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HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION: THE PASTIME OF PAST TIME

(A POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM)

Linda Hutcheon
She is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian
Studies. Hutcheon describes her herself as "intellectually promiscuous", as she brings a cross-disciplinary
approach to her work.
Historiographic Metafiction
Works of historiographic metafiction are "those well-known and popular novels which are both
intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages".
Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form, with reliance upon textual
play, parody and historical re-conceptualization.
Historical Fiction
It is a literary genre in which the action takes place in the past. The settings are drawn from
history, and often contains historical persons.
Works in this genre often portray the manners and social conditions of the persons or times
presented in the story, with attention paid to period detail.
Artistic license is permitted in regard to presentation, subject matter, and historical facts.
Part -I
Literature and History
They have both been seen to derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective
truth
They are both identified as linguistic constructs
Highly conventionalized in their narrative forms
Not at all transparent either in terms of language or structure
They appear to be equally intertextual
Historiographic metafiction keeps distinct its formal auto-representation and its historical
context, and in so doing problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge, because there
is no reconciliation, no dialectic here just unresolved contradiction
Art and Historiography

Aristotle a historian can only focus on events from the past, while a poet can focus on what
might happen, allowing he or she to deal with more universals
Many historians have incorporated fictional representations to create imaginative versions of
their historical, real worlds
It is part of the postmodernist stand to confront the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation,
the particular/the general, and the present/the past
Ethical concerns in the eighteenth century about truth in narratives
Most readers today had the pleasure of a double awareness of both fictiveness and a basis in the
real as do readers of contemporary historiographic metafiction
Include/Exclude
Insider/outsider
The eighteenth-century concern for lies and falsity
A postmodern concern for the multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s)
Postmodern concern of the subjectivity of those who write history
Fiction is superior to history
History is limited to particular occurrences
Historiographic metafiction works to demarginalize the literary through confrontation with the
historical, and it does so both thematically and formally
Christa Wolfs No Place on Earth as an example
Part -II
The structuralist point of view literature is not a discourse that can or must be false, cannot be
subjected to the test of truth; it is neither true nor false
Post modenism truths are plural; there is no falsity, only others versions
Hutcheon believes that the interplay of the historiographic and the metafictional contributes to the
inability to claim both authentic representation and inauthentic copy alike
Hutcheon suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both
cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological
The concern of the subjectivity of historical accounts is a recurring theme in postmodernism.

Hutcheon points to both the need to separate and to the danger of separating fiction and history as
narrative genres
Historys problem is verification, while fictions is veracity
Doctorow says: History is kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a
kind of speculative history . . . by which the available data for the composition is seen to be greater
and more various in its sources than the historian proposes
Fredric Jameson says, historical representation is surely in crisis as is the linear novel
In reporting a true version of history, historians should instead focus on a conceptof history.
Postmodern historiographic metafiction has already accomplished this task
She does not believe that history and fiction adopt equivalent representational procedures or
constitute equivalent modes of cognition
Part -III
Historiographic metafiction attempts to distinguish between fiction and history, clouding the
difference in the process.
She believes that the simultaneous and overt assertion and crossing of boundaries is more
postmodern
She states that historiographic metafiction, not historical fiction, serves to narrate the past
Postmodern Fiction &Historical Fiction
Historical fiction is that which is modeled on historiography to the extent that it is motivated and
made operative by a notion of history as a shaping force
Lukcs believes that
The historical novel could enact historical process by presenting a microcosm which
generalizes and concentrates
The protagonist should be representational of all the humanly and socially essential
determinants
The protagonists of historiographic metafiction represent the other, representing the postmodern
belief in plurality
Hutcheon Lukcs
The use of detail in the historical novel is insignificant

Seeing it only as a means of achieving historical faithfulness, for making concretely clear the
historical necessity of a concrete situation
The validity of that detail is immaterial.
Historiographic metafiction plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record
In historiographic metafiction the characters are often seen trying to decipher the data they have
collected
Historiographic metafiction acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized
accessibility to us today
Historical figures the role of secondary characters in the historical novel.
historical figures are often incorporated into historical novels a authenticating the fictional text
Metafictional postmodern novels question our ability to know the past.
Historiographic metafiction is interested in making readers examine historical texts as a means of
authenticating the fictional text.
Non-fictional novel
More a form of documentary narrative which deliberately used techniques of fiction in an overt
manner and which usually made no pretence to objectivity or presentation
Overtly personal and provisional journalism, autobiographical in impulse and performative in
impact
This non-fictional novel questioned who was responsible for creating truth
Many see connections between the non-fictional novel and historiographic metafiction.
Both stress the power to create unities
Both aim to avoid a reduction of a unified meaning
Although acknowledging the similarities, Hutcheon does see distinctions
Part -IV
Interaction of historiography and fiction
Historiographic metafiction utilizes two modes of narration, multiple points of view and an openly
controlling narrator, that blurs subjectivity.
Neither of these modes does there exist a narrator who, with any confidence, is certain of his or
her ability to know the past

Hutcheon alludes to the postmodern technique of parody as a means of incorporating the past into
the present
The use of intertextuality, as a means in which to close the gap between past and present or the
reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context
Historys referents are believed true and those in fiction are believed false.
Postmodernism questions our ability to know a reality and to be able to represent it in language
Postmodern fiction questions reference. The issue is no longer to what empirically real object in
the past does the langue of history refer?; it is more to which discursive context could this
language belong? To which prior textualizations must we refer?
Hutcheon focuses on the theory that the referent in historiographic metafiction is already in
existence in the discourses of our culture, and it is this connection that acknowledges its identity
as construct, rather than as simulacrum of some real outside
Whose version of history exists?
Hutcheon quotes Hayden White when he says: every representation of the past has specifiable
ideological implications
Subjectivity, intertextuality, reference, and ideology are many of the characteristics of the
relationship between history and fiction in postmodernism, and Hutcheon explains that it is the
narrative that can encompass them all.
Hutcheon moves on to present the postmodern view that reality is created by cultural
representations
Munz who believes that events are configured into facts by being related to conceptual matrices
within which they have to be imbedded if they are to count as facts
Semiotically constructed contexts
She stresses the importance of remembering that our history is a semiotic transmission, again
reinforcing the postmodern idea that our history is a reflection of those who record it