ‘Silt: which
shapes and undermines continents; which demolishes as it builds; which is
simultaneous accretion and erosion; neither progress nor decay’ (Swift
1983: 7). A more perfect image of postmodern paradox would be hard to
find. In terms of history, the allegorical, slow ‘process of human siltation’ is
contrasted with that of revolution and of ‘grand metamorphoses.’ To Crick,
reality is what the monotonous fens provide: reality is ‘that nothing
happens.’ Historiography’s causality is only a construct: ‘How many of the
events of history have occurred . . . for this or for that reason, but for no other
reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to
you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama.
History, and its near relative, Histrionics’ (34). He would like to replace the
heroes of history with the silenced crowds who do the ‘donkey-work of
coping with reality’ (34).
56 The Politics of Postmodernism
Nevertheless, Crick realizes that we all imitate ‘the grand repertoire of
history’ in miniature and endorse ‘its longing for presence, for feature, for
purpose, for content’ (Swift 1983: 34–5) in order to convince ourselves that
reality means something. He himself attributes his becoming a history
teacher to the tales his mother told him when he was afraid of the dark as a
child. Later, when he wanted ‘an Explanation,’ he studied history as an
academic discipline, only to ‘uncover in this dedicated search more
mysteries, more fantasticalities, more wonders and grounds for
astonishment’ (53). In other words, as it had begun for him, history continues
to be ‘a yarn’: ‘History itself, the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the
dispeller of fears of the dark’ (53).
The story Crick actually tells us and the ‘Children’ is one that is overtly
fictive history, and we get to watch the fictionalizing process at work. At one
point we are told: ‘History does not record whether the day of Thomas’s
funeral was one of those dazzling mid-winter Fenland days’ (Swift 1983:
70), but fourteen pages later, Thomas’s funeral takes place under a definitely
dazzling sky. Crick is aware of this creative, constructive process. At one
point he stops: ‘Children, you are right. There are times when we have to
disentangle history from fairy-tale. . . . History, being an accredited subscience,
only wants to know facts. History, if it is to keep on constructing its
road into the future, must do so on solid ground’ (74) – something his
slippery fen-country tale often seems to lack. Swift manages to raise the issue
of narrative emplotment and its relation to both fictionality and
historiography at the same time as he begins his problematization of the
notion of historical knowledge. Crick tells his students: ‘When you asked, as
all history classes ask, as all history classes should ask, what is the point of
history? Why history? Why the past?’ he feels he can reply: ‘Isn’t this
seeking of reasons itself inevitably an historical process, since it must always
work backwards from what came after to what came before?’ (92).
The study of history – that ‘cumbersome but precious bag of clues’ –
involves inquiry that attempts to ‘uncover the mysteries of cause and effect’
(Swift 1983: 92), but most of all it teaches us ‘to accept the burden of our need
to ask why’ (93). That process of asking becomes more important than the
details of historiography: ‘the attempt to give an account, with incomplete
Postmodernist representation 57
knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge’
(94). As he later says, ‘History: a lucky dip of meanings. Events elude
meaning, but we look for meanings’ (122) and we create them.
Tom Crick is in some ways an allegorical representation of the
postmodern historian who might well have read, not just Collingwood, with
his view of the historian as storyteller and detective, but also Hayden White,
Dominick LaCapra, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Jean-
Francois Lyotard. The debates about the nature and status of narrative
representation in historical discourse coincide and are inextricably
intertwined with the challenges offered by historiographic metafiction. Yet
we have seen that postmodern fiction is typically denounced as
dehistoricized, if not ahistorical, especially by Marxist critics. In the light of
fiction like Waterland or Midnight’s Children or Ragtime this position would
seem difficult to maintain. Of course, the problematized histories of
postmodernism have little to do with the single totalizing History of
Marxism, but they cannot be accused of neglecting or refusing engagement
with the issues of historical representation and knowledge.
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 the 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. Take Paul Veyne’s
example of Louis XIV’s cold: even though the cold was a royal one, it was
not a political event and therefore it would be of no interest to a history of
politics, but it could be of considerable interest for a history of health and
sanitation in France (Veyne 1971: 35). Postmodern fiction often thematizes
this process of turning events into facts through the filtering and interpreting
of archival documents. Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme presents a narrator who
admits to being a compiler of discourses and whose text is woven out of
thousands of documents researched by the author. Of course, documents
have always functioned in this way in historical fiction of any kind. But 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
58 The Politics of Postmodernism
historical representation. In so doing, suchpostmodern fictionunderlines the
realization that ‘the past is not an “it” in the sense of an objectified entity that
may either be neutrally represented in and for itself or projectively
reprocessed in terms of our own narrowly “presentist” interests’ (LaCapra
1987: 10). While these are the words of a historian writing about historical
representation, they also describe well the postmodern lessons about
fictionalized historical representation.
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 acknowledgement of limitation as 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
representation 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, as we shall
see in more detail in chapter 4. The forms of representation used and abused
by this paradoxical postmodern strategy can vary – from the parodic and
historic architectural forms in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor that mirror and
structure the novel’s intricate narrative representation (itself parodic and
historic) to the strangely transcribed oral histories of the post-nuclearholocaust
world of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, where the narratives of
the past exist but are, in the text’s words, ‘changet so much thru the years
theyre all bits and blips and all mixt up’ (Hoban 1980: 20).
As this kind of novel makes clear, there are important parallels between
the processes of history-writing and fiction-writing and among the most
problematic of these are their common assumptions about narrative and
about the nature of mimetic representation. The postmodern situation is that
Postmodernist representation 59
a ‘truth is being told, with “facts” to back it up, but a teller constructs that
truth and chooses those facts’ (Foley 1986: 67). In fact, that teller – of story
or history – also constructs those very facts by giving a particular meaning to
events. Facts do not speak for themselves in either form of narrative: the
tellers speak for them, making these fragments of the past into a discursive
whole. The ‘true’ story of the historical gangster, Jack Diamond, that we read
in William Kennedy’s Legs is shown to be a postmodern compromised one
from its very title: ‘Legs’ is the protagonist’s public label, the name the
newspapers give him. In Jack’s words: ‘All the garbage they ever wrote
about me is true to people who don’t know me’ (Kennedy 1975: 245) – that
is to say, to people like us. Brian McHale calls this kind of work a ‘revisionist
historical novel’ (McHale 1987: 90) because he feels it revises and
reinterprets the official historical record and transforms the conventions of
historical fiction. I would rather put this challenge in terms of a denaturalizing
of the conventions of representing the past in narrative –
historical and fictional – that is done in such a way that the politics of the act
of representing are made manifest.
One of the clearest examples of this process self-consciously at work is
(ironically) a novel by a Marxist critic who has accused postmodern fiction
of being ahistorical: Terry Eagleton’s Saints and Scholars. The introductory
note to the novel asserts that the story is ‘not entirely fantasy.’ Some of the
characters are real, as are some of the events, but most of the rest is invented.
This becomes evident in the first chapter, a fictionalized historical account
of the last hours of Irish revolutionary James Connolly before he is executed
in Kilmainham gaol on 12 May 1916. But the account ends with a remark that
engenders the rest of the fiction to follow:
But history does not always get the facts in the most significant order, or
arrange them in the most aesthetically pleasing pattern. Napoleon
survived the battle of Waterloo, but it would have been symbolically
appropriate if he had been killed there. Florence Nightingale lingered on
until 1910, but this was an oversight on history’s part.
(Eagleton 1987b: 10)
60 The Politics of Postmodernism
So the narrator arrests the bullets of the firing squad in mid-air in order to
‘prise open a space in these close-packed events through which Jimmy may
scamper, blast him out of the dreary continuum of history into a different
place altogether’ (10).
The plot action eventually comes to settle around a cottage on the west
coast of Ireland where gather, thanks to irony and chance, a wondrous
collection of historical and fictional excentrics: ‘A Scottish Irishman
[Connolly], an Irish Hungarian [Leopold Bloom], an anglicized Austrian
[Ludwig Wittgenstein], and a Russian [Nicolai Bakhtin, Mikhail’s brother]’
(Eagleton 1987b: 131–2). Though some are real and others fictional, all
characters work to problematize the very distinction: Nicolai Bakhtin is said
to be exceedingly extravagant but nevertheless historically real, and the
others think he is ‘an entirely fictional character,and the only realthing about
him was that he knew it’ (30). When he later tells the fictive Leopold Bloom
that the notion of individuality is a ‘supreme fiction,’ Joyce’s character
replies: ‘You might be a bleeding fiction. . . . You look pretty much like one
to me. I happen to be real. I think I’m just about the only real person here’
(135).
The novel’s metafictionality operates through many such parodic
intertextual echoes. To offer another instance: Bakhtin asks Connolly about
the success of the Easter Rising because he is eager to know whether he is ‘in
the presence of a world-historical figure’ (Eagleton 1987b: 94) – Lukacs’s
term for the real personages found within historical fiction. The text’s selfreflexivity
also functions on the level of language and this is where
Wittgenstein fits in. But what is also made clear is that Wittgenstein’s famous
linguistic theories are the direct product of his personal history, and
particularly of his national history as a Viennese and his racial history as a
Jew. When he (characteristically) tries to convince Connolly that the limits
of his language are the limits of his world, the orator and man of action
replies: ‘What do you propose instead? That we should languish in the
prison-house of language . . . ?’ (114). The echo of the title of Jameson’s
book, The Prison-House of Language, is not just a clever move in some
literary-critical recognition game: it invokes the entire context of Marxist
criticism’s (and Eagleton’s own) stand against the reflexivity of language
Postmodernist representation 61
and narrative in the name of politics. This is important because Saints and
Scholars attempts to reconcile these seemingly opposing positions – as
indeed does much historiographic metafiction.
Eagleton’s novel ends with another deferral of those firing-squad bullets
heading for Connolly’s body: ‘When the bullets reached him he would
disappear entirely into myth, his body nothing but a piece of language, the
first cry of the new republic’ (Eagleton 1987b: 145)Of course, we do only
.
know Connolly today primarily from pieces of language, the traces and texts
of the past. Eagleton wants to do more than problematize this
epistemological reality, though. He offers as well a new way of representing
history – not derived from the official accounts of the victors, but taken from
the unofficial, usually unrecorded perspective of the victims of history. The
novel’s densely detailed descriptions of the life of the poor and the working
class in Dublin are accompanied by analyses of the causes of the misery: the
economic and political maneuverings of imperialist Britain. The plot
contrasts a Viennese Jew’s desire to be ‘hiding from history’ (84) with an
Irish revolutionary leader’s view that to be free ‘you have to remember’
(128), tell your own story, and represent yourself: ‘A colonial territory was a
land where nothing happened, where you reacted to the narrative of your
rulers rather than created one of your own’ (104). Talk is all that is left to ‘a
race bereft of its history’ (104) but talk – ‘discourse’ – is a kind of action:
‘Discourse was something you did. . . . The Irish had never fallen for the
English myth that language was a second-hand reflection of reality’ (105).
Obviously, neither did the postmodern.
This is the kind of novel that works toward a critical return to history and
politics through – not despite – metafictionalself-consciousness and parodic
intertextuality. This is the postmodernist paradox, a ‘use and abuse’ of
history that Nietzsche, when considering that subject, never contemplated.
In Roland Barthes’s terms, we are shown that there is ‘nothing natural
anywhere, nothing but the historical’ anywhere (Barthes 1977b: 139), and
the consequences of this realization form the topic of the next chapter.
Re-presenting the past
‘Total history’ de-totalized
In the light of recent work in many theoretical areas, we have seen that
narrative has come to be acknowledged as, above all, a human-made
structure – never as ‘natural’ or given. Whether it be in historical or fictional
representation, the familiar narrative form of beginning, middle, and end
implies a structuring process that imparts meaning as well as order. The
notion of its ‘end’ suggests both teleology and closure and, of course, both of
these are concepts that have come under considerable scrutiny in recent
years, in philosophical and literary circles alike. The view of narrative that
so much current theory challenges is not new, but it has been given a new
designation: it is considered a mode of ‘totalizing’ representation.
The function of the term totalizing, as I understand it, is to point to the
process (hence the awkward ‘ing’ form) by which writers of history, fiction,
or even theory render their materials coherent, continuous, unified – but
always with an eye to the control and mastery of those materials, even at the
risk of doing violence to them. It is this link to power, as well as process, that
the adjective ‘totalizing’ is meant to suggest, and it is as such that the term
Re-presenting the past 63
has been used to characterize everything from liberal humanist ideals to the
aims of historiography. As Dominick LaCapra has pointed out, the
dream of a ‘total history’ corroborating the historian’s own desire for
mastery of a documentary repertoire and furnishing the reader with a
vicarious sense of – orperhaps a project for – control in a world out ofjoint
has of course been a lodestar of historiography from Hegel to the Annales
school.
(LaCapra 1985: 25)
Witness Annales historian Fernand Braudel’s stated aim: ‘Everything must
be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that
despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we
may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life’ (Braudel 1980:
16). Totalizing narrative representation has also, of course, been considered
by some critics as the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre, ever
since its beginnings in the overt controlling and ordering (and fictionalizing)
of Cervantes and Sterne.
In very general terms, the postmodern questioning of this totalizing
impulse may well have its roots in some sort of 1960s ’ or late romantic need
to privilege free, unconditioned experience. But this need seems to be
countered these days by an equally strong terror that it is really someone else
– rather than we ourselves – who is plotting, ordering, controlling our life for
us. British-based critics tend to localize as a particularly American
phenomenon a paradoxical desire for and suspicion of totalization, and the
work of writers like Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon certainly explains
why they do so. But there are equally powerful examples of the postmodern
paradox of anti-totalizing totalization in resolutely non-American novels
such as Midnight’s Children, The Name of the Rose, or The White Hotel,
novels which structurally both install and subvert the teleology, closure, and
causality of narrative, both historical and fictive.
A similar and equally contradictory impulse can be seen in postmodern
narrative photography – the same doubled urge, ironically playing with
conventions in order to turn the apparent veracity of photography against
64 The Politics of Postmodernism
itself. The overt self-reflexivity in the work of Duane Michaels, for example,
points to his various series of photographs as self-consciously composed,
fictionalized, and manipulated, but the images themselves nevertheless also
function as seemingly transparent documentary representations within a
temporal framework. This contradictory conjunction of the self-reflexive
and the documentary is precisely what characterizes the postmodern return
to story in poetry as well. Marjorie Perloff ( 1985: 158) has argued that much
recent narrative poetry challenges the modernist or late romantic separation
of lyric poetry and narrative prose by foregrounding both the narrative codes
and their (and our) desire for closure as well as for the order usually implied
by systematic plot structure. What this means is that – as in fiction – there is
an opening up of poetry to material once excluded from the genre as impure:
things political, ethical, historical, philosophical. This kind of verse can also
work to contest representation and the traditional notion of the transparent
referentiality of language in its problematizing of narrative form, and as such
resembles, in its effect, historiographic metafiction.
In all these cases, 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 too 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 particularmeaning
to the past. What historiographic metafictions like Waterland or I the
Supreme ask, as we have seen, is 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.
The totalizing impulse that postmodern art both inscribes and challenges
should probably not be regarded either, on the one hand, as a naive kind of
deliberately imperialistic desire for total control or, on the other, as utterly
unavoidable and humanly inevitable, even necessary. The motivation and
even existence of such totalization may certainly remain unconscious and
repressed (or at least unspoken) or they may be completely overt, as in
Re-presenting the past 65
Fredric Jameson’s deliberate totalizing in the name of Marxism as the only
‘philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution’ to the
dilemmas of historicism (1981: 18). But Jameson’s ‘History’ as
‘uninterrupted narrative,’ however repressed, is exactly what is contested by
the plural, interrupted, unrepressed histories (in the plural) of novels like
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
That novel’s postmodern narrating historian might be seen as indirectly
suggesting that not even Marxism can fully subsume all other interpretive
modes. In his postmodern story-telling there is no mediation that can act as a
dialectical term for establishing relationships between narrative form and
social ground. They both remain and they remain separate. The resulting
contradictions are not dialectically resolved, but co-exist in a heterogeneous
way: Rushdie’s novel, in fact, works to prevent any interpretation of its
contradictions as simply the outer discontinuous signs of some repressed
unity – suchasMarxist ‘History’ or ‘the Real.’ In fact, a novel like Midnight’s
Children works to foreground the totalizing impulse of western –
imperialistic – modes of history-writing by confronting it with indigenous
Indian models of history. Though Saleem Sinai narrates in English, in
‘Anglepoised-lit writing,’ his intertexts for both writing history and writing
fiction are doubled: they are,on the one hand, from Indian legends, films, and
literature and, on the other, from the west – The Tin Drum, Tristram Shandy,
One Hundred Years of Solitude, and so on.
Rushdie’s paradoxically anti-totalizing totalized image for his
historiographic metafictive process is the ‘chutnification of history’
(Rushdie 1981: 459). Each chapter of the novel, we are told, is like a pickle
jar that shapes its contents by its very form. The cliche with which Saleem is
clearly playing is that to understand him and his nation, we ‘have to swallow
a world’ and swallow too his literally preposterous story. But chutnification
is also an image of preserving: ‘my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all,
connected to my nocturnal scribblings. . . . Memory, as well as fruit, is being
saved from the corruption of the clocks’ (38). In both processes, however, he
acknowledges inevitable distortions: raw materials are transformed, given
‘shape and form – that is to say, meaning’ (461). This is as true of historywriting
as it is of novel-writing. As Saleem himself acknowledges:
66 The Politics of Postmodernism
Sometimes in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have
known too little; at other times, too much . . . yes, I should revise and
revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy.
I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that
way because that’s how it happened.
(Rushdie 1981: 560–1)
But does that opening ‘It’ of the last statement refer to the events of the past
or to the writing and preserving of them? In a novel about a man writing his
own and his country’s history, a man ‘desperate’ for meaning, as he insists he
is from the first paragraph, the answer cannot be clear.
To challenge the impulse to totalize is to contest the entire notion of
continuity in history and its writing. In Foucault’s terms discontinuity, once
the ‘stigma of temporal dislocation’ that it was the historian’s professional
job to remove from history, has become a new instrument of historical
analysis and simultaneously a result of that analysis. Instead of seeking
common denominators and homogeneous networks of causality and
analogy, historians have been freed, Foucault argues, to note the dispersing
interplay of different, heterogeneous discourses that acknowledge the
undecidable in both the past and our knowledge of the past. What has
surfaced is something different from the unitary, closed, evolutionary
narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it: as we have
been seeing in historiographic metafiction as well, we now get the histories
(in the plural) 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 I might add, of women as well as men.
These are among the issues raised by postmodern fiction in its
paradoxical confrontation of self-consciously fictive and resolutely
historical representation. The narrativization of past events is not hidden; the
events no longer seem to speak for themselves, but are shown to be
consciously composed into a narrative, whose constructed – not found –
order is imposed upon them, often overtly by the narrating figure. The
process of making stories out of chronicles, of constructing plots out of
sequences, is what postmodern fiction underlines. This does not in any way
Re-presenting the past 67
deny the existence of the past real, but it focuses attention on the act of
imposing order on that past, of encoding strategies of meaning-making
through representation.
Among the lessons taught by this didactic postmodern fiction is that of the
importance of context, of discursive situation, in the narrativizing acts of
both fiction and historiography: novels like Timothy Findley’s Famous Last
Words or Salman Rushdie’s Shame teach us that both forms of narrative
representation are, in fact, particularized uses of language (i.e. discourses)
that inscribe social and ideological contexts. While both historians and
novelists (not to mention literary critics) have a long tradition of trying to
erase textual elements which would ‘situate’ them in their texts,
postmodernism refuses such an obfuscation of the context of its enunciation.
The particularizing and contextualizing that characterize the postmodern
focus are, of course, direct responses to those strong (and very common)
totalizing and universalizing impulses. But the resulting postmodern
relativity and provisionality are not causes for despair; they are to be
acknowledged as perhaps the very conditions of historical knowledge.
Historical meaning may thus be seen today as unstable, contextual,
relational, and provisional, but postmodernism argues that, in fact, it has
always been so. And it uses novelistic representations to underline the
narrative nature of much of that knowledge.
As Lyotard argued in The Postmodern Condition, narrative is still the
quintessential way we represent knowledge and this explains why the
denigration of narrative knowledge by positivistic science has provoked
such a strong response from so many different domains and points of view.
In many fields, narrative is, and always has been, a valid mode of
explanation, and historians have always availed themselves of its ordering
as well as its explanatory powers.
This is not unrelated to Collingwood’s early notion that the historian’s job
is to tell plausible stories, made out of the mess of fragmentary and
incomplete facts, facts which he or she processes and to which he or she
thereby grants meaning through emplotment. Hayden White, of course, goes
even further and points to how historians suppress, repeat, subordinate,
highlight, and order those facts, but once again, the result is to endow the
68 The Politics of Postmodernism
events of the past with a certain meaning. To call this act a literary act is, for
White, in no way to detract from its significance. However, what
contradictory postmodern fiction shows is how such meaning-granting can
be undermined even as it is asserted. In Pynchon’s V., for instance, the
writing of history is seen as an ultimately futile attempt to form experience
into meaning. The multiple and peripheral perspectives offered in the
fiction’s eye-witness accounts resist any final meaningful closure. And
despite the recognizable historical context (of the Cold War years and their
paranoia or of German policies in southwest Africa), the past still resists
complete human understanding. A plot, be it seen as a narrative structure or
as a conspiracy, is always a totalizing representation that integrates multiple
and scattered events into one unified story. But the simultaneous desire for
and suspicion of such representations are both part of the postmodern
contradictory response to emplotment.
In writing about historical events, both the emplotting historian and the
novelist are usually considered as working within certain constraints – those
of chronology, for instance. But what happens when postmodern fiction ‘dedoxifies’
even such obvious and ‘natural’ constraints, when Midnight’s
Children’s narrator notices an error in chronology in his narrative, but then
decides, ‘in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time?’ Later
he also inverts the order of his own tenth birthday and the 1957 election, and
keeps that order because his memory stubbornly refuses to alter the sequence
of events. Rushdie offers no real answer to the questions Saleem poses, but
the issues are raised in such an overt manner that we too are asked to confront
them. Worried about that error in the date of Gandhi’s death, Saleem asks us:
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my
desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything – to
re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in
a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it
to others.
(Rushdie 1981: 166)
Re-presenting the past 69
Well, others (like us) are indeed left to ask – but not only of this particular
error within this particular novel – if one error would invalidate the entire
fabric of representation in history or fiction?
A related question: in the drive to totalize and give unified meaning to
historiography as well as fiction, are elisions (if not errors) not likely to occur
which would condition the ‘truth to fact’ of any representation of the past?
Related issues are certainly being discussed in Marxist and feminist theory
today, but they also come up in a novel like John Berger’s rather didactic G.
Here, the narrator intervenes in the middle of a description of a fictive
character caught up in a real historical event:
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6
May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon
a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent.
Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here,
despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be
possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish
is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another
way.
(Berger 1972b: 77)
The only other way offered here is the representation of the brute data of
historical event (the number of dead workers in the Milan uprising) and their
political consequences – ‘the end of a phase of Italian history’ and the
initiation of a new one which meant that ‘crude repression gave way to
political manipulation’ (77) which kept suppressed any revolutionary urges
for at least twenty years.
While this is as much an ‘End’ and a ‘Unity’ as those of the fictive
narrative would have been, it does act to foreground the postmodern
suspicion of closure, of both its arbitrariness and its foreclosing interpretive
power. Perhaps this explains the multiple endings of E.L. Doctorow’s
fictionalizing of the Rosenbergs’ history in The Book of Daniel. Various plot
and thematic threads are rather problematically tied up, but in such an overt
way that they point to suspicious continuity as much as relativized finality.
70 The Politics of Postmodernism
In one ending Daniel goes back to the site of past trauma, the house of his
parents who have been executed for treason, only to find the quality of life
there worse, perhaps, than that of his experience: in the life of the poor black
inhabitants, however, he sees a continuity of suffering that forbids him to
wallow in personal pain. Another ending presents his sister’s funeral,
complete with paid prayers, offering a Kaddish for all the dead, past and
present, of Daniel’s life and this novel. And in yet another ending, as he sits
in the Columbia University library stacks in May 1968, writing the
dissertation/novel/ journal/confession we read, he is told to ‘Close the book,
man,’ for the revolution has begun, and its locus is life, not books. As he
writes the last pages we read, the book and this ending self-consciously selfdestruct
in a manner reminiscent of the final page of One Hundred Years of
Solitude. And, of course, the very last words we actually read are those of yet
another ‘Book of Daniel’ – the biblical one.
Postmodern fiction like this exploits and yet simultaneously calls into
question notions of closure, totalization, and universality that are part of
those challenged grand narratives. Rather than seeing this paradoxical use
and abuse as a sign of decadence or as a cause for despair, it might be possible
to postulate a less negative interpretation that would allow for at least the
potential for radical critical possibilities. Perhaps we need a rethinking of the
social and political (as well as the literary and historical) representations by
which we understand our world. Maybe we need to stop trying to find
totalizing narratives which dissolve difference and contradiction (into, for
instance, either humanist eternal Truth or Marxist dialectic).
Knowing the past in the present
Among the unresolved contradictions of representation in postmodern
fiction is that of the relation between the past and the present. In The Book of
Daniel, various stands on this issue are thematized: the 1960s’ revolutionary,
Artie Sternlicht, rejects the past in the name of the present and future; Susan
lives too much in the past and dies for it; Daniel tries to sort out the past in
order to understand his present. This relationship is one that has preoccupied
Re-presenting the past 71
historiography since at least the last century. Historians are aware that they
establish a relationship between the past they write about and the present in
which they write. The past may have appeared as confused, plural, and
unstructured as the present does as it was lived, but the historians’ task is to
order this fragmented experience into knowledge: ‘For the whole point of
history is not to know about actions as witnesses might, but as historians do,
in connection with later events and as parts of temporal wholes’ (Danto
1965: 185). In historiographic metafiction, it is this same realization that
underlies the frequent use of anachronisms, where earlier historical
characters speak the concepts and language clearly belonging to later figures
(as in Banville’s Doctor Copernicus or Doctorow’s Ragtime).
For the most part historiographic metafiction, like much contemporary
theory of history, does not fall into either ‘presentism’ or nostalgia in its
relation to the past it represents. What it does is de-naturalize that temporal
relationship. In both historiographic theory and postmodern fiction, there is
an intense self-consciousness (both theoretical and textual) about the act of
narrating in the present the events of the past, about the conjunction of
present action and the past absent object of that agency. In both historical and
literary postmodern representation, the doubleness remains; there is no sense
of either historian or novelist reducing the strange past to verisimilar present.
The contemporary resonances of the narration of a historical period piece
like Natalie Zemon Davis’s book (or film) of The Return of Martin Guerre
coexist with their counter-expectation in the form of the challenge to our
romantic cliched conventions of love conquering all. This is deliberately
doubly coded narrative, just as postmodern architecture is a doubly coded
form: they are historical and contemporary. There is no dialectic resolution
or recuperation in either case.
Works like Coover’s The Public Burning or Doctorow’s The Book of
Daniel do not rewrite, refashion, or expropriate history merely to satisfy
either some game-playing or some totalizing impulse; instead, they
juxtapose what we think we know of the past (from official archival sources
and personal memory) with an alternate representation that foregrounds the
postmodern epistemological questioning of the nature of historical
knowledge. Which ‘facts’ make it into history? And whose facts? The
72 The Politics of Postmodernism
narrating ‘historian’ of Rushdie’s Shamefinds that he has trouble keeping his
present knowledge of events from contaminating his representation of the
past. This is the condition of all writing about the past, be it fictional (‘it
seems that the future cannot be restrained, and insists on seeping back into
the past’ (Rushdie 1983: 24)) or factual (‘It is possible to see the subsequent
history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world
forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed’ (87)). The narrator
knows that it ‘is the true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on
the world’ (87). He goes on to ponder this similarity of impulse between
historical and fictional writing: ‘I, too, face the problem of history: what to
retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on
relinquishing, how to deal with change’ (87–8). What he knows complicates
his narrative task in that he is dealing with a past ‘that refuses to be
suppressed, that is daily doing battle with the present’ (88), both in his novel
and in the actual, present-day history of Pakistan. He even admits that the
inspiration for his fictive investigation of the notion of shame came from a
real newspaper account of a murder in London of a Pakistani girl by her own
father (116) – or so he says. The present and the past, the fictive and the
factual: the boundaries may frequently be transgressed in postmodern
fiction, but there is never any resolution of the ensuing contradictions. In
other words, the boundaries remain, even if they are challenged.
It is at this level that these epistemological questions of postmodern
narrative representation are posed. How can the present know the past it
tells? We constantly narrate the past, but what are the conditions of the
knowledge implied by that totalizing act of narration? Must a historical
account acknowledge where it does not know for sure or is it allowed to
guess? Do we know the past only through the present? Or is it a matter of only
being able to understand the present through the past? As we have seen, these
confusing questions are those raised by postmodern novels like Graham
Swift’s Waterland. In the opposition between the history-teacher narrator
and his present-oriented students are enacted the conflicts of contemporary
historiographic debate. For the narrator, ‘life is one-tenth Here and Now,
nine-tenths a history lesson’ (Swift 1983: 52), but it is that one-tenth that has
taught him ‘that history was no invention but indeed existed – and I had
Re-presenting the past 73
become part of it’ (53). The novel’s fens landscape opposes the flux of water
(an image of both time and space) to the attempt at fixity by land reclamation
– and also by the discipline of history (both as memory and as story-telling).
The question is never whether the events of the past actually took place. The
past did exist – independently of our capacity to know it. Historiographic
metafiction accepts this philosophically realist view of the past and then
proceeds to confront it with an anti-realist one that suggests that, however
true that independence may be, nevertheless the past exists for us – now –
only as traces on and in the present. The absent past can only be inferred from
circumstantial evidence.
The tensions created by this realization that we can likely only know the
past through our present do not absolve postmodern historians or novelists
from trying to avoid dissolving those tensions, no matter how uncomfortable
they might make them. This, of course, was one of the lessons of Brecht:
we must drop our habit of taking the different social structures of past
periods, then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so
that they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this
process a certain air of having been there all along, in other words, of
permanence pure and simple. Instead we must leave them their
distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our
eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.
(Brecht 1964: 190)
Postmodern fiction stresses even more than this (if that is possible) the
tensions that exist, on the one hand, between the pastness (and absence) of
the past and the presentness (and presence) of the present, and on the other,
between the actual events of the past and the historian’s act of processing
them into facts. The anachronistic intertextual references to modern works
of science, philosophy, and aesthetics in Banville’s Doctor Copernicus point
to the contemporary relevance of the issues also raised in the sixteenth
century: the relations between theory and praxis, words and things, science
and the universe. But because the manner in which these questions are
presented is self-consciously anachronistic, the text also points at the same
74 The Politics of Postmodernism
time to the novelist’s act of making past/present connections in such a way
that there is still a radical discontinuity between then and now, between
experiencing and knowing.
Knowing the past becomes a question of representing, that is, of
constructing and interpreting, not of objective recording. Just as the Rankean
objectivity theory of history-writing was challenged by Hegel, Droysen,
Nietzsche, Croce, and so many others, so the metafictional aspects of
historiographic metafiction also highlight the areas in which interpretation
enters the domain of historiographic representation (in the choice of
narrative strategy, explanatory paradigm, or ideological encoding) to
condition any notion of history as objective presentation of past events,
rather than as interpretive representation of those past events, which are
given meaning (as historical facts) by the very discourse of the historian.
What is foregrounded in postmodern theory and practice is the selfconscious
inscription within history of the existing, but usually concealed,
attitude of historians toward their material. Provisionality and
undecidability, partisanship and even overt politics – these are what replace
the pose of objectivity and disinterestedness that denies the interpretive and
implicitly evaluative nature of historical representation.
The question of objectivity in historiography is not just one of
methodology. As discussed in the last chapter, it is also related to what
Jameson calls the ‘crisis of representation’ of our culture, ‘in which an
essentially realist epistemology, which conceives of representation as the
reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it – projects
a mirror theory of knowledge and art, whose fundamental evaluative
categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and Truth itself’ (Jameson
1984b: viii). The epistemological issues raised by representation in both
historiography and fiction belong in the context of this crisis. The work of
Hayden White has clearly been important in bringing these issues into the
forefront of historical and literary critical discussions. He has asked the same
kind of questions that novels like Berger’s G. or Boyd’s The New
Confessions have asked:
Re-presenting the past 75
What is the structure of a peculiarly historical consciousness? What is the
epistemological status of historical explanations as compared with other
kinds of explanations that might be offered to account for the materials
with which historians ordinarily deal? What are the possible forms of
historical representation and what are their bases? By what authority can
historical accounts claim to be contributions to a secured knowledge of
reality in general and to the human sciences in particular?
(White 1978a: 41)
The issue of representation and its epistemological claims leads directly
to the problem introduced in the last chapter regarding the nature and status
of the ‘fact’ in both history-writing and fiction-writing. All past ‘events’ are
potential historical ‘facts,’ but the ones that become facts are those that are
chosen to be narrated. We have seen that this distinction between brute event
and meaning-granted fact is one with which postmodern fiction seems
obsessed. At a certain moment in his relating of the contemporary history of
India and Pakistan in Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai addresses his
reader: ‘I am trying hard to stop being mystifying. Important to concentrate
on good hard facts. But which facts?’ (Rushdie 1981: 338). This is a serious
problem because at one point he cannot tell, from ‘accurate’ accounts in
documents (newspapers), whether Pakistani troops really did enter Kashmir
or not. The ‘Voice of Pakistan’ and ‘All-India Radio’ give totally opposing
reports. And if they did (or did not) enter, what were the motives? ‘Again, a
rash of possible explanations,’ we are told (339). Saleem parodies the
historiographical drive toward causality and motivation through his
reductive, megalomaniacal exaggeration: ‘This reason or that or the other?
To simplify matters, I present two of my own: the war happened because I
dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers; furthermore, I remained
impure, and the war was to separate me from my sins’ (339).
Such a perspective may be the only possible response left to a world where
‘[n]othing was real; nothing certain’ (Rushdie 1981: 340). Certainly the
text’s grammar here alters – from assertive sentences to a long list of
interrogatives that ends with what might be the ultimate example of
contradictory postmodern discourse: ‘Aircraft, real or fictional, dropped
76 The Politics of Postmodernism
actual or mythical bombs’ (341). Compared to what the sources and
documents of history offer him, Saleem himself is ‘only the humblest of
jugglers-with-facts’ in a country ‘where truth is what it is instructed to be’
(326). The ideological as well as historiographic implications here are overt.
The text’s self-reflexivity points in two directions at once, toward the events
being represented in the narrative and toward the act of narration itself. This
is precisely the same doubleness that characterizes all historical narrative.
Neither form of representation can separate ‘facts’ from the acts of
interpretation and narration that constitute them, for facts (though not
events) are created in and by those acts. And what actually becomes fact
depends as much as anything else on the social and cultural context of the
historian, as feminist theorists have shown with regard to women writers of
history over the centuries.
Despite first appearances, the distinction between fact and event is
actually quite different from that other opposition which is central to the
criticism of the novel genre: that of fiction versus non-fiction. But because
postmodern novels focus on the process of event becoming fact, they draw
attention to the dubiousness of the positivist, empiricist hierarchy implied in
the binary opposing of the real to the fictive, and they do so by suggesting
that the non-fictional is as constructed and as narratively known as is fiction.
For some critics, all novels are ambivalent in their attitude toward the
separation of fact and fiction, but some historiographic metafictions do seem
more overtly and problematically so. In his Factual Fictions: The Origins of
the English Novel (1983), Lennard Davis argues convincingly for the
coterminous discursive identity of fact and fiction in the mid-eighteenthcentury
novel of Defoe and others. But in the postmodern rewriting of
Robinson Crusoe in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, it is necessary that we separate what
we know of the history of the writing of Defoe’s novel (its sources, its
intertexts) from what Coetzee offers as the (fictionally) real – but absented
and silenced – female origin of the story: the experience of castaway Susan
Barton. This may not be ‘true’ of Defoe’s particular story, but it does have
something to say about the position of women and the politics of
representation in both the fiction and the nonfiction of the eighteenth
century.
Re-presenting the past 77
When historiographic metafictions use the verifiable events and
personages of history, like Defoe or Indira Gandhi, they are open to being
attacked for inaccuracies, lying, slander, or simply bad taste. Fuentes’s Terra
Nostra deliberately and provocatively violates what is conventionally
accepted as true about the events of the past: Elizabeth I gets married;
Columbus is a century or so out in his discovery of America. But the facts of
this warped history are no more – or less – fictionally constructed than are the
overtly fictive and intertextual ones: characters from different Spanish-
American novels all come together in one scene, with apt echoes of At SwimTwo-
Birds, Mulligan Stew, and other experimental fiction. The realist notion
of characters only being able to coexist legitimately if they belong to the
same text is clearly challenged here in both historical and fictional terms. The
facts of these fictional representations are as true – and false – as the facts of
history-writing can be, for they always exist as facts, not events. In the
representations of Coover’s Nixon in The Public Burning and Bowering’s
George Vancouver in Burning Water this interpretive process is made overt.
It is interesting that, in his influential discussion of the historical novel,
Georg Lukacs did not demand correctness of individual facts as a condition
of defining the historical faithfulness of situation. Historical data
traditionally enter nineteenth-century historical fiction in order to reinforce
the text’s claim to verifiability or at least to a persuasive rendering into fact
of its events. Of course, all realist fiction has always used historical events,
duly transformed into facts, in order to grant to its fictive universe a sense of
circumstantiality and specificity of detail, as well as verifiability. What
postmodern fiction does is make overt the fact-making and meaninggranting
processes. The narrator of Rushdie’s Shame announces:
The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two
countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space. My story, my
fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found
this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate.
My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.
(Rushdie 1983: 29)
78 The Politics of Postmodernism
The open mixing of the fictive with the historical in the narrator’s storytelling
is made into part of the very narrative:
In Delhi, in the days before partition, the authorities rounded up any
Muslims . . . and locked them up in the red fortress . . . including members
of my own family. It’s easy to imagine that as my relatives moved through
the Red Fort in the parallel universe of history, they might have felt some
hint of the fictional presence of Bilquis Kemal.
(Rushdie 1983: 64)
A few pages later, however, we are reminded: ‘If this were a realistic novel
about Pakistan, I would not be writing about Bilquis and the wind; I would
be talking about my youngest sister’ (68) – about whom he then does indeed
talk. The seeming non sequitur here points both to the arbitrariness of the
process of deciding which events become facts and to the relationship
between realist fiction and the writing of history. Although the narrator
writes from England, he chooses to write about Pakistan, acknowledging
that ‘I am forced to reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors. . . . I
must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits’ (69) – a
warning meant for the reader of both fiction and history.
Historiographic metafiction like this is self-conscious about the paradox
of the totalizing yet inevitably partial act of narrative representation. It
overtly ‘de-doxifies’ received notions about the process of representing the
actual in narrative – be it fictional or historical. It traces the processing of
events into facts, exploiting and then undermining the conventions of both
novelistic realism and historiographic reference. It implies that, like fiction,
history constructs its object, that events named become facts and thus both
do and do not retain their status outside language. This is the paradox of
postmodernism. The past really did exist, but we can only know it today
through its textual traces, its often complex and indirect representations in
the present: documents, archives, but also photographs, paintings,
architecture, films, and literature.