UNIT 8: HISTORIOGRAPHIC

METAFICTION
 Introduction
The term Historiographic Metafiction was coined by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in
A Poetics of Postmodernism. These Postmodern works are both intensely self-reflexive
and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages. Historiographic
metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form that relies upon textual play,
parody and historical re-conceptualization. It has the characteristics of Postmodernist
fiction we have already mentioned.

History

Why the interest in history? History becomes a site of debate and contest for
Postmodernist theorists. History is an ambiguous term: it refers to what happened in the
past, as well as to the narration of what happened. History refers to interpretations of the
past. It is what we, in the present, make of the past. No account of the past can recover
the past as it was, because the past is not an account, but events and situations. For
Hayden White: “Any historical representation aims at having real events display the
coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life that is and can only be
imaginary.”

The narratives which constitute “History,” with a capital “H,” are interpretations of
events from the vantage point of those who have the power and influence to write
History. As Hayden White argues “Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to
give to real events the form of story.... What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by
the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display
the formal coherency of a story? In the enigma of this wish, this desire, we catch a
glimpse of the cultural function of narrativizing discourse in general, an intimation of
the psychological impulse behind the apparently universal need not only to narrate but
to give to events an aspect of narrativity.”
Characteristics of Historiographic Metafiction

Historiographic metafiction is one kind of postmodern novel which rejects projecting

present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of
the individual past event. It also suggests a distinction between “events” and “facts” that
is one shared by many historians. Since the documents become signs of events, which
the historian transmutes into facts, as in historiographic metafiction, the lesson here is
that the past once existed, but that our historical knowledge of it is semiotically
transmitted.

We know the past only through other texts, so all history is necessarily intertextual.
(Remember the importance of intertextuality in Postmodern fiction: City of Glass is a
good example that you all have read.)

Finally, Historiographic metafiction, as Hutcheon argues, often points to the fact by

using the paratextual conventions of historiography to both inscribe and undermine the
authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations. What we get is
historical parody. As Hutcheon argues: “To parody is not to destroy the past. In fact, to
parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. And this is the postmodern
paradox”, and “What I mean by ‘parody’ . . . is not the ridiculing imitation of the
standard theories and definitions . . . The collective weight of parodic practice suggests
a redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling
of difference at the heart of similarity. In historiographic metafiction . . . This parody
paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity.”

Thus, Historiographic metafiction questions the constructed, artificial nature of

meaning. It does not aspire to tell the real truth, as much as to question whose truth gets
to be told.

Joseph Heller (1923-1999)

His novel Catch-22 was the black humor novel most

reflective of the increasing unreality of the public
scene. Heller was in the Air Force in Italy during
WWII and this is the setting of Catch-22, but not its
true subject. Heller acknowledges his actual subject as
‘the contemporary regimented business society depicted against the background of
universal sorrow and inevitable death that is the lot of all of us.’ The Cold War and the
political situation of the 1950s is more to the point than WWII. There are deliberate
anachronisms in the novel. These include farcical versions of the loyalty oaths required
for various federal and state positions, and so on.

The comic aspect of the novel is present all through it, and most of the times it works
but reducing to absurdum the scenes without being far from conventional political logic.
Heller most effectively mocks this ideology by concentrating more on its formal
structure than its content. In fact, Catch-22 is a novel based on logic rather than on
character, a classic illustration of the belief that postmodernist writers have displaced
ego psychology with an emphasis on ‘the while of cognitive faculty and just how we
make sense of patterns’. The major rhetorical devices of the novel along with
reduction ad absurdum are non sequitur and logical inversion because these reflect the
public logic of an absurd world. In the world of Catch-22 everything is rationalized
and nothing makes sense. The satirical power of the novel is in its inverted logic. This
is what reached readers, especially when paperback sales of Catch-22 took off from
1964 to 1968. Set during WWII, about the Cold War politics and institutional
rationalization of the 1950s, Catch-22 answered most to an audience that saw the
novel’s structural logic as a perfect reflection of the American engagement in
Vietnam. The rhetoric of body counts, the proclamation of an American general that he
had destroyed a Vietnamese city in order to save it – this and other aspects of Vietnam
seemed a Heller invention, an extension of the logic of Cach-22. The absurdity of the
war was evident to the soldiers there as on the front home. 

Heller begins with a large cast of characters, each with a chapter to himself,
exaggerates them instead into cartoons, putting them through the paces of stand-up
comedy and Road Runner farce.

Heller fashioned his own comedy about death, cowardice and survival by
borrowing Céline’s slashing anarchic humour. His Yossarian is more a somber
variation on Céline’s Bardamu. Despite the real-life origins, Heller’s soldiers are not
people so much as cardboard cutouts who strike an attitude. The verbal game conveys
the existential absurdity. In Catch-22, Heller brings off a knockabout farce and
creates a madcap reality that eventually becomes unbearably poignant and grim. He
seduces us with mocking laughter only to take s beyond the jokey on-liners, structuring
the book with lightning reversals, comic-book changes of fortune, brilliant riffs of
language, and, Like Vonnegut, widening circles of disclosure that gradually carry us
from comedy to horror. Instead of unfolding chronologically, as if there were a real
sequence to the men’s wartime experiences, the book is anchored by arbitrary points
of reference – Yossarian’s stays in the hospital, the number of required bombing
missions. In this intricate pattern, characters who are already ‘dead’ in one chapter as
still alive in a later chapter, pinned all the more ineluctably to their determined fates.
These characters function more as leitmotifs than as real people, since individuality
would do little to alert what hapens to them. As in Vonnegut’s works, everything seems
to be happening continuously.

Heller anticipated Vietnam novels. Heller takes the edge of anxiety built into mot
combat fiction and makes a comic universe out of it. This is a world saturated with
death but made more poignant by his compulsion to joke about it. In this inverted world,
for example, Heller’s Yossarian prefers the decorum of death in the hospital to the
unpredictable turns of death outside the hospital. Alone among these writers, Heller
turns a joke into an outlook on life; he transforms anxiety from a stoic situational fear,
indigenous to the war novel, into an acrid, cynical sense of vulnerability that becomes
the very principle of existence. Thus, Catch-22 is the apotheosis of the war novel even
as it transcends it, since war for Heller is merely a heightened instance of how life will
always conspire against you, scheming to do you in. 

Heller’s savagely funny sense of the ironies of life was grounded not only in his war
experience but in his Jewish outlook an upbringing (as satirized in Good as Gold). In
the 1950s (which formed the basis for Something Happened), and in the popular
existentialism of the period. It helps explain why Catch-22, like other black-humour
characters novels about WWII, remains such a static book. Heller’s view of war, like
his view of the corporation, the government and the neurotic Jewish family, is that
nothing can happen: all involved are stuck in their own rut, perpetual parodies of
themselves, acting out roles assigned long ago, a laughable reduction from the fully
human. Heller’s saturnine outlook, with its conservative sense of possibilities of human
development, is reminiscent of haughtier satirists, such as Evelyn Waugh in A Handful
of Dust.