Oppermann, Postmodern Histories

Dr.Serpil Oppermann (Department of English Language and Literature, Hacettepe University, Ankara-Turkey 1998)

In view of the postmodernist challenges to the writing of history, representing the past has come to be a thorougly problematic issue both in historiographic and literary theory today. Since postmodernism has irrevocably disredited the referentiality of history in relation to representation, history as an extra-textual source of reality is no longer a valid definition. But, as John Zammito says, "everybody is talking historicism these days" (1997: 1). There is now a "historical" turn sweeping through the humanities in response to the "linguistic turn" that has been dominant over the past 20 years. These two "turns" have come to open up conflicting positions among the historiographers and literary theorists alike. The problems of critical discourse mostly stem from these contending positions and their corresponding dilemmas, namely the textualist position, which favors textualist analysis of history on formalist principles, and the contextualist one, which privileges the historicity of texts, placing them in relation to society, culture and politics. It is important to note that the significant role claimed for historization in literary studies has come about at the very time the role of textuality in historical writing has been in full swing. Implications of this debate can be seen in postmodernist fiction which relates to it in significant ways. Labelled as historiographic metafiction by Linda Hutcheon, postmodernist fiction is "at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past" (1989: 3).

Since the historic turn marks the self-reflexive narratives of such fictions, the interrelated matrix of textuality and historicity as conflicting terms renders the question of history to be intensely problematic. Historiographic metafictions offer critiques of teleological history by foregrounding the theoretical problems of factual versus fictive representation. They incorporate the understanding of history both as poetics, a discursive practice, and as a discipline that investigates the relation of power to knowledge in the past- in short as social and political construction.

Postmodernist critique of history as Grand Narrative, however, has led to the New Historicist debate over how the contextualization of the past can be represented in histories written in the present. At the core of this debate is the premise that history is a verbal construct. It amounts to the argument that the past can only be "known from its texts, its traces, be they literary or historical" (Hutcheon 1989:4). It is because, as Jonathan Culler notes, "history... manifests itself in narrative constructs, stories designed to yield meaning through narrative ordering" (1989:129). Yet, the one master problem around which the question of history revolves in contemporary theory is the historical nature of all discourses. Historical discourse too is produced in processes of contextualization, and thus all systems of meaning are historically determined. Historical narratives then are marked by what Culler calls, "the historicity of articulations" (1989:129), but historicity itself alone cannot be the foundation of historical knowledge, since its textual nature is unavoidable. Historical discoures cannot lay claims to the truth of what is being recorded. As Stephen Greenblatt claims: "The historical evidence is unreliable; even in the absence of social pressure, people lie readily about their most intimate beliefs. How much more must they have lied in an atmosphere of unembarrassed repression" (1994: 474). Consequently, historical knowledge can only be attained through texts; and "extratextual considerations defy proof and, accordingly, relevance" (Genovese 1997:87).

The origins of this New Historicist argument stem from Hayden White's influential theory of historical narratives. In White's view the writing of history is a poetic process, historical narratives are "verbal artifacts," and the nature of historical representation is "essentially provisional" (1978: 42). According to him, It is the historian who formulates historical contexts in the form of stories: "Historians may not like to think of their work as translations of 'fact' into 'fiction;' but this is one of the effects of their works"(1978: 53). White's emphasis of the "fictive nature of historical narrative"(1978: 42) has resulted in the erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, and thus has placed the linguistic nature of historical writing at the core of interpretive strategies. White's theory has now been carried into a web of textualism by a considerable number of postmodernist theorists of history. Their self-conscious investigations of what Louis Montrose calls, "historicity of texts and the textuality of history" have come to be the central focus of attention in critical theory today. Here is Montrose's chiastic formulation :

By thehistoricity of texts,I mean to suggest the cultural specifty, the social embedment, of all modes of writing- also the texts in which we study them. By thetextuality of history,I mean to suggest firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question- traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the "documents" upon which historians ground their own texts, called "histories." (1989:20)

In Montrose's view, history is a textual reconstruction of the past, and as such it can possess no authoritative materiality. Dominick LaCapra, too, attacking contextual historicism, has claimed that "the context itself is a text of sorts...It cannot become the occasion for a reductive reading of texts"(1983: 95). LaCapra's argument proposes "multiple interactive contexts" in historical writings (1983: 91) which, for all intents and purposes, applies to the discourses of historiographic metafictions. InHistory and Criticsmhe writes that "texts interact with one another and with contexts in complex ways, and the specific question for interpretation is precisely how a text comes to terms with its putative contexts" (1985:128). This is a revisionist notion of contextualization where the relationship between text and context is a question of interpretation. Contextualization, however, is central to historical practice. It is, as Berkhofer says, "the primary method of historical understanding and practice" (Zammito 1993:791). But, contextualization alone cannot provide a full historical understanding, because the context (the historical milieu) itself is created via the historical documents which are texts themselves.

This debate centers on the textualist politics making the linguistic usage an object of historical inquiry. "To put it in a nutshell," as Ankersmit writes, "we no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them" (1997: 278). On the other hand, a mere contextualist approach in the old sense as the object of historical study can no longer suffice and is limiting. We need to consider both ends of this dichotomy between textualist and contextualist positions in interpreting the past. This is what historiographic metafiction purposefully undertakes to do.

The formal linking of history and fiction in historiographic metafictions produces an interactive use of texts and contexts. Postmodern novel, as such, offers a richer perspective for historical interpretation. In fact, it may as well serve as the best evidence for understanding the complexity of the historical contexts and their constructions. This is especially evident in Graham Swift'sWaterlandwhich locates the interplay of historicism and textuality in a specific landscape, the Fens in eastern England which serve as the emblem of the history/narrative problematic. The narrator of the novel, Tom Crick, revisits the past in order to understand his present situation. He is about to lose his job as history teacher, and his students are rebelling against studying the French Revolution which, they believe, has no relevance to the present because they think we live under the threat of nuclear war which will end all history.Waterlandis "an allegorical exploration of postmodern theories of the end of history, treating those theories as the novel's intertexts, or subtexts"(Schad 1992: 911). Crick, then, departs from the objective narrative of the French Revolution to narrate the story of his life as history. He states that history is a form of story. Yet, he says "history was no invention but indeed existed"(53). He views history as "just story-telling"(133), as "Grand Narrative"(53), as "fairy-tale"(6), and as "fact"(74). Accordingly what makes history so problematic is this uncertainty about its definition. History inWaterlandreveals the intrusion of fiction upon fact, constantly challenging the realist strategies of representation as deceptive modes. The novel's questioning of history corresponds to the discussion on the interpretive indeterminacy of historical knowledge. In fact,Waterlandthematizes what Hayden White writes in "Historical Text as Literary Artifact:" "There is something in a historical masterpiece that cannot be negated, and this non-negatable element is its form, the form which is its fiction"(1978: 43). Within this framework,Waterlandexposes the radical confrontation of fiction with postmodernist theories of history as discourse without a reliable referent. As Tom Crick informs his students, "history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge...I taught you that by for ever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain"(94). Novels likeWaterlandaccentuate the process of linguistic embodiment of the past in historicist inquiries where the role of language to shape history is undeniable. As Raymond Federman points out, this is the issue that requires utmost responsibility from the writer. In his words:

Historiographic metafictions embody a postmodern recognition of the poetic nature of historiography where the self-reflexive medium, in which the past events are situated, becomes the ground over which history meets metafiction. The metafictional mode itself creates a certain opacity, drawing attention to the process of textualization as much as to the historical reality behind the text. Historiographic metafiction recontextualizes both the production and the reception processes of history and invites us to reconsider historical knowledge by showing theprocessof creating theproduct. In brief, historiographic metafictions construct interesting postmodern histories.

Federman'sTo whom It May Concernand Timothy Findley'sFamous Last Wordsare two striking examples to such constructions. They are overt thematizations of the processes of historical representations offering literary contextualizations of the events during the Second World War. Both novels turn the traces of the past into a historicist investigation. They expose the process by which we represent the past in terms of a metafictional self-reflexivity that is used to disrupt the entire concept of unproblematic documentation in the writing of history. The forms of representation "used and abused," to quote Linda Hutcheon's words, in this postmodern strategy range from formal rewriting of remembered events, as in Federman's novel, to the recontextualizing of the entire polical climate of the war in Findley's version. Both novels draw attention to how the documents of history turn into a fictional context in the writing process.

To whom It May Concernis about the attempts of a writer to narrate the whole reality of the two cousins who were separated during the roundup of the Jews in Paris, and now, 50 years later, they are about to meet in Israel. The writer, in a series of letters addressed to whom it may concern, tries to find the exact narration to reveal the truth, but he can only communicate the painful past by an act of writing that keeps pointing to the indeterminacy of historical knowledge. History here turns out to be Federman's surfictional story created out of the fragmented historical events as he remembers them. InFamous Last Words, Ezra Pound's fictional character, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, plays a major role in the political intrigues between the Nazies and their supporters in England and among the allies. Here historical inquiry centers upon both the contextualist approach, exposing the relation between power and knowledge, and upon the textualist analysis investigating the relation between language and the world when von Ribbentrop, Rudolph Hess, the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor, Lindbergh, Sir Harry Oakes, Ezra Pound, and other famous historical figures get involved in an elaborate scheme to secure world domination. Mauberley is a famous writer and was a close witness to the development of the secret alliance among the famous figures of the times. The whole novel is based on Mauberley's words that he wrote on the walls of the hotel before he was murdered. Just like in Federman's novel, the events here no longer cohere, their unity is disrupted when Mauberley's "famous last words" function as what F.R. Ankersmit states in theory: "history always manifests itself in the form of text"(1995:225). Historical meaning in Mauberley's narrative then is relational and provisional. Set aside from the entire writing is one epigraph on the ceiling, one sentence pointing to this notion. Mauberley has written: "All I have written here... is true; except the lies"(59). This type of fictive historical writing questions how the texts of history enter into fictional contexts while at the same time retaining their historical documentary value (Hutcheon1991: 82).

Past events acquire meaning only through their representations, but narrative representation can not provide an authority to support any claim to historical credibility due to its discursive nature. Novels like this then move in two directions. They point to the fictionality of the writing of history, and also assert the historicity of their writing.To Whom It May Concern, for example, states that there is no way of knowing the past outside its narratives, whether they are fictional or historical. Federman wants to rewrite the past as a story in order to open it up to the present. What matters for him is the telling of the story of "a traumatic past"(17). In this way, he draws attention to the fact that understanding historical events requires giving of an account for them which can only be done in the form of stories:

AsTo Whom It May Concernindicates, the ways of telling that story are the only means of coming to terms with history. Similarly, Mauberley's words filling 4 whole rooms, 16 walls of it, can be interpreted, not as documentary reality, but as a self-conscious way of approaching the documents. Mauberley's account, too, points to the postmodern rewriting of the war contexts as one version among others. The issue that the textuality of history produces many viewpoints and voices in history is the underlying thematics in both novels. Moreover, they focus, in a self-reflexive way, on how the historian invents the narrative form in giving a particular meaning to the past. And invention always involves some recourse to imagination. In Louise O. Mink's words: "so narrative form in history, as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of imagination" (1978:145), which is also Federman's underlying thesis in his text. As both Federman's and Findley's accounts indicate, historical texts refer to the past which they themselves bring into existence by means of language. In other words, reflexivity entails projecting the past through language. Sitting with Wallis, the Dutchess of Windsor, and von Ribbentrop at the Ritz in Madrid in June 1940, Mauberley realizes that the former King of England, the Duke of Windsor, has been chosen as the leader of the new world order by the Cabal. He writes:

A similar postmodern awareness pervades the narratives of other historiographic metafictions, like Penelope Fitzgerald'sThe Blue Flower, Derek Beaven'sNewton's Niece, Peter Ackroyd'sHawksmoor, and John Banville'sDoctor CopernicusandKepler. The epigraph by Novalis inThe Blue Flowersummarizes this awareness: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history."This novel reconstructs the early life of Fritz von Hardenberg before he came to be known as the famous German Romantic poet Novalis. Here he is deeply concerned with "the problem of universal language"(61) that would be capable of having a direct reference to reality. But as the story unfolds, Novalis comes to realize that "Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher"(75), echoing a postmodern critical awareness. The novel is about von Hardenberg's love affair with the 12- year- old Sophie von Kuhn, who is his "heart's heart"(74), his "true Philosophy." Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe and Schiller make brief appearances in the novel which is based on diaries, letters, public and private documents that were only published in 1988. In short, the novel recreates a historic past based on documentary evidence. The chapters are sometimes straight extracts from Hardenberg papers. But how much of this story is true? The answer to this question is in Novalis's clever remark: "If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching"(112). What is important, then is the fact thatThe Blue Floweris one among other readings of that lost, transcendental, German world. It effectively underlines the notion that "documents...do not transparently reflect reality, but only other texts," and as such, the "past" "dissolves into literature" (Spiegel 1997:262).

Historical textualization both draws from and creates the contexts in question asThe Blue Flowerposits. There is no truth to be found, but only stories that go on searching it. In John Banville'sDoctor CopernicusandKepler, we encounter this search. In their postmodern biographies Copernicus and Kepler present a religious conviction of their scientific discoveries. "To enquire into nature," says Kepler, "is to trace geometrical relationships."(145). In their search for the ultimate truths, however, Kepler and Copernicus encounter only the limits of empiricist and positivist epistemologies. They realize that even the scientific knowledge cannot lay claims to self-evident truths. In the final pages ofDoctor Copernicus, the failure of science to grasp ultimate knowledge as such becomes clear to the dying Copernicus who is visited by the ghost of his brother Andreas. "It is the manner of knowing that is important"(239) says Andreas to the disillusioned Copernicus: "We know the meaning of the singular thing only so long as we content ourselves with knowing it in the midst of other meanings: isolate it, and all meaning drains away. It is not the thing that counts, you see, only the interaction of things; and of course, the names..."(239). It is precisely this idea of the interaction, in terms of contexts and texts that postmodern novels investigate echoing LaCapra's notion of "multiple interactive contexts" in historical writings.

In Derek Beaven'sNewton's Niece, and Peter Ackroyd'sHawksmoor, this interaction becomes more emphatic where the past enters a dialogic relationship with the present. A polymorphous sense of context is installed in a number of ways. We may witness the reconstruction of a dominant mode of discourse as representing the specific historic past, but only to challenge it with an intrusion of the presence of other discourses within that historical past. This is seen inHawksmoorwhere the rationality of the 18th century is contested by a parallel discourse of esoteric sciences which was as much part of that time as was the discourse of reason. Or, we may encounter a specific historical context fully fictionalized in detail as a reminder of the conventions of historical novel, but intertextual references to present theoretical concerns over language and ideology, representation and narrative, subvert the effect of that context as a unified field in itself. This is evident both inNewton's Nieceand inHaksmoorwhich juxtapose past and present in their contextualizations. While Beaven links the 17th and the 20th centuries by the presence of Newton's niece in each, Ackroyd creates a mirroring of both centuries that flow into one another. In Beaven's novel, Newton's niece, Kit, says, "We write our own story on the walls of our world; we project ourselves on to our account of the past- and the future"(7), speaking from within both centuries she inhabits "as a fragment." The reality of her past and present in both the 17th and the 20th centuries posits the operations of interactive contexts in exploring the traces, texts and intertexts of Newton's time. The historicity of the text is also reinforced by detailed references to cultural life in England shaped by the presences of such figures as Jonathan Swift, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, and Charles Halifax who becomes Kit's long time lover. The novel shows that these identities are constructed by discursive systems of power at the time.

At the beginning of the novel, Newton's niece, Kit, appears as half-animal, a wolf boy who gets transformed into a beautiful young girl during the testing of what she refers to as Newton's "Elixir." As she narrates her story, she reveals the process by which Newton sought "the secrets of power and control"(35). Historical recontextualization is manifest in this version of Newton's life, operating at the level of scientific discourse associated with the historical Newton. This, however, is an ironic rewriting of Newton's identity, since his Elixir is "never made public. Of course not. It was never sent up to the Annals of the Royal Society..."(22), Kit says problematizing the whole historical reference behind the text. Therefore, by raising such a question as whether Newton really discovered the philosophers stone, the novel challenges the certainty of our knowledge of Newton's historic identity. At the end, Kit leaps into the 20th century as a result of removing the philosopher's stone from her forehead that Newton had secured during her transformation in the first place.Newton's Nieceis a legitimate example of how historicism is embodied in textuality. It shows that our knowledge of Newton can only be textual. As Hayden White argues, narrative accounts of historical events only give a certain version of the specific past events: "stories are not true or false, but rather more or less intelligible, coherent, consistent, persuasive and so on. And this is true of historical, no less than fictional stories" (1986:492). In this respect, this novel presents an equally intelligible account of the past as any historical text itself.

The same holds true forHawksmoorwhere historical reference and textuality double upon each other.Hawksmoor, too, confronts the past as a textualized trace in a complex interaction of two parallel plots which literally merge into each other. The 18th century and 20th century plots are thematically and structurally interrelated in terms of the repetitions of words, images, phrases, and names from the 18th century plot in the 20th century, and above all, through a series of murders which are committed in the 18th century story while the bodies of victims appear in the 20th century plot. These repetitions problematize historical identity, reference and time. The 18th century story is told, as a pastiche of that time's style, by a fictional architect, Nicholas Dyer who is involved with Satanism. He refers to his story as "my History," and states that he will, "like a State Historian, give you the Causes as well as the Matter of Facts" (13), first creating a realist illusion and then immediately confronting it by saying,"I never had any faculty in telling of a Story, and one such as mine is will be contemned by others as a meer Winter Tale"(13). This signals the problematic line between fact and fiction. Dyer wants to form a magic Septilateral Figure with his 7 churches in London so that he can restore a demonic order to the world. As a result of his diabolical belief, he sacrifices victims, mostly children, to impart a sacramental quality to his churches. This story forms the textual past in the novel. The 20th century plot is narrated by the fictional detective Nicholas Hawksmoor who tries to solve the enigmatic murders in the grounds of Dyer's churches, murders which are re-enactments of Dyer's ritual sacrifices in his own age. Victims in both ages are the same people. Unable to solve the dilemma, Hawksmoor comes to realize that there are no explanations, only contingent facts. In the novel. Nicholas Dyer is the fictionalized version of the real Augustan architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor who actually designed 6 churches in London in the early 18th century. The novel problematizes this historical reference by making the fictional modern detective carry the historical architect Hawksmoor's name. In this way, historical identity is also shown to be provisional and textual. Since the interdependence of fact and fiction problematizes historical reference in the novel, we realize that there are no definite frames of reference by which the events and historical identity can be judged. Thus,Hawksmooruses history as an implied reference to the past and also as a discursive construct. In the end Hawksmoor and Dyer speak with one voice, signalling the metafictional querying of fact/fiction polarity.Hawksmoor, then, is both fictive and historical in its postmodern version of the past.

These are the interesting postmodern histories questioning the official version of historical events. These novels raise our curiosity and challenge our perceptions of the past. Newton's discovery of the philosopher's stone, Satanic rituals behind Hawksmoor's churches, the secret Cabal among the Nazi leaders and The Duke of Windsor, Copernicus and Kepler's awareness of linguistic structures in scientific discourses, Novalis's post-structuralist concept of language, raise several questions. Did these events occur or not? If so, who were responsible for their happening? In short what really happened in the past? I would like to conclude with Tom Crick's words inWaterland: "...all the stories were once real. And all the events of history, the battles and costume-pieces, once really happened" (257); that was of course before we all had turned theoretical.

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN HISTORICISM AND TEXTUALITY: POSTMODERN HISTORIES

`THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN HISTORICISM AND TEXTUALITY: POSTMODERN HISTORIES`