fludernik history and metafiction

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Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

MONIKAFLUDERNIK

History and metafiction

Experientiality, causality, and myth

Originalbeitrag erschienen in:Bernd Engler (Hrsg.): Historiographic metafiction in modern American and Canadian literature.Paderborn [u.a.]: Schöningh, 1994, S. [81] - 101



MONIKA FLUDERNIK

History and Metafiction:

Experientiality, Causality, and Myth

Historical Metafiction at first sight appears to be a contradiction in terms. H istory

is supposed to refer to the R eal, fiction to the Im aginary; an d m etafiction signify-

ing the self-ref lexive strain, the postm odernist mo de of writ ing, in turn sug gests

playful invention and ram pan t irreferentality and therefore seem s to conflict with

the realist connotations of the histori(ographO cal. All the sam e, in recent critical

work a connect ion has repeatedly been draw n between histor ical and f ic t ional

modes of writing, proposing by way of argument that history is nothing but a

fiction w ith no imm ediate claims to a representation of the Real.' "Thus historians

can write only by combining within their practice the 'other' that moves and

m isleads them and the real that they can represent only through f ict ion.' This

argument has been supported by reference to fictional techniques which areobservab ly employed in historiography . H istories, particularly those comp osed in

the nineteenth century, not only concen trate on m ajor political figures and their

motives, decisions and personal weaknesses, they additionally use invented

dialogues, free indirect discourse and som etimes even interior m onologue, re-

shuffle the chronology for artistic effect 3 and cast their narratives into recognizable

The supposed factuality of history is presented as a mimetic reality-effect, an illusion of the Real,

by Roland Barthes, among others; Roland Barthes, "Le discours de l'histoire," Poitique, 49 (1982),

15-21. The fictionality of historical writing has been propounded forcefully in the following works:

Paul Veyne, Comment on icrit l'histoire (Paris, 1971); most of the essays in G eschichte — Ereignis

— Erzahlung, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich, 1973); Michel de Certeau, T he

W riting of History (New York, 1988, 1 1975); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural

Criticism (Baltimore, 1978); Robert F. Berkhofer, "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical

Practice," Poetics Today, 9/2 (1988), 435-452. The revolutionary insights of Droysen are noted in

Lionel Gossman, "History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification," The Writing of History:

Literary Forms and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and H enry Kozicki (Madison, WI,

1978), 3-39.2 de Certeau, The Writing of History, 14 .

3 See, e.g., the excellent study by Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three

Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), as well as her earlier "Du recit histo-

rique: La prise de la Bastille selon Michelet (1847)," Poitique, 75 (Sept. 1988), 267-278. More recent-

ly, Philippe Carrard has undertaken to examine the workings of Annales school historiography in

Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, 1992).



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generic modes of literary origin: satire, tragedy or com edy.' Another argumen t that

is frequently adduced in support of the 'fictionality thesis' is the reference to the

constructedness of b oth fictional and historical discourse. Whereas the story is

pure invention in the case of l iterature, in history data m ay have a basis in a

reality beyond the text but are nevertheless constructed entities since the flow of

events, of happenings (Geschehen), cannot be p artitioned off into historical data

without a prior conceptualization, necessarily eliminating, restructuring and recon-

stituting events in order to tran sform the m into historical data. 5 Historical data

becom e significant only once they acquire a position in a chain of sequen tiality

or a chain of argum ent, such that a causal or at least contributory function can be

assigned to them . The teleology of historical writing, indeed, is generally acknow l-

edged to be a n imposition by the historian. 6

Neverth eless, it seem s to me, one can exagge rate the fictionality of historiog-

raphy, fai ling to observe the very important differences between historical andfictional writing, "For our understanding of fiction needs the contrast with history

as mu ch as our understanding of h istory needs the contrast with fiction."' These

differences, I should hasten to ad d, do not prim arily derive from the textual

surface of such writing. On the contrary, the thesis of history's entirely fictional

nature has com e precisely from critics interested in the l inguistic make-up of

historical writing, and the fictionality m arkers which the y have d isclosed in the

discourse of historiograph y do indeed b espeak a heavy reliance on literary devices

and techniqu es.' It is also true that, in so far as historians are telling a story (and

not all historians do these day s), they are attem pting to achieve storytelling effectswhich a re com parable to tho se of l i terary f ict ion. It is for these reasons that

history can so easily be read as literature and vice versa.

The d istinctions which one need s to draw betw een history and fiction are to be

situated not on th e textual plane (at least not necessarily so) but on th e levels of

production and reception. They include the historical piecing together of what

must have hap pened from a frequently daunting amoun t of so-called historical

evidence: witnesses' reports, archival registers and do cum ents, previous historical

4 See Hayden W hite, T rop ics of Discourse.

5 See Paul Veyne's enlightening rema rks on the constructedness of historical data or facts: S..]

les 'faits' n'existent pas a l'etat isole: l'historien les trouve tout organ ises en ensemb les oil i ls jouent

le role de causes, fins, occasions, hasards, pretextes, etc." Comment on kilt l'histoire, 45 .

6 See Veyn e, ib id ., and de Certeau's incis ive discussion of the very f ict ional effect of historical

reliability which is the conseq uence of history's narrativization: "It [i.e. the inherent m etaphorical

slippage of historical discourse in its narrativized shape] carries causality off in the direction of

successivity (p ost hoc, ergo pr opt er hoc). It takes relations of coexistence as coh erence, and so forth.

The likelihood of statem ents is constantly substituted for their verifiability. Whence the authority wh ich

historical discourse needs in o rder to uph old itself: wh at it loses in rigor must be compen sated for by

an increase in reliability." T he W riting of History, 93-94.

7 Louis 0. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," T he W rit ing of History, 148f.8 In pa rticular see the work of Anne Rigney and F .R. Ankersmit , Narrative L ogic: A Sem antic

A nalysis of the Historian's Language (The H ague, 1983).



History and Metafiction3presentations , archaeological and b iological evidence. ' The f irst job of the

historian is therefore one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the puzzle gam e

in which a reader o f the typical (post)modernist grand narrative has to engage

when trying to resurrect a simp le chronology, a connection betw een events, an

interpretation of mo tivation and ca usality from wh at at first appears to be an

opaqu e chaotic m ass of unrelated details in textualized shape. (I am thinking of

novels such as Prou st's Recherche, Joyce's Ulysses, Cortazar's C amb io de pie!,

or Pynchon's Gravity's R ainbow , to nam e just a few obvious examples.) Once a

historian has pieced together a chron ology of events and has foun d a logically

(and psych ologically) consistent explanation for the succession and causal depend -

ency between them, these insights are then due to be retextualized in story form.

The historian's fabu/a is thus a fabula which he ha s in turn elicited from previous

texts and which he now textualizes into an 'ordinary' narrative (sjuzhet) by means

of the well-known d iscourse operations of narrativization: em plotmen t, teleology,causal explication an d (no n-obligatorily) stylistic an d a esthetic l iterarization

(reshuffling of the chronology, focalization, reader-oriented entertainm ent value,

scenic dialogues, presenting character's con ciousness, humorou s asides, etc.).

Ther e are, however, additional explicit markers wh ich quite openly constrain

interpretation in the direction of historical, i.e. referential, meanings. Thus, as both

Cohn and Genette have recently proposed, titles and author's names significantly

determine the reader's latitude of interpretation'', particularly b y gen eric elements

in the (sub)title. Som e histories, especially those of an austere aca dem ic per-

suasion, also explicitly discuss their methodology — the sources used, the problemswhich the se presented for interp retation, the knotty question of causality, etc.

Likewise, som e fictions deliberately display their fictionality (although to entirely

different effect) and they the refore intentiona lly unde rm ine the realist illusion

which m ost fictional and historical narrative relies on.

The rea der's interpretation of a text, though constrained by such textual markers,

can in m any cases transform texts into a referential or fictional genre w hich

contradicts that of their original conception. Nineteenth-century histories frequently

no longer provide historically adequate evidence an d enga ge in h istoriographically

suspect kinds of argum ent. Such texts can, how ever, be enjoyed as narra tive

versions of 'proper' histories with an indeterm inate claim to historical accuracy

and truth. Fictional reinterpretations of this kind occur with p articular insistence

9 Cf. Veyne, Comment on icrit l'histoire, 14: "[...1 en aucun cas ce que les historiens appellent un

evenement n'est saisi directement et entierement; il l'est toujours incomplêtement et lateralement, a

travers des docum ents ou des temoignag es," and Dorrit Cohn's remarks in her "Signposts of Fictionali-

ty," Poetics Today, 11/4 (1990), 775-804, esp. 781. Paul Ricoeur has likewise emphasized the deri-

vational and intertextual nature of historical writing, Time and Narrative, vol.!, transl. by Kathleen

McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, 1984).

Compare Dorrit Cohn's "Fictional versus Historical Lives: Borderlines and Borderline Cases,"

T he Journal of Narrat ive T echnique, 19/1 (1989), 3-3 0, and her "Signpo sts of Fictionality" w ith Ger ard

Genette's "Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative," Poetics Today, 11/4 (1990), 744-755.



84

onika Fludernik

in those texts which em ploy what are now perceived to be dated explicatory

techniques, relying on perceivably nineteenth-century psychological or ph ilo-

sophical and indeed m oral persuasions. To read M acaulay as fiction is, however,

an entirely different interpretative renegotiation of a text than would be the read -

ing of (historical) novels as history, a pastim e that has becom e increasingly

popular as the gen eral reader finds historiographic discourse less and less 'read-

able.' The rece nt genres of the nonfiction novel and the new journ alism" in fact

cater to exactly this kind of readership. History and fiction can therefore be argued

to share a textual narrative pattern which lends itself to reinterpretation but reposes

on entirely different writing techniques which m ay each im plant a textual meta-

narra tive trace in the discourse. Me tanarr ative discourse, in historical writing,

serves to underline the historiograph er's cautious and circumspect treatm ent of

available evidence an d therefore e nhances the realist il lusion, whereas, in the

fictional realm, the creative inventiveness of the writer is foregroun ded m uch tothe detrimen t of the realist illusion.

A third argu m ent that is reiterated in support of the fictionality of histori-

ographic discourse feeds from ou r experience of the actual world as a chao tic

plethora of unrelated details, which we recognize as having bee n pressed into the

service of ideological simplifications whose fictionality is all too apparent. In the

post-m odern wo rld, it is argued, one's worst fantasies are becom ing true; in fact,

actual events exceed fictional scenarios in their grotesquen ess, paradoxicality and

incom prehen sibility . As R aven Qu ickskil l says in Ishmael R eed's Flight t o

Canada, "Wh o is to say wha t is fact and wha t is fiction?" It is this situation wh ichcritics have postulated to be at the root of historiographic m etafiction, and which

is argued to reflect the clim ate of the A m erican 60s and 70s. It is therefore no

coincidence that the great historiographic metafictionists are writing precisely

during that period, producing representations of a chao tic world such as those

found in H eller' s Catch-22, Vonnegut' s Slaughterhouse-Five, Pynchon' s Gravity's

Rainbow, or in the work of Haw kes and DeLillo.

I will return to this posimodernist m ode shortly, paying particular attention to

the range of historical models used and to the cross-fertilization between the new

history of the mentalites and p rivate life schools on the one hand and the concerns

of the novel (traditional and postm odern) on the other. For the mom ent I would

like to briefly clarify som e aspects an d indeed subcategories of the concep tions

of 'history' as w ell as present a discussion o f the concep ts of narrativity and

causality. In the course of this argum ent I w ill maintain that fictional narrativity

is based on the quality of na rrative experience (experientiality), and w ill suggest

that historical writing lacks experientiality and hence n arrativity. I will then return

to historiographic metafictioiind analyze som e of its mo st prominen t features as

"For these genres see John Ho llowell, Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction

Novel (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977) and Barbara Foley, T elling the T ruth: T he Theory and Pract ice of

Documentar y Fiction (Ithaca, NY, 1986) .



History and Metafiction5they relate to the m odels of historical discourse types, paying particular attention

to the parodic reinstatement of the m ythic prototype of historiography in som e

contemp orary novels. I will conclude this essay with what I believe to be one of

the most fascinating historiographic fictions of recent times, George Garett's T h e

Succession (1989), casting a surrep titious eye across the A tlantic to briefly include

Adam T horpe's Ulverton (1992) in the discussion. I w ill suggest that the term his-

toriographic metafiction has to be limited in its application, since one no w finds

too man y very different works classed in the category. Indeed, one can argue tha t

an entirely new genre has been born from a confluence of fabulation, Latin-Amer-

ican ma gic realism , the m etafictional genre, the nonfiction novel and autob io-

graphical new journalism, a new genre that has allowed itself to accomm odate a

new historical mythology' 2 and a lso subscribes to m etafictional writing techniques.

I. What is History? Causality and the Everyday Concept of HistoricalExplanation

In contem porary criticism the con cept of the historical has com e to be defined

largely in terms of the referential or the institutional. History appears to b e that

which we recon struct to have happene d in the past, and the reconstruction of such

a chain of events is undertaken in accordance with firm institutional guidelines

designed to ensure a m aximum of objectivity. Such an accoun t of current his-

torical practice frequently leaves out of sight the earlier causal preoccup ations of

the historical profession — those, that is, starting with Hem pel" — according to

wh ich the sequence o f historical events should be explained on the basis of

generally valid historical rules. That such ru les have never been unearthed is by

now a critical commonplace, and the bankruptcy of empirical historiography can

nowhere be recognized more thoroughly than in the disappearance of the age-old

question of historical cause and effect . Not even the statist ical m ethod h as

ma naged to d ocumen t a sufficient numb er of recurrent statistical tendencies to

vouchsafe for causal explanatory mo dels. Even more than so ciology, the subject

m atter of history has resisted the attempt at em pirical explanatory an alysis,

remaining fmally trapped in singular events and their motivated b ut not rule-governed su ccessivity.' 4

Historical enquiry of the Annales school type has tended to somew hat blur this

basic failure of historical science as an em pirical discipline by shifting the em pha-

12 "History is probabally our myth. It combines what can be thought, the 'thinkable,' and the

origin, in conformity with the way in which a society can understand its own working." de Certeau,

T he W rit ing of History, 2 1.

13 Karl Hem pel , "The Funct ion of General Law s of His tory," T he Journal of Philosophy, 39 (1942),

35-48. On the covering-law model see also Ricoeur, T ime and Narrative, 121-143.

14 Compare the earlier passage from de Certeau quoted in fn. 5. Veyne, C omm ent on ecrit Phis-wire , is quite frank about this, noting the specificity (if not singularity) of historical events (73-75) and

the "sublunar" kind of causality operative in historical argument (176-209, esp. 178f.).



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onika Fludernik

sis away from historical events and m ajor protagonists in the political realm to the

questions of long-term historical developments as they emerge from the geograph-

ical, climatological, institutional an d ideological realms, resulting in th e fam ous

histoire de m entalites and the h istory of the longue dur ee. Such reorientations

towards the com plex entities of natural and man -ma de forces shift the focus from

historical events, which seemed to be m ore imm ediately determ ined by hum an

agency, to processes and developm ents whose h istorical developm ent quite

obviously cannot b e explained on the basis of concerted hum an action. Such an

enquiry therefore ba ckgrounds the qu estion of causality in the actantial sense and

instead appe ars to allow for a causal m odel that is closer to that of the natural

sciences. Howe ver, as should ha ve been clear from th e start, em pirically valid

causal ity cann ot be postulated in this realm, either. In fact , the p rocesses of

econom ic development or of shifting beliefs among p eople resist causal determina-

tion even m ore forcefully than do the historiopolitical 'events' of traditional his-tory. Historiography never man ages to explain in an em pirical fashion why certain

events took place or w hy institutions developed into new directions, although

historians are able to provide very good p ossible reasons (i.e. plausible reason s)

and a plethora of contingencies which all apparently contributed to pushing a

certain constellation of circum stances into one direction rather than another.

Historians who are frank about their discipline will probably argue that their aim

is to collect as m uch information ab out synchronic states and to develop theses

about which of the changes occurring in such states may have resulted in m ore

comp lex historical shifts. The m odel for such explanatory theses is not that of anem pirical science in wh ich unchangeab le laws can be o bserved to apply, laws

which can be tested since they recur in determ inable environments; explanations

in history after all remain conjectures, but conjectures that are supported by a

m ass of detail. Even th is limited causal pattern , one needs to note, is not a real

cause and effect argum ent. In fact, as far as the exp lanation of historical data

goes, history deals in the accumu lation and com bination of contingencies which

happ en to result in certain changes and developments!' Contingency and chance,

which are such crucial factors also in fictional plots, cannot be e liminated from

history (and only imp erfectly suppressed in historiographic discourse) precisely

because h istorical destiny (a f ictional s trategy in som e kinds of traditionalhistories 16) is no longer a dm issible as a last-ditch resource . Historical laws, such

as they em erge in historical writing, are very m uch post-factum rationalizations

based on com mo n sense (not to say comm onplace) insights into hum an nature:

pow er will be abused; boys will be boys."

15 On con tingency see esp. Ricoeur in T ime and Narrative, 96f.16 Tha t the nineteenth-century discourse of historical destiny and of imp eccable objectivity owes

no slight debt to the omn iscient narrator con vention of nineteenth-century novelist ic discourse and its

invocation of reliability is noted in Gossm an's excellent "History and L iterature," 24.

17 Such truisms can fruitfully be com pared to novelistic 'rules of l ife' such as the o nes studied by



History and M etafiction7A second crucial aspect of historical writing concerns the necessarily retrodictive

character of historical explanation' and the intrinsic exposure of the historical past

to the reconce ptualizations of recen t and presen t-day shifts in interest, ideology

and m entalities. Hence the recurring need to re-evaluate historical knowledge in

the light of present-day d evelopments. The con tinual rewriting of history therefore

not on ly reinterprets the significance of historical events for present-day concerns °but also helps to explain present circum stances as resulting from a series of non -

teleological developme nts. Teleology, in fact, is what we ob trude on the h istorical

evidence on the basis of our informed hindsight of how things happ ened to turn

out. Causality as it surfaces in historiography there fore frequen tly reposes on the

folk model of historical explanation rather than the scientific notion of causality,

even though few h istorians would confess to these ' low' origins.

The folk model of historical explanation can b est be illustrated from everyday

usage:

"Why are there G erman-speaking comm unities in Minnesota?" —

Answer: "B ecause of large-scale imm igration." —

"Why w as there large-scale emigration?" —

"Beca use people wen t into exile for econom ic and religious reasons." —

"Wh y did people emigrate for religious reasons." —

"Because of the Counter-Reformation." —

One im med iately notices how this series of apparent cause and effect argumen ts

allows itself to be extended indefinitely, leading from the Counter-Reform ation tothe Reform ation and back to the abuses w ithin the Catholic Church (in so far as

these are perceived to have triggered the Reformation), from there back through

the history of State/Church relations (the Investiture conflict) to the origins of th e

Christian State religion an d the origins of Christianity and the origins of these

origins. The term "origin" is of course fully appropriate in this connection and

should replace cause and effect patterns. If somebod y says, "This can be explained

from history," 2 ° the implication is that there is precisely such a chain of develop-

M ichael Riffaterre in his Fictional T ruth (Baltimore, 1990).

18 Veyne, C omm ent on icrit l'histoire, 176-209. See also von Wright's remarks quoted in Jean-Luc

Petit's "L a na rrativiti et le concept de l'explication en h istoire," La Narrativite, ed. Dorian Tiffeneau

(Paris, 1980), 193 and 199. Compare as well the quotation from Droysen in Hans-Robert Jauss,

"Geschichte der Kunst und Historic," Geschichte —Ereignis —Erzahlung, 189: "Das, was war, interes-siert uns nicht darum , weil es war, sondern weil es in gewisseth Sinn noch ist, indem e s noch wirkt,

weil es in dem ganzen Zusam menh ang der D inge steht, welche wir die geschichtliche, d .h . s it tl iche

Welt, den sittlichen Kosmos nen nen."

1 9 See de Certeau, T he W riting of History, 23 : S. .] any reading of the past — however much it is

controlled by the analysis of docum ents — is driven by a reading of current events." Compare also de

Certeau's dis tinct ion between "the 'meaning' w hich has becom e an object, and the 'meaning' which

today allows it to be understood as such" (34)— a distinction which reflects that b etw een meaning (as

denotation) and significance.

2° The folk theory of historical explanation under the catch ph rase "Das kann man nur historisch



88

onika Fludernik

me nts which are boun d together by a n arrative logic of motivated sequentiality

and in wh ich coincidence plays a crucial role , as it does in the Realist novel.

History does not prove any necessary seq uences of events, but once events have

occurred one can usually trace them through a series of stages which have suc-

ceeded chronologically and therefore contributed to the present net effect. 21

In this respect historical explanation indeed resemb les fictional narrative which

traces largely coincidental developments to their fmal resolution. 2 2 Unlike history,

however, fictional narrative can afford to start with a clean slate, usually the b irth

of the protagon ist, and its fascination may d erive in part from the entirely unreal-

istic prom ise of eventual resolution of the p lot. Such (artificial) end points w here

discordant elements are h armonized do not occur in real life which continues un-

abated with no m ental resting place or resolution point in sight. That nineteenth-

century histories attempted to provide master narratives to make hum an life mean-

ingful in no w ay prove s that history as a rea l-life entity is like that at all. Historyin its nineteenth-century m anifestations indeed, l ike art, attempted to fi l l the

vacuum o f mean ing left gaping by the loss of theologically validated mea ning, and

the construction of historical explanation h as resulted in precisely the kind of

parano ia vs. chaos scenario that one finds in so man y m etafictional texts from

Pynchon to De Lillo and Coover.

Liibbe's examination of the folk theory of historical explanations relies on th e

existence of perceivable irregularity, of present-day phen omen a wh ich require a

reference to a (retrospective) series of developments w hich happen ed to result in

their synchronic oddity. The exam ple of the G erman -speaking pop ulation inM innesota illustrates just such a synch ronic difference which h istory naturalizes

by an a ccount of a diachronic series of developmental stages. 23 In truly para-

doxical fashion, that which only can be explained h istorically is precisely some-

thing that resists explanation in the first place 24 because it cannot be referred to

a meaning (Sinn) or causal necessity (Gesetzmafligkeit) but m erely to a series of

coincidences. Ltibbe here concurs with Paul Veyne's illuminating remarks on the

fundam ental utterance of the historian: "T hat's interesting." 25 How ever, Veyne also

erklaren" has been the subject of two stimulating papers by Hermann Liibbe, "Was heiBt: 'Das kann

man nur historisch erklaren," G eschichte — Er eignis — Erz ahlung, 542-554, and "Wieso es keine

Theorie der G eschichte g ibt ," T heorie und Erzahlung in der G eschichte, ed. J iirgen Kocka and Thom as

Nipperday (Munich, 1979), 65-84.

21 This folk model of historical explanation, however, needs to be kept separate from the discourse

of historiography which negates such a loose 'one thing after another' approach, attempting in proper

scholarly fashion to test a number of hypotheses about the distribution and extent of determining

factors.

2 2 As Gossman, "History and Literature," 8-10, points out, Aristotle defined history precisely in

terms of contiguity and made this to be one of his criteria for the superiority of (unified) poetry over

(patchwork) history.

23 Compare especially Liibbe, "Was heiBt," 544f.

2 4 Ibid., 544.

25 See Veyne, C om m ent on icrit l 'histoire, 63-65.



History and Metafiction9gives their due to the historical docum ents and to the sifting and w eighing of

evidence, wherea s Liibbe tries to raise the folk mo del of 'That can only be ex-

plained historically' to the one and only theore tical model. Present-day singulari-

ties may of cou rse alert the historian to interesting outcom es of historical pro-

cesses, but no h istorian resolves such od dities by reference to a loose series of

contingencies per se but will necessarily ask a numb er of mu ch m ore complex

questions. Instead of following the presence of G erma ns in Minnesota in the naive

and sw eeping m anner of folk theory, the historian will outline precisely w hen

what specific groups of G erman s crossed the Atlantic, from w hat social and reli-

gious backgrounds they came, who m oved and who stayed at home, where they

tended to settle in North Am erica, etc. A historian would therefore tend to produce

a history of G erman emigration rather than a concatenation of (very suspect)

causal stages in a series of explanatory step s.

From the previous remarks I would l ike to draw the following conclusions.H istory, l ike f iction, operates by mea ns of em plotm ent and is based not on

em pirical cause-and-effect causality but on motivated sequ entiality, with a super-

added level of teleological significance w hich is (in the case of historiograph y)

explanato ry of an even tually known, and (in the case of fiction) aesthetically or

mo rally-philosophically m otivated, outcome. History and fiction are, how ever,

entirely different in their concep tual m ake-up. History relies on the validation of

historical evidence, which interacts with the argu m entative presentation of

explanatory theses. Fiction, on the other hand, concentrates on individual hum an

experience even if that experience is viewed from th e perspective of a general,philosophical vantage point and constitutes an analysis of the human predicament.

Ricoeur says in reference to historical temporality: "[the epistem ological status of

historical time] appears to have no direct connection to the tim_e_ of the m emory,

expectation, and _circum spection of individual agents. It no longer seems to refer

to the living present of a su bjective consciousness." 26 History and fiction therefore

both concern them selves with the tensions between an actual vs. an ima gined past,

but they also interpret human experience from com plementary points of view, with

history describing huma n interaction on a transindividual plane (reaching into the

realms of the institutional and economic) and fiction depicting the typically human

on the basis of an individual's transpersonal relations. Fiction is therefore tradi-

t ionally m uch closer to evoking for the reader the experience of being in the

world, whe reas history, even in the life of kings and statesm en, has to concentrate

on the larger context of processes affecting entire classes and pop ulations 27 and

therefore treats only secondarily of individuals. What I am trying to suggest is that

there is a necessary functional difference between the fictional and the historical

mod e, but that this difference cannot b e resolved in terms of the traditional dichot-

2 6 T ime and Narrative , 177.

' Compare Cohn's initial statement that history usually deals with a plural subject. "Fictional

versus Historical Lives," 3.



90onika Fludernik

omy between the Real and the Im aginary. Recent accounts of the 'fictionality' of

historical writing have been co rrect in pointing out that historiograp hy, like fiction,

creates an imag inative narrative, configures a plot and do es not directly represent

a historical given which w ould pre-exist the historical discourse as a categorizab le

entity without always already owing its conceptualization to a prior historiographic

discourse, if only that of the witness rep ort. But all this m eans is that the Rea l

cannot be g rasped on the h istorical plane, just as it certainly cannot be grasped in

physics without the interm ediary discourse of theoretical models describing and

thereby constituting the Real even in the present.

If therefore the story of "what h appened" disappears from scientific history (in order, in contrast,

to appear in popular history), or if the narrative of facts takes on the allure of a "fiction" belonging

to a given type of discourse, we cann ot conclude that the referen ce to the real is obliterated. This

reference has instead been som ewhat displaced. It is no longer imm ediately given by narrated or "re-

constituted" objects. It is implied by the creation of "mod els" (destined to make objects "thinkable")proportioned to practices through their confrontation with what resists them, limits them, and m akes

appeal to other m odels; f inally, through the clarif ication of w hat has m ade this activity possible, by

inserting it w ithin a particular (or historical) econom y of social prod uction. 2 8

The fab ricatedness of historical narrative in no way elides the existence of a Re al

even if it fails to circumscribe it, or sketches it only imp erfectly.

Perhaps, too, by holding to the idea of discogrse and to its fabrication, we can b etter apprehend the

nature of the relations that it holds with its other, the real. In this fashion, doesn't langua ge not so

mu ch implicate the status of the reality of which it speaks, as posit i t as that which is other thanitself?"

Both history and fiction therefore need to em ploy an illusionist discourse which

pretends to refer to the R eal, but that real is a historically specific real in the case

of history and an im aginary singular of ideal truth in fictional writing. It isbecause fiction attempts to propose that which has always been true about the

human predicament that it chooses the examp le of individual experience to make

its case. Fiction therefore needs to coh ere with our understanding o f hum an nature

and on ly secondarily with our historical know ledge. Historical writing, on theother hand , is not only mad e up of prior writings and evidence, it also needs to

cohere with these writings and pro ject a continuum, a flow of events and an inter-

active contiguity w ith other know n historical subjects. 3 ° History therefore needs

to be consistent externally as well as internally, and it is precisely this contiguity

with o ther historical accounts that al lows for the fals if ication of historicalexplanations.

I may h ave seemed to suggest that history and fiction are radically and incom -

men surably different from each other. Tha t the above basic dichotom y is not an

2' De Certeau, T he W rit ing of History, 43 .

" Ibid., 21.

3 ° Cf., for instance, Berldiofer, "The Cha llenge," 439-44 1.



History and Metafiction1absolute , however , should require no ins is tence on m y p art . Like Barb= Foley,

I would like to insist that the reader keeps utilizing prior conceptions of the

historical and the f ictional wh ich init ially appea r to be irrecon cilable attitudes

toward s the authen ticity of a specific text. 31 The h istorical novel and the (histori-

cal) biography, how ever, need to be situated precisely in the intermediate realm

between history and fiction, and historiographic metafiction, in its turn, exploits

this very generic indeterminacy , allowing for the ironic (ab)use of, and the self-

reflexive play with, factual param eters. 3 2 Like the h istorical novel, which claims

to be coextensive with historiographic presentations of a specific period, m eta-

fictional texts may a dop t the very shape of historical genres, choosing to write

persona l histories of current even ts (the nonfiction nove l, the new journalism) or

inventing the m emo irs of a historical figure." In this respect, fiction starts to ad opt

the present-thy concerns of the mentalites school, reproducing on an entirely

f ict ional level what historians l ike Le Roy Ladurie performed for med ieval com-mu nities such as M ontaillou. 3 4

H. The Novel and History

At this point we m ay w ell ask what the relation between the novel and history has

been w ithin the fictional text itself. The m ere fact that the n ovel has traditionally

taken history as one of its most favorite them es illustrates that — after the initial

period of differentiation between the tw o genres in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries" — novels and histories have after all rem ained different genres even if

they cross-fertil ized one an other. As rega rds the b eginnings of the no vel , suff ice

it to note how crucial was the importance of the autobiography in the early

struggle for the truth claim of fiction. And it is no coinciden ce that (auto)biogra-

phy is precisely that subgenre of history which most closely resembles the

experientiality o f narrative presentation. A fter this initial period, history sho ws up

in the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century novel primarily in two

disguises — in the subgenre of the historical novel, and in the genera l referential

factor within the narrative text.

' Foley, T elling the Tr uth, 36f .

3 2 See ibid., 107-112, where Foley first retracts her earlier either-or position.

" Joseph W. Turner, "The Kinds of Historical Fiction: An Essay in Definition and Methodology,"

Genre, 12 (1979), 335.

3 4 See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, M ontaillou: C athars and C atholics in a French V illage, 1294 -1324, transl. by Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth, 1981).

"See, especially the ground-breaking study of Michael McKeon, T he O rigins of the English Novel,

1600-1740 (Balt imore , 1987). As regard s the late medieval and ea rly sixteenth-century p eriods, the epic

and the romance were opposed to the history and the vita, but the crucial concepts of historical

evidence, even if only on the basis of personal witness reports, did not bring about the functional

differentiation that began to emerge in the second half of the sixteenth century. See also Lennard J.

Davis's Factual Fictions: T he O rigins of the English Novel (New York, 1983).



92

onika Fludernik

To start w ith the latter, all fiction, particularly of the nineteen th century , situates

itself in the realm of real geography and real history — with very few utopian

exceptions. Even the m ost fabulous romances such as Ha wthorne's T he Marb le

Faun or, earlier, Charles Brockden B rown 's tale of Edgar H untly's adventures in

the Am erican wilds at least pretend to a realistically conceived location of their

unbelievable and fantastic plots. To ch oose a fictional location in the dim past is

always at the sam e time to invoke historical knowledge, even if that knowledge

m ay be of the vaguest. Such history as a background m ay be of a variety of

shapes and m ay reach w ell into the recent past, a topic that is in fact thematized

in ma ny Victorian novels, for instance in G eorge Eliot's M ill on the Floss.'The so-called historical novel therefore constitutes only an inten sification of

such hybridization of real and fictional reference within the ordinary run-of-the-

mill tale of the nineteenth cen tury. As Scott's work dem onstrates very forcefully,

the distinctions between the historical novel on the one hand and the rom ance ortale of contem porary life on the other are fluid in the extreme. Historical reference

in the historical novel appears to be a m atter of proportion: em phasis on the real

historical events with secondary emp hasis on the me rely fictional protagonists,

pastness or remoteness from the aud ience's geographical and tem poral location.

Mu ch of the concept of the historical novel rem ains a matter of taste or expedien-

cy. W ar and Peace is much less of a historical novel than T hornton W ilder's T h e

Ides of M arch, and George Eliot's Romola m uch less so than Yourcenar's

M emoirs of Hadrian. 37

Present-day historiographic metafiction therefore cannot be fruitfully opposedto a un ified, generically discrete concept o f the historical novel except with rega rd

to form, and th at only in the sense that twe ntieth-century self-styled historical

novels usually imitate the realist novel (and therefore also the nineteenth-centu ry

historical novel) as well as com plying with a definition of the historical-real that

has become outmoded in both professional historiography and progressive fiction.

If postmod ernist works of fiction as well as the non -fiction novel therefore 'feel'

different from our pro totypical concept of the h istorial novel, this is because

historical 'reality' itself is now conceived of as fantastic and chaotic and b ecause

the writing styles employed in postm odernist writing deliberately mirror this pre-

dicame nt of general disorientation. Thu s Pynchon's Gravity's R ainbow includes

'snatches' from th e 'history' of World War II which are very sp ecific, yet closer

to the history of private life than to the traditional schoolbook history texts pur-

36 There are num erous references in Mill to the good old times as well as to a village chronicle

with the town's legend of the Holy Virgin appearing to St . Ogg. Comp are my " Subversive Irony:

Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative in M ill on the Floss," REA L, 8 (1991-1992), 164 fn. 15, and 168.

37 The d efinition of the historical novel is taken for granted in m any studies, a failing po inted out

persuasively by Turner, "T he K inds of H istorical Fiction," who proposes instead three types of h istori-

cal novel based on the texts' relation to docum entary evidence.



History and Metafiction3porting to deal with ou r recent past. Whereas, in the classic type of the historical

novel, political events and ma jor political figures were resp onsible for the h istoric-

ity or authenticity index of these writings, postmo dernist fiction has already been

informed b y the mo st recent developm ents in historiography . It is therefore not

really fruitful to exclude such me tafictional novels from the genre of the h istorical

novel since their departure from nineteenth-century models is due to a reconceptu-

alization of the historical and of historiography as m uch as to a difference in

fictional styles and techn iques. Historiographic m etafiction, from this perspective,

appears to be simply the up dated late-twentieth-century version of precisely the

sam e genre (the historical novel) which has m eanw hile adapted to twentieth-

century conceptualizations of the n ovel and of the historical.

M any recent developm ents in fictional writing, even if they are not proclaimed

to be "historiographic," nevertheless reprodu ce or re-enact new form s of histori-

ograph y. The h istory of private life, for instance, as a genre seem s to convergeeasily with writing strategies observable in minority literature. Thus presentations

of black comm unity life are freque ntly told from the inside perspective of a few

protagonists who help the non-black reader to em pathize with black attitudes, to

subm erge herself within a culture that initially seemed foreign and therefore

incomp rehensible. Such presentations of black com m unity l i fe very c losely

resemble the techniques of historians attempting to resurrect the 'feel' of private

l ife in the Midd le Ages, the experience o f 'heretical' com m unities, and th e like.

They a re necessarily predicated on the presuppo sition that the subject of (hi)story

is the Other, whether in the shape of the exotic past or the present-day unknow n.A brief survey of other postmod ern w ritings yields a similar convergence, an

interlacing of the fictional and the h istorical-real. Not only is real life dem onstra-

bly more fantastic and grotesque than enlightenment culture would have vouched

for. Areas of what used to be called superstition, fantasy or m adness are slowly

regaining recognition as h istorically significant phenom ena w hose 'reality' consists

primarily in the authenticity and presentness of these phenom ena for their 'experi-

encers.' 3 8 Historians an d fiction w riters alike suspen d d isbelief, taking seriously

the mentalites, the i l lusions and p rejudices of med ieval or present-day witches,

faith healers, religious fanatics, and so on. In this m anner historiography ha s in

fact repeated developm ents perceivable already in the great novels of this century

which have noto riously chosen to present the psyches of 'marg inal' individuals —

the criminal, the insane, the hom eless, or 'the preterite,' as Pynchon calls them .

From the T in Drum to Gravity's Rainbow, from Beckett's fictional personae to

38 These authentic experiences cannot, however, be treated historically as insights into the psyches

of historical subjects — the interiority of experience remains irretrievable. Historiography can discuss

such experiences only in an external fashion as practices and routines and rituals, quoting internal

evidence only as the direct discourse of the Other w hich rem ains 'framed' by the naturalizing historical

discourse. See Veyne, Comment on icrit l'histoire, 212-249, on the crucial notion of praxis as

disjoined from consciousness, especially the example of human sacrifice (216).



94

onika Fludernik

M arilinne Robinson's Housekeeping, from the portrayal of communes and social

rebel groups to the depiction of the ha rsh reality of im migrants and guest workers'

lives, fiction has increasingly come to assert the exceptional and hitherto m arginal

over and against the Am erican or European default value of the WASP family, the

bourgeois m iddle-class household. That type of history is taken so mu ch forgranted that it can now on ly be parodied, so that serious treatments of m iddle

class life appear to have retreated to the popular novel, British fiction, and TV a nd

film culture.

Such choices on the p art of historians and novelists alike to concen trate on

ethnic identity or societal ma rginality and on the precariousness of hu ma n exis-

tence obviously reflect both ideological and aesthetic preoccupations if not agen-

das, and they display a qu ite intentional disregard for rationality and social con-

formity. The unp lanned, the random , the uncanny, the paradoxical, the fabulous

as well as the irrational, otherwordly and mythic have com e to replace the positionof control , objectivity and order. It is no new s that the b att le betw een these

dichotom ies lies at the heart of the f iction of Pyncho n or H eller , Coover or

DeLino. Indeed, the explicit rejection of the Western h um anist and technological

tradition is here b eing carried out in fictional terms, feeding not m erely from a

political 60s' culture mentality but also from the m ore intellectual attitudes of anti-

colonialism an d anti-logocentrism. This resurrection of the fabulous, the my thic

and the occult parallels the writings of the so-called Ma gic realists which are

precisely of a postcolonial provenance. Rushdie' s M idnight's Children, like Pyn-

chon's scenarios, has a nightm arish quality of chaos, but this resistance to orde r

and rationality is more than offset by the imaginative exuberance and playfulness

of the exercise (a feature prevalent also in the Latin Am erican novel) and by the

reinvention of the mythic.

One of the m ost noticeable developments in recent fiction, particularly in what

is here called historiographic m etafiction, seems to b e the reinvention of m yth as

a viable attitude in relation to the past. With the disappeara nce of causality as the

ordering myth of historiography an d with the dem ise of both causality and teleolo-

gy in the realm o f fiction, my thic accounts have again taken over. These mythsare, however, of a large variety of form s and con tents, although they share a

hum an rather than d ivine texture. If history is no longer experienced as a rational

process, then th e com peting genre s of oral storytelling, of the tall tale, of family

history retailed in ever mo re fabulous shape, or of the accounts of otherword ly ex-

periences, seep in to replace, restructure and rewrite historical conciousness. In the

absence of accep ted param eters for verification, historical 'truth' can no longer be

invoked for such accounts — although their subversive force is decisively restricted

within historiography due to its institutional framing: heretics' experiences keep

being oppose d to the views of their antagonists, and the realm of the purely expe-riential (visions, religious ecstatic mystical experience) remains off limits as that

which can not be ch ecked against 'facts.' In historiographic metafiction, by con-

trast, myths frequently becom e ma jor reading models that require operative assent



History and Metafiction5within the fictional world even if this suspension of disbelief is soon counteracted

by the au dience's 'real world' experience. As with the m ore traditional fantastic,

the postmodern magic realist text requires sympathetic agreement, and that even

in quite prom inently self-reflexive texts such as M idnight's Children.

Before turning to George G arrett's T he Succession—a perfect examp le of the

successful merging of historical and fictional concerns — let me briefly point to

the scale of techniques em ployed in such merg ings and inter-correlations between

'reality, ' 'history' and 'f iction' as they ap pear in a num ber of h istoriographic

m etafictions. Some of these texts concentrate on a m ajor historical (i.e. 'real')

event and relate it by m eans of fictional techniques. This is the case of the non -

f iction novel, for instance T rum an Cap ote's In C old Blood, or of the various

accounts of the Rosenberg case (Doctorow's T he Book of Daniel, Coover's T he

Pub lic Burning, Evanier's R ed Love) . Fictionalizing techniques here include not

only the inevitably fictional insight into the p syche of the various protagonists, andthe replacement of protagonists' names (thereby creating a kind of roman a clef),"

but also the fictional prerogative of invention (of minor char acters, of events and

scenes, and of course of protagonists' dialogue, mem ories and thoughts) and of

the selection, rearrangem ent and "fa lsification" of the historical evidence.°Other

postmode rnist novels merely include historiographic episodes (Doctorow's R ag

Time), and these m ay be fantastically distorted as well (Cohen's Beautiful Losers

or Reed's Flight to C anada). Others are " historical" only in the sense that they

lend them selves to being read as an im plicit presentation of curren t historical

events even though , literally, they do not refer to present-day concerns (Heller'sCatch-22 or M ailer's W hy are we in Vietnam?). Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse -Five,

l ike Pynch on's Gravity's R ainbow , presents historical events from the perspe ctive

of individual experience, and therefore resem bles a view of history close to that

propounded in people's stories about their wartime experiences (e.g. in oral history

collections such as Studs T erkel's T he Good W ar). One m ay come across a wide

spectrum of such alternative 'handlings' of history, from m ore historiographical

or at least biographical novels all the way to texts which m erely play with the

presence of h istorical characters and situations, and to reflections on historical and

mythical know ledge with little 'real' historical background.

I will now turn to G eorge G arrett's T he Succession (1983 ) as an instance of the

use of m etafictional technique s in the service of the fullest possible evocation of

historical circum stances, and — at the same time — as an examp le of a post-

mo dernist novel of indeterm inacy in w hich its historical chronology superficially

helps to ancho r some of the disparate events w ithin an order of sorts. In fact, as

I wil l argue, Garrett 's text can be rega rded as indicative of a n ew historical

consciousness within the realm of f ict ion, a m odel for a new historical novel

which reflects more recent theoretical interest in the past for its own sake. 4 '39 Cf. Turner's category of the "disguised historical novel." "The Kinds of Historical Fiction."

'° Cf. Turner, ibid.

41 The allusion is to the New Historicism and to cultural criticism in its analysis of sixteenth



96

onika Fludernik

III.he Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James: History as Fiction

and Fiction as History

G eorge G arrett's two novels T he Death of the Fox (1971) and The Succession

(1983) comb ine fictional techniques an d historical or historiographical preoccup a-

t ions in a m anner that init ially appears to be very different from that of thehistoriographic m etafictionalists. Whereas Pynchon and o thers emph asize people's

subjection to external forces of political or ideological provenance, G arrett, who

is after all dealing with the efficient intelligence service during the reign of Que en

Elizabeth, nevertheless ma nages to keep individuals and their mo tives, failings,

am bitions and desires at the center of attention. Nor is Ga rrett tempted by g reat

rem ythologizations. Although m uch of the no vel has no specific historical back-

ground , inventing m inor characters and their personal affairs, G arrett goes out of

his way to evoke a historical flavor rather than a fantastic-fictional one, and that

in spite of treating subjects that would ea si ly lend themselves to a fantastic and

mythologizing treatment. Both novels deal with the Elizabethan-Jacobean period,

T he Death of the Fox describing Sir Walter Ralegh's life and death, T he Succes-sion providing an overview of the reign of Elizabeth I from a few chosen per-

spectives.

T he Succession centres on the relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and James

VI of Scotland, her successor, or it does so at least superficially. The novel opens

and closes with a scene from 1603, hinting at the q ueen's intuition of her own

death and portraying Christmastide as m erry even for the poor of h er realm. Thisis the closest G arrett gets to a m ythology of the so-called "g olden" Elizabethan

age wh ich is otherwise presented in som e of its harsher and darker colors. The

relationship between E lizabeth and Jam es also occupies the very center of the

novel, where we get extracts from their corresponde nce. The succession of the

queen, a top ic on which she refuses to' pron ounce un til the very last, is the central

them atic unit of the novel, with noblem en's rebellions and the entire secret service

engineered by Sir Francis Walsingham an d Sir Robert Cecil trying to ensure the

queen's safety (a m ajor risk because no successor has been n am ed). The nobility's

behavior is also motivated by the prospects of the queen 's demise and the nece ssi-ty to inform the heir of this event,' or to be on the correct person's side ("Secre-

tary: 1603," 51-55 ).

In this net of political intrigue m inor characters are swallowed up . There are

three of them , all engulfed by the political whirlpool. The messen ger, a merry lad

whose career w as turned into that of a spy in the service of Lord W ill iam Cecil

( the father of Sir Robert) , provides the rea der w ith an insight into ordinary

people's concerns, rubbing shoulders as he does with innkeepers, their patrons and

through nineteenth-century literary and non-literary discourses.

42 See the "Courtier" section, The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James (New York, 1991),

475-481.



History and Metafiction7scullery wenches. The m essenger com es on stage five times, and in these five sec-

tions, which narrate a kind of 'interior mo nologue,' 43 one gets a d escription of his

indirect presence at the birth of Jam es VI, of his trip south to L ondon (a tour de

force which introduces a geographically determined line of development — from

the Scottish border to Londo n) and of a series of reminiscences which provide a

crash course in early Elizabethan h istory: the history of the queen's accession to

the throne, the interlude of B loody M ary, Sir William Cecil's ability to choose the

right party, Elizabeth's. The precariou sness of court life and the dange rs of exile,

the discomforts of being a spy and the m eagre financial rewards of such work are

all detailed compassionately through th ese supposed m em ories. As it turns out in

the final section, this trip to Londo n is yet to be perform ed, the reward (including

a bath) still far ahead in the un certain future.

The second person who is swallowed up by the manipulations engineered by the

story's 'doers' is the priest. As we learn from the priest's section, which consistsof the papers found on him at his arrest, the priest is a rather naive and unstable

person, who opted out of a career at court and w as unable to reach a reconciliation

with his father. On the other hand, the docum ents also shed a substantial light on

the eventual strength of his faith. The priest is portrayed as an all too hum an

person, rocked with doubts at his own ability to withstand tem ptation and torture,

but his writings also display a naive childlike trust and belief in G od w hich

illum inates the entire novel w ith a spiritual light. By the end of the priest's section

one ha s conceived a great respect for this man in spite of his obtrusive naivety,

particularly for his hum anity and hum ility. The priest's documents are followedby a letter to Lord Walsingham which apo logizes to him tha t the priest has died

under torture without giving away any names. The weakest character in the book

has therefore proved the m ost courageous, and he is the only one (except for the

reivers of section seven) who is not harassed into sycophan cy and opp ortunism.

The third unimportant character is that of the player. For fmancial reward the

player has acted as a spy and is now nea rly kil led because he m ight know too

mu ch. Luckily, the documents wh ich he gathered turn out to be harmless, and so

he even receives som e mo re m oney. Narratologically speaking, this section is a

major tour d e force since it is written in the second p erson form, from the per-

spective4 4 of the secret agent who comes to get the docum ents, and who is in turn

addressed as y ou (in the dialogue) by the player. The "Player" section also com -

plem ents the novel's picture of the Elizabethan w orld by the locales of the theatre

and the tavern.

43 Actually, the narrative is third person omniscient present tense, with much monologizing by the

protagonist in what needs to be defined as present-tense free indirect discourse.

" That is to say, the you refers to the protagonist, the uncanny visitor who attends a performance

of the player and then goes on a drinking spree with him before he finally gets down to his real

purpose.



98

onika Fludernik

Besides these three m inor characters the reader is a lso introduced to the

"Reivers," Scottish cattle thieves who engage in large-scale plunder across the

English borde r. The reivers are courage ous people w ho live by their skill, and are

as yet little affected by the p olitical events which im pinge on the other chara cters,

thriving as they do on the political differences between Scotland and England. The

"R eivers" section consists of a storytelling session at which tall tales and gh ost

stories are related. The effect is an implicit histoire de mentalites of these people

which also allows us a g limp se at their custom s, life style and professional risks.

The rem aining sections of the book deal with two more prom inent characters:

the above-m entioned courtier, Sir Robert Carey, who w as the first to tell James

VI of his succession to the En glish throne but fell into disgrace and recovered

preference u nder Ch arles I; and Secretary Sir Rob ert Cecil , one of the m ain

political figures of the 'story.'

As one can alread y gather from this summ ary, there is no real unitary plot tothis novel, it is a fragm ented co llection of vignettes w hich are linked by th e

reader's knowledge of historical events — Queen Elizabeth's accession, the birth

of James VI, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (watched with disbelief by the

priest), the Earl of Essex rebellion, the death of the Queen. Unlike m ost histories

of the Elizabethan period in which the q ueen takes the center position and every-

thing revolves around her, Elizabeth here m erely provides a frame w hich is also

the horizon of her life, her death; but the events appear to be m anipulated through

others to whom she succum bs and behind w hom she hides. L ikewise James ,

although a m ajor protagonist in principle, is somebody with very little substanceand riddled with great doubts. He apparently succumbs to the w iles of the Queen

without ever having met her, comm unicating with her by proxy, by letter. One of

the Queen's successes is that James allows his m other to be executed, swayed by

the hazy p rospect of his own su ccession to Elizabeth. Instead of a retelling, an

ordering of h istorical events, one gets a series of personal experiences which allow

an insight into the Elizabethan mentalite, and beyond this — through the charac-

ters' involvement w ith political events — open themselves to a larger historical

perspective from the pe ople's vantage point. G arrett's Succession therefore pro-

duce s a 'history' very close to the Annales style, thus lending a mo re precise

m eaning to its definition as a historical novel: it deals with a spec ific historicalperiod and it writes history in a recognizably historiographic m ode. 45

On the other hand, The Succession can also be described as a venture in m eta-

fiction. For on e thing, the presentation is a fictional one in m ost parts of the boo k,

excepting a few d ocume nts and the reference to actual historical figures. These

historical figures are, however, described in the intimacy of their m inds in a

reconstruction of their character and their m usings which can hard ly claim his-

torical validity. This is apparent from the start on the ba sis of fictional technique.

45 That historiographic mode, of course, does not comprise the linguistic and particularly narra-

tological aspects of the novel which quite decisively put the text into the fiction category of writing.



History and Metafiction9Although m ost sections are written in a third person om niscient present tense

mod e, they keep shifting into the third person character's interior m onologue or

free indirect discourse and have long ish sections of pure internal focalization. This

technique recalls both the oral style of an interventive narrator (the third person

present tense narrative is colloquial) and at the sam e time a llows for a trans-

personal presentation of Elizabethan E ngland. Mo reover, it also makes possible

the typologically imp ossible: an external inside view of characters' m inds. Such

a contradictory technique immediately emphasizes the fictional nature of the text

and it also constitutes a first m etafictional eleme nt.

T he Succession is metafictional, additionally, on account of its fragm ented

structure which foregro unds selection and juxtapositon. Particularly with regard

to the chronological reahn 46 this fractured discourse acquires a m etafictional tone

— after all, the mu lti-perspectivism can be said to realistically reflect the absence

of unitary m eaning, the lack of historical interpretation.T he Succession therefore com bines both the historical and the metafictional in

what on e could describe as a mode rn history in the shape of fiction or a novel in

the shape of Annales historiography. It is on this paradoxical middlegroun d that

the experientiality of the 'new' h istory and the standard experientiality of na rrative

m eet to prod uce a text that is bare of traditional causality (earlier a defining

property for both history and fiction) and wh ich keeps myth in abeyance — that,

too, a traditional h istoriographic concern. This refusal of mythological signification

and the reverting to au thentic agents and events can be l inked also with the

inception of the novel as a genre where m yths, too, needed to be oppo sed (bothin the shape of the epic and in that of the prose rom ance). The Succession there-

fore appears to m e to l ink the historiographic and the (meta)fictional in a truly

remarkable m anner, in a manifestation of a new parad igm or genre. Such a new

non-fabulous historical novel will have profited from the experim ents of earlier

postm odernist writing techniques a nd w ill resist the old historical novel's implica-

tion with outm oded historical paradigms.

IV. Concluding Remarks

That T he Succession is not the only such star on the horizon has recently been

documented b y a Bri ti sh novel , Adam T horpe's Ulverton (1992). Unlike The

Succession, Ulv erton has a chronological structure, stringing together episodes

from successive stages of the history of Ulverton, a village in Berkshire. Th ese

vignettes are highly fictional, consisting as they d o in a series of tales by form er

villagers or even internal mono logues, written diary accounts and, finally, a film

script. Although Ulverton appears to b e less of a historical novel than G arrett's

' The various sections center on the Queen's death in 1603 but are arranged in seemingly

haphazard fashion, also incorporating many reminiscences: 1603-1566-1603-1587-1626 (1575), 1566,

1602, 1602-1603, 1566, 1626, 1603, 1566, 1602, 1626 (1603), 1566, 1602-1603.



100

onika Fludernik

piece since it does not co nfine itself to a recognizable h istorical period, it is in fact

more of a history, lending itself to be read as the docum entation of the evolution

of m entalities of En glish village folk from the Civil War to the present. Ulverton

therefore dem onstrates what fiction at its very best can do in the historical realm,

joining hands with the best of historiograp hy in an evocation of lived hum an

experience resurrected from the past.

It is now time to p ull the threads together. I have argue d in this essay for a

basic difference between fiction and historical writing, a difference that does not

necessarily appear from the actual shape of the text. On the contrary, fiction and

history appear to differ in their paradigma tic emph asis on the experience of a

restricted group of individuals on the one han d, and, on the other, on the trans-

personal experience of a specific social group, class or nation in their synchronic

or diachronic bu t in any case systematic relation to institutions and political,social, ideological and religious settings w ith which this gro up of historical sub-

jects is imp licated. Whereas the subject of fiction therefore typically concerns the

experience of frequently one specific human being and— across this medium — the

quality of general hum an experience, mor es and ethics, historical subjects remain

specific to precise historical locations and points in time an d their study serves to

explain not human nature in general (a knowledge of which is presupp osed and

enters by way of establishing m otivation) but a specif ic society's or group of

people's historical situatedness w ith a view towa rds generalizing towards the

historical specificity of that grou p, that society, that particular era or tow nship.Th is basic distinction betw een history and fiction needs to be oppo sed to the

ma ny similarities that exist between the tw o realms of w riting. Both fiction and

history are discourses that reconfigure plots and therefore construct (alternative)

realities rather than — as their rhetoric pretends — mimetically representing them.

Both deploy, and rely on, the illusion of referentiality, but only historical writing

sifts (prior documentary) sources and comments on the establishment of one plot

outline or one explanation rather than the other.

Ha ving said this much, one needs to then po int out that history and fiction easily

overlap in all possible sorts of way s. Historical writing not only relies on fictional

techniques, it can be read as fiction (M ichelet, Ma caulay), and it has more recent-

ly taken account of ever m ore private areas of l ife which had before this been

reserved to (auto)biography and fiction. Secondly, there have always been num er-

ous genres and w riting modes situated on the bord erline of fiction and history: all

the biographical and autobiographical literature (including travellogues), the so-

called historical novel, and w ithin the novel itself the well-known interm ixing of

historical m aterial which constitutes part of its 'reality e ffect.'

The h istorical novel, in particular, is much less uniform a gen re than one wou ld

initially suppose, yielding a num ber of different types and co nstellations which to

no negligible extent depend on the d ifferent meanings of 'history' and 'the

historical' that operate in them . Besides Turn er's three types of the historical



History and Metafiction01

nover (that which creates a past, that which disguises a documented p ast and that

which recreates a docu me nted past), one can go on to catalogue fictional histories

of an en tire era, the f ict ional fam ily chron icle , works wh ich deal with m ajor

political events or have m ajor pol it ical f igures am ong their cast , novels that

recreate a historical period by w ay of gen re painting (Eco's Nam e of the R ose),

and so forth . Not only are different conceptions of history at play (the historical

as the diachronic, history as that which can b e looked up in official history books,

history as that wh ich concern s people and events of historical factuality. ..),

historical novels also im itate ways of writing history, and it should therefore come

as no surprise that postm odernist attemp ts at the historical novel im itate both

fictional innovations and historiographic developments.

H istoriographic m etafict ion for these reasons straddles the f iction/history

boundary in triple and qua druple manner, radicalizing the hyb ridization which was

already the key note of the historical novel and gleefully subverting any gen refeatures of traditional fiction or historiography. This is not the place to provide a

categorization of the man y texts which belong to historiographic m etafiction (a

definition that would p rove even hard er to com e by than for the 'traditional'

historical novel). One development can , however, be noted in the direction of a

renewed interest in the past for its own sake which can now b e approached w ith

the sophisticated toolbox of postmodern ist writing techniques and em barked on in

the l ight of state-of-the-art historiographic m ethodology. Whereas m uch of the

exuberant an d rebellious spirit of the 60s and 70s went into a debun king of serious

historical questions, exploding instead the received historical mythology o f greatmen and H istory with a capital H, more recent historiographic m etafiction has

been increasingly concerned w ith the l ife of ' the people' in former a ges or w ith

diachronic developmen t of p eople's attitudes and beliefs . I have chosen T he

Succession for my central example of such a concern, but similar attempts can be

observed in several contemporary kinds of writing — always provided that one is

willing to ap ply a particular conception o f the historical to these texts. I am think-

ing of Toni M orrison's Beloved and Jazz , Adam Thorpe's Ulverton or Graham

Swift's Waterland (as well as his mo re recent novels), or of Lawrence Norfolk's

Lam pr iere's Dictionary and Patrick Stiskind's T he Perfume. A new, m ore serious,

mo de of historiographic metafiction seem s to be hatching, one that is less playful,

m ore specifically concern ed with 'history' (in different ways) and less simplis-

tically and d ichotomously mytho logical than m ost of the historiographic m eta-

fictions of the 1960s and 1970s. Should on e therefore , as I have sug gested, desist

from calling such texts historiographic metafictions and talk instead of "the new

historical novel"? That, I Mist, history will tell.

fludernik history and metafiction

Documents

new history

factuality of history

metafiction experientiality

french historical discourse

historiographic metafiction

thewriting of history

mythhistorical metafiction

historical understanding