English Historiographic Novel of the Late 20th Century

The nineteenth-century era produced some of the most acclaimed novelists and greatest literary works in British fiction. The Victorian novel set a precedent on how this genre should look like, and, for many decades, served as a model for writing a large number of authors adhered to. However, with the changes that are inevitably provoked by the course of time, the focus and treatment of literature changes as well. It is said that literature is “the mirror of the society” and reflects the ideological, cultural, social and political twists, not only in the themes, but also in the strategies it deploys. It is obvious, then, that the traditional mode of realist writing has gone through various stages – stages, in which it was imitated, refused, or reworked with irony.

An ironic eye on tradition was indeed cast by postmodernism, an era the British literature slowly entered on in the 1960s and which both re-constructed and deconstructed the past tradition under the influence of new tendencies. The leading figures of the 1960’s fiction – John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, and David Lodge – were “obsessed with the nature of genre, the status of the text, the shape of a plot, the weigh of a character, the burden of narrative, the sense of ending” [17, p. 128]. In addition, many of the novelists have turned to the past as a means of reflecting the present. One of the commonest criticisms directed at recent British fiction is that it is obsessed by the past. There are historical novels that look back to the supposed simplicities of the past in order to avoid the messy demands of the present. For many novelists, however, the backwards gaze becomes liberating, freeing their imaginations to refashion experience. Historical narratives of all kinds use the past as a mirror in which their narratives catch reflected glimpses of the present and the competing circumstances that have formed it. For example, in “Chatterton”and “Hawksmoor”,Peter Ackroyd, using his own versions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose with mimetic brilliance, draws readers into narrative mazes which lead them eventually to climactic revelations of the bonds between the centuries. Rose Tremain takes court life in Charles II’s England (“Restoration”)and seventeenth-century Denmark (“Music and Silence”) as the setting for richly orchestrated stories that explore very contemporary ideas about love and power and the value of art. Novels like Robert Edric’s “The Book of the Heathen”and Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger”use events from colonial history to illuminate issues of oppression and exploitation which are no less relevant in a postcolonial world. In “The Passion”and “Sexing the Cherry”,Jeanette Winterson invents her own idiosyncratic versions of the past that can encompass both the real and the fantastic. These are all very different novels, often using very different narrative techniques, but they do have one thing in common. All of these novels, and very many more, engage with the contemporary through the historical rather than evade it.

The postmodernist historiographic novel questions the clear-cut division between history and fiction, since, as pointed out by C. Gallagher has become more literary and literature more historicized as a result of the postmodern condition [32, p. 15]. By means of their overt metafictionality, postmodern texts challenge the capacity of history to represent reality outside the text, and the truth-value of historical knowledge as well. The fact that they are highly self-reflexive novels points to the process of constructing, ordering and selecting, which presupposes that history is a human construct as is literature. Therefore, postmodernist historical novels attempt to insert history into fiction to subvert historical “facts” and rewrite them from a perspective different from the accepted interpretation. In such postmodernist texts, which question the problematized relations between history and fiction, the hitherto silenced histories of marginalized groups are sometimes foregrounded through this rewriting and subverting of historical material.

Linda Hutcheon argues that the postmodern historical novel marks the return of “plot and questions of reference” to postmodern fiction. Where both plot and referentiality were either disavowed in radical metafictional experimental writing – as in Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” and Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants”– or endlessly problematized, because their authors’ primary aims were to “explode realist narrative conventions” [39, p. 12], by contrast, a work of historiographic metafiction is still committed to telling a long and involving story, full of believable characters, which can be enjoyed by the reader in the manner of nineteenth-century realism. This explains why, of all the modes of fiction associated with postmodernism, historiographic metafiction has been “bestselling”.

Postmodern historical novels insert historical documents, events and historical personages into the fictional worlds of their works, drawing attention at the same time to this process. Literary critics foreground the intense preoccupation with history in the works of many contemporary novelists such as John Fowles, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, A.S. Byatt, D.M. Thomas, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter among many others. This flourishing of the historical genre, besides complementing critical theory and self-conscious historiography, contributed to the reorientation of imperial history by postcolonial writers, particularly after the success of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” in 1981. In his study “The Modern BritishNovel”, Malcolm Bradbury claims, “Certainly exploring past and recent history, at a time when its progress seemed either ambiguous or disastrous, and many of the progressive dreams of the earlier part of the century had plainly died, did become a central theme of Eighties fiction” [14, p. 132]. For Bradbury, this tendency is the outcome of the developments that we have mentioned concerning the field of history which show that “writing history is more like writing novels than we often choose to think” [14, p. 132]. Therefore, Bradbury acknowledges that “what we understand by history, the means by which we construct significant histories, and the way we relate those histories to our understanding of our own situation” has been reshaped by the recent philosophy of history [14, p. 432].

In light of a strong probability that the past attracts British novelists because it is grander than the post-imperial present, historical fiction appears to A.S. Byatt to be a way of turning away from the complexities of the contemporary world. This is a viewpoint that has been brought to bear upon Byatt’s own writing and on that of others who use contemporary license to lay bare and exploit the past. “The notion of the past as an exciting, edifying point of contrast with the present is a mainstay of recent historical fiction but there is a factor that goes beyond this and which is evident in the work of [William] Boyd, [Adam] Thorpe, [Peter] Ackroyd, [Rose] Tremain et al., and it is this. Irrespective of gestures toward lost periods as independent worlds there is a prevailing …inclination among practitioners of the new historical novel toward lofty omniscience” [ 17, p. 10].

The inclusion of history in recent postmodern fictions like those of Jeanette Winterson and Salman Rushdie has been reshaped by the postmodernist theory of history. Jeanette Winterson’s novels “The Passion”and “Sexing the Cherry” question the truth-value of history as a patriarchal discourse and threaten its monology through mingling it with the fantastic and grotesque elements. Hence Winterson offers alternative versions of history in her novels by foregrounding the otherwise silenced lives, activities and achievements of women. Historiographic metafiction serves as a liberating genre for women writers and enables other histories to be verbalized. In “Midnight’s Children”and “Shame”Salman Rushdie makes the East and the history of India and Pakistan, respectively, the themes, and he openly parodies the historical discourse of the colonial West. The postcolonial rewriting of history, likewise, is an attempt to create alternative histories of the colonized as opposed to the official history of the colonizer. Postcolonial theorists believe that traditional history is used by the colonial powers in a discursive way as an instrument to construct reality on behalf of the colonizer; and such history inevitably leaves out the histories of the colonized. Postcolonial novels that include references to the colonizer’s version of historical facts with a critical distance try to destroy the hegemonic accounts of the past by means of introducing the suppressed voices of “others” whose histories are silenced under the monology of colonizer’s history. Salman Rushdie’s novels can be read to illustrate that the process of colonization does not simply “impose its rules upon the present and the future of a dominated country […] it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it,” too, as Franz Fanon puts it in “The Wretched of the Earth”[27, p. 210].

Defining the common features of British historical novels after the emergence of postmodernism, Suzanne Keen argues in her study that, “[t]hese historical novels bear a strong relationship in their revisionist spirit to the feminist and postcolonial tradition” [41, p. 179]. In the hands of these writers, therefore, historiographic metafiction “becomes a liberating tool because for all its playfulness…, historical fiction has a strong political resonance especially for women and ethnic writers: the imperatives behind female and ethnic (re)writings of history are inescapably different from those of white men. If one of the driving forces in the writing of historical fiction is to give a voice to the silenced. Other, then for a woman or ethnic author to write into being the unaddressed past and its muted subalterns, or to rewrite an established male-authored work, presents a challenge for both author and reader” [35, p. 142].

Postmodern historical novels critically revisit the past; their interest in what has been before does not simply tally with a nostalgic return. They are concerned with the effects of historical forces, great historical events and their consequent traumas on the lives of individual characters. Contemporary experience is permeated by the past; therefore, the focus of the novels is on both the movement of history and the rhythms of ordinary life. In postmodern novels, historical events are proved to be deeply influent on the way in which the characters construct their understanding of their personal and national pasts, to mention Tom Crick in Swift’s “Waterland”, Martha Cochrane in Barnes’s “England, England”, Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, Archie Jones in Smith’s “White Teeth”, or Queenie Bligh in Levy’s “Small Island”. In these novels, the approach to the protagonists’ act of construction of the past and their identity focuses on the fact that it is modelled through dominant national narratives. They examine their nation’s past as it survives, as it is retold and understood, and so as it shapes the way people live in the present. They ask how to imagine the future unfolding from the past, inviting the reader to reflect on received versions of history. The process of building identity is connected to such reflection on the past. English postmodern historiographic novels often question the received narratives of national identity. Central to these novels is the question of how we imagine history, focusing on the limits and powers of reporting or rewriting the past.

The characters of historiographic metafiction are not confident of their ability to know the past with any certainty; yet, they demonstrate to possess a historiographic consciousness. Throughout the novels, they seek to understand their own self in historical terms, finding some reassurance from the consciousness that there is a history behind them, obtaining some certainty from the awareness that they have something behind to look at and confront with. Historiographic consciousness is based on the development of the past; historiographic metafiction is interested in who had the power to compose truths about the past. If postmodern fiction does not aspire to tell the truth, at least it questions whose truth has hitherto been told.

In most examples of English historiographic metafiction, the writers never strive for definitive answers and closure as represented by a grand narrative of history. Contemporary novelists declare that the function of history must be rethought in order to renegotiate its uses for the postmodern age and that the investigation and reconsideration of the past are the means to look at identity and its construction. The construction of postmodern identity requires a critical and attentive approach to the past that questions conventional notions of truth and historical progress.

A renewal of the genre of historical fiction in English has been a defining aspect of literary production since the appearance of John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” in 1969. Fowles’s reimagining of nineteenth-century history and the Victorian novel heralded a range of new fictions covering multiple historical eras and debating such conceptions as “Englishness” and “Britishness”.