In this
project I ground my reading of historiographic metafiction
in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert
traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon’s
construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular
literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse
in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing
the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography,
I investigate the specific textual strategies that historiographic
genres—such as the postmodern novel, the Canadian long poem,
the short story and to some extent, the film genre—use to
present their self-reflexive interaction between history and
fiction.
I open
my discussion by analyzing those texts which both posit the
necessity of history and investigate it as a verifiable discourse.
I next discuss the necessity of history by looking at legitimizing
historiographical strategies postmodern historical texts use:
“found” texts, Comic Book covers and newspaper articles, the
public archive and major players in historical events. Historiographic
metafiction overturns these discourses by the use of anachronism
and the deliberate falsification of an accepted historical
version. I examine the gradually revealed multiple truth which
is left to the reader’s interpretation and the construction
of history as myth, as well as the problematic narrative voices—such
as the so-called unreliable narrator and the use of the lyric
“I” in the contemporary long poem. In some incarnations a
historian figure directly criticizes/enacts how events become
facts. Still other postmodern re-visionings of the historical
past are politicized retellings which question the official
historical version of particular historical events or people.
Arguing
for the deliberately political and even polemical nature of
historiographic metafictions, I focus upon these specific
literary strategies in order to argue that historiographic
metafiction’s specific and political use of these strategies
is an attempt to recover, re-examine, mythologize and narrate
the assorted discourses we call history. I argue that historiographic
metafiction creates a previously nonexistent historical space
which writes both people and events into a traditional history
from which they have been deliberately—and with political
motive—excluded.