"The Past is Not Even Past"
On historiographic metafiction, or, why it's taken me a lifetime to finish a novel
“We make more of a fuss interpreting interpretations than interpreting things, and there are more books about books than on any other subject: we do nothing but comment upon one another.” Michel de Montaigne
In life, as in history (and so too in literature),
the most commonly accepted narratives aren’t those that represent the truth, but rather those that narrativize the past in a way that provides meaning to our current epoch.
In my favorite Joan Didion essay, “The White Album (1968-1978),” Didion speaks to the complexity of narrativizing the past in a way that makes sense while staying true to “history.” The essay was written during a time when many of America’s well-oiled mythologies (“freedom,” “democracy,” benevolent imperialism, “free love”) were being beaten down in the streets of Chicago and Montgomery, firebombed in the jungles of Vietnam, or otherwise hacked to pieces by psychotic hippies in Beverly Hills.
Fifty years onwards, “The White Album” reads as if it could have been written yesterday:
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.1
A time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself … sound familiar?
It seems perfectly clear to me as I sit here compiling this very essay palimpsest from a series of previous essays I wrote years ago that we, or at least I (lest I dare speak for anyone else) am living through a dishonest era in which I have become obsessed with trying to categorize, compartmentalize, or otherwise compile all that has led up to this present moment in a way that results in a cohesive narrative.
But that’s not how life works.
It’s hard to make the connections. One of my professors told me she used to think human beings are meaning makers; she later refined this statement to say we are pattern seekers.
This is an era in which nobody knows which stories to trust anymore, not the least because all of us have our own narratives and versions of the “truth” to help us sleep at night. And yet … and yet … none of us can sleep. We wake up in the morning and check our phones to see what happened while we were off in dreamland. So why is it that people like yours truly all over the world have begun to feel paradoxically full of conviction sanctimonious and completely empty at the same time?
At the end of Didion’s essay, she’s not any closer to finding any clear and present meaning to apply to her own life after analyzing the turbulent decade of 1968-1978. In her conclusion, she describes the moment she learned that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis:
The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. “Lead a simple life,” the neurologist advised. “Not that it makes any difference we know about.” In other words, it was another story without a narrative.”2
Enter the quintessentially postmodern genre known as historiographic metafiction, a painfully academic term first defined by Linda Hutcheon in 1988 that nonetheless has helped me make some sense of my present reality.
“The past really did exist, but we can only ‘know’ that past today through its texts, and therein lies its connection to the literary.” Linda Hutcheon
Historiographic metafiction is a distinct genre from history and historical fiction
because it suggests that as with literature, history, too, is subjective. The past is caught up in a system of references to other histories, subjectivities, and self-serving meta-narratives. The past, in this sense, is if not a lie than a simulacrum, a fabrication.
Historiography means the study of the writing of history,
and metafiction means a story wherein the author breaks the fourth by consistently reminding the reader that they are, in fact, reading a work of fiction.
Broadly speaking, historiographic metafiction challenges the notion that anyone can objectively document the past or ever fully know it.
Instead, the past must be continually investigated, or, to borrow William Faulkner’s words, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Here, “the past” is nothing more (or less) than a conversation, a means to a better understanding of the contemporary. Or, in the words of the post-modernist historian Hayden White, this “questioning of history” invites readers to re-imagine historical writing not as the representation but rather the narrativization of history.
“For generations now, philosophers and thinkers who shape the nature of social science have produced theories that embrace the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of humankind—that is, those living in non-Western cultures.” Dipesh Chakrabarty
Post-colonialism is essential to understanding the past.
In the late 1960s, when academics finally began to realize just how much Euro-centrism has dominated the entire study of human history, scholars began scrutinizing how history as a whole should (or even can) been accurately recounted. History, in this sense, becomes a narrative first written by the victors aggressors, only to be obfuscated, revised, and rewritten by the oppressors because of the all-too-human tendency to silence the voices of those people who’ve lived a different version of a story that ends really well for one group and very poorly for another.
Historiographic metafiction rejects simple sweeping grand narratives by asking whether or not any individual narrative, post-colonialist or otherwise, is capable of accurately representing the myriad aspects that make up the story of the human condition. Such an understanding of history thus demands that all writers—but especially historians—recognize the truth that historical writing is nothing more than the representation narrativization of history.
In the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible,
within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion […] so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous."3
This is not an easy task, but it is essential if we hope to update our understanding of the malleability of literary and historical narratives. Historiographic metafiction is a useful genre for this task, and in years to come I suspect it will come into its own to join the ranks of some of its early examples, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in which the author narrator considers just how we’re supposed to tell the story of the “creation” of Pakistan:
In a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is this case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence—that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.4
By consistently re-imagining what it means to arrive at a “conclusion” about the past, historiographic metafiction re-imagines history as a concept that must be in constant dialogue with the contemporary.
And now, to break a cardinal rule of historical academic writing,
I shall conclude with the words of the Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry: “I rebel: against my past, against history and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way.”5
So long as a single person’s story remains untold, the past will never be resolved. This is the admission and promise of the genre that is historiographic metafiction. It's taken me five hours to finish this essay and ten years a lifetime to finish a novel about my own connection to history, memory, and the story of WWII that is both historically “accurate” and still feels true to me. The novel is called Orange Blossom Memory, and it will exist in the world one day soon for all to see.
The past is a story, yes, but as Joan Didion writes, it is a story without a clearly defined narrative, and it is up to each of us to continually reexamine our version of our own “histories” if we hope to make any sense of the current epoch.
Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 11.
Ibid, 47.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House Inc., 2006), 373.
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), xi.
Love the reference to Didion. She has a related phrase in "Keeping a Notebook," one of those classic references for the phrase "emotional truth," where she says that memoir is less a factual account than a rendering of "how it felt to me."
I think there is a limit to this subjectivity, however. I realize that your subject is meta-fiction, but this is a debate among memoirists, too. Someone like John D'Agata, who feels that tweaking chronology and events and sometimes fabricating much more than that is fair game in "nonfiction," is really abusing the relativity of the past, in my view. I also am not certain that it's impossible to grasp enough of the past to be quite close to its truth. There are many structures for meaning making that are not perfect, but that we rely on for our survival. Our bodies seek to maintain homeostasis -- not a perfect balance, but a perpetual compensation for external and internal imbalances. And the neuroscience term for shared meaning is "intersubjectivity," where our perception overlaps enough with another's for shared meaning. Infants rely on intersubjectivity to communicate with caregivers long before they have access to language. And I think it's a useful term for how we approach the past -- not as an irreparably elusive set of facts or as a bunch of details that can be assembled into any narrative we like, but as events that are knowable in some respects and inscrutable in others.
I'm riffing, and perhaps losing focus, but Atul Gawande's first book, Complications, addresses this question in the context of medicine. Humans in some ways are like ice cubes: perfectly predictable. Place an ice cube in a fire, and it always melts. But humans are in other ways like hurricanes: highly unpredictable. The art of medicine is weighing the difference. I think the art of history is much the same. Post-modernists like to suggest that history and language are like hurricanes. But I'm not sure that is the whole truth.
I suppose I don’t find Chakrabarty’s ideas all that interesting. He’s more or less demanding what good fiction has always done, isn’t he? For example, the digressiveness and multiple points of view that a lot of fiction has had since the 60s can’t help but depict a world that’s more “heterogeneous” (he sounds like a statistician). Or really, much earlier in, say, Tristram Shandy, or even Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, where we get the story through the eyes of different characters. Or maybe Moby-Dick, which reads, as someone once said, like it was written for the future.