Susana ONEGA, Telling histories : narrativizing history, historicizing literatur

Martín Alegre, Sara

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Reviews Links & Letters 4, 1997 117 to a mentality that shamelessly encour- aged cultural impurity. Meanings were intended both to remain intelligible to and distinct from Western standards. The different colonized communities had to undertake this process separately. Interestingly, the new settler representa- tions needed strong continuities with Europe, so a spiritual place called «heme» had to be found in the colonies with the result that many quest narra- tives a ~ ~ e a r e d  in literature. Critics have I I lately demonstrated that the search was not for physical destinations but for a historical self. Obviously, black repre- sentations had to be created by the blacks themselves. Pre-English traditions were revived (The Mahabharata in India). Western myths, such as the Promised Land, were reversed. Native films and songs were included in works of art and, most importantly, English was rejected. Kincaid's quotation from A SmalL Place included in Colonial and Postcoloniallit- eraturep. 208 reads «The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view))). The urgency with which imperial stereotypes were knocked down is re- sponsible for the omission of entire black communities (such as women) from the new national image. Nevertheless, a sec- ond reaction concerned itself with mar- ginalized groups and re-appreciated the advantages of speaking European lan- guages for trade or as a means of commu- nication among different ethnic groups. Boehmer quotes Aijaz Ahmad (p. 209) «To substract English from South Asian cultural life . . .would be as absolutely pointless as boycotting the railways)). Chapters five and six turn to the voices that have emerged after self-gov- ernment. In my view, this is the most valuable part of the book because of the writer's well-aimed remarks about post- colonial women's writing, indigenous writings after 1970, the connections be- tween the postmodern and the postcolo- nial, and migrant literature. Unfortu- nately, though, her project only touches on these aspects. Boehmer's opinion about the future developments of post- colonialism and their connection with postmodernism have an enormous po- tential to be the seed for further work. Notwithstanding, 1 alert readers of the writer's subtle alliance with «a strange universe)). Can she really not see the ob- vious farce of those authors who criticize the neocolonialist order at the same time that they invest their profits in securing a place in the First World? Salvador Faura Universitat Autbnoma de Barcelona Susana ONEGA (ed.) Telling Histories: Narrativizing Histovy, Historicizing Literature. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995. 208 pages. Telling Histories is a collection of essays originally presented in the ((Symposium on History and Literature)) celebrated in Zaragoza in March 1993. The book is divided into two main sections: the first, «The End of the Classical Period)), deals with aspects of nineteenth-century his- torical fiction and with the legacy left by nineteenth-century new ideas on history, especially by Hegel's view of history as a global master narrative. The second part, «The Postmodernist Era)), focuses on ex- amples of postmodernist historiographic metafiction, such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children, William Golding's Rites of Passage, and Julian Barnes' The Histo y of the World in 1 O and 1/2 Chup- ters, among others written in the 1980s. What is meant by historiographic metafiction are British postmodernist historical novels written in the 1970s and the 1980s. They are intended to 118 Link  & Letters 4, 1997 Reviews question from an ironic, historically self- conscious position, the idea that history and not literature, is the most appropri- ate discourse to arrive at the 'truth' about the world. Susana Onega cites John Fowles's The French Lieutenantí Woman (1968) as the earliest pioneer of this gen- re. Yet. in fact, novels like Fowles's be- long to'the ~r i t i sh  tradition of the histor- ical novel iriitiated by Walter Scott, which they partly subvert. Offering a better understanding of this tradition is the idea that justifies the inclusion of the essays on ~iCtorian historical fiction in the first part of Teiíing Histories. Onega's own introductory essay re- views the changing relationship between history and literature since the Renais- sance. Accorciing to her, modern histori- ography was born when the need to de- marcate the fictional from history, reformulated then as one of the sciences, was felt in the 17th and the 18th centu- ries. In the 19th century the trend was partly reverted, firstly, by Hegel's new view of the world's history as a master narrative pointing towards a utopian 'end of history' and, secondly, by Walter Scott's historical romances, in which the representation of man as a product of historical forces was in fact infused with fictional, romantic motifs. In the 1980s, the New Historicists -the term was coined by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982- and a number of influential philosophers auestioned the idea that there is a radical ciifference between the truth proclaimed by the historian and the one arrived at by the storyteller. Hayden White, Jacques Ehrman and Paul Veyne on one side, and Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man on the other, argued that history and litera- ture are discourses necessarily articulated by language, hence, as fictional or as truthful as one may regard any other lin- guistic utterance. However, Onega notes that «what provides the impulse for the writing of historiographic metafiction is indeed the discovery of the ability of lit- erature to reveal truths that cannot be grasped from traditional history)) (p. 16). The first Dart of this collection con- sists of four irticles by Andrew Sanders, Ma Dolores Herrero, Ma Pilar Pulido and Felicity Hand, respectively. In his re- view of Victorian historical fiction from Dickens to Elliot. Sanders observes that Scott's successors in what he calls an «in- tensely historical age» (p. 21) found in the historical novel a «new aesthetic re- spectabilityn (p. 22). Writers such as Dickens or Elliot were convinced that the historical novel could be used to educate a wide, popular public and, indeed, to ex-   lo re the relationshi~ between the indi- vidual and society, as most Victorian fic- tion did. On her side, Herrero explores the influence of Hegel's view of historv as a divine plot that &e philosophers must unravel on the work of Marv A. Ward. She notes the late-Victorian paradox that the more historical studies tried to dis- cover the historical pattern envisaged by Hegel, the more each historical situation carne to be seen as a unique grouping of events. This led to a historicist fragmen- tation of the Hegelian sense of historical cohesion that was expressed by modernist fiction, which centres rather on the inner world of the individual. Pulido's article on the development of the ballad history in Ireland contributes the idea that the historical balladist produced his work, which was meant to be an integral part of the task of rebuilding Ireland's cultural legacy, on the strength of research as ac- curate and scholarly as that of the histori- an. Felicity Hand's analysis of two novels about the 1857 Indian mutiny written a century later, describes the danger that the historical novel might be used to cre- ate a falsifying mythology which could be passed off as the 'historical truth' in the interests of a biased (in this case imperial- ist) manipulation of the historical facts. The second part of Telling Hirtories gathers together essays mainly on postmodernist British historiographic Reviews Links & Letters 4, 1997 119 metafiction. Eight different scholars ana- native model of research to be taken as lyse novels by Salman Rushdie (Luisa seriously as that of the academic histori- Juárez), William Golding (Marita Nad- an. In fact, the postmodernist writer of al), Julian Barnes (María Lozano), Jean- historical novels is a researcher who nette Winterson (Susana Onega), Mar- writes his or her conclusions in a way that garet Drabble (Angeles de la Concha), would be rejected by the academia as his- Angela Carter (Celestino Dele~to), Dav- tory but that makes nonetheless strong id Bradley (Jesús Benito), and a play by claims to being intellectually serious. Caryl Churchill (Chantal Cornut-Genti- ~~~t of the essays suggest that &is lle). The territories analysed in the essays ,geCtion of academic historiography is in which history and fiction interact are subversive, for it parodies the historian's as varied as the representation of the re- discourse and bis or her authority, espe- cent history of India in Rushdie's work, cially by introducing not only fictional the discussion of female identity in the but also great doses offantasy and texts by Carter, Chuchiii and Winterson, rnyth in the fabric of the historid novel. the exploration of the difference between 1, other cases, obviously, historical fic- the meaningless events of real life and the tion helps disempowered minority meaning of the historical 'fact' estab- groups to claim an authority that the bis- lished by the historian in Golding's novel torim has denied them by neglecting the and the recovery of the silenced hilstory area of history that concerns them. In of African slaves in the USA narrated by any case, since the selection of works of Bradley. fiction commented on in the second part From these essays it can be inferred, of the book is mainly canonical -or basically, that postmodernist histori- rather composed of candidates to future gaphic rnetafiction usually presents bis- canonisation- what is missing is how the tory from the point of view of a a charac- playful manipulation of the historical ter that is marginal to the main historical discourse in mainstream postmodernist events s/he narrates but who is both a fiction compares with similar strategies witness of history in the making, and the used in popular culture. link between the reader -who can be said Is not this postmodernist attempt to to be also at the margins- and the centre deconstruct the historiographic dis- of past historical events. Juárez notes, re- course in fact much less ~arnivales~ue, garding Saleem Sinai, the narrator of subversive -somehow less radical, less Rushdie's Midnight Chikiren, that he is courageous- than other British post- «a caricature of the historian)) (p. 81). modernist narratives such as Monty Py- Yet, despite insisting on the idea that thon'S revision of history in Life ofBrim contemporary historiographic metafic- or the unglamorised retelling of British tion is different from the traditional his- history in the television series Bkzckad- torical novel because it questions rather del? Even the Arnerican cartoon TV se- than complements the task of the histo- ries for children based on the comedy rian, oddly enough, none of the authors film Bill and Te& Excellent Adventure discusses in depth an idea constantly im- seems more disruptive of the seriousness plied in al1 the essays but that never quite attached to the academic historian. It surfaces, namely, whether the writer of could even be argued that the enjoyment postmodernist historical fiction is genu- a child may derive from seeing the naive inely concerned with subverting the his- Californian teenagers Ted and Bill meet toriographic discourse -with turning the historid characters slhe has heard into a caricature- or whether slhe aims, about in the classroom is, at root, the instead, at producing, basically, an alter- same felt by an adult, sophisticated 120 Links & Letters 4, 1997 Reviews reader of postmodernist historiographic itself too seriously to be genuinely sub- metafiction when coming across histori- versive, genuinely threatening for the cal characters in works of fiction. Argua- credibility of the historian's work. In bly, the depth of the reflection on the re- fact, it is its best complement. lationship between history and fiction is greater in the fiction analysed in Telling Sara Martín Alegre Histories, but this is fiction that still takes Universitat Autbnoma de Barcelona Rohinton MISTRY. A Fine Balance. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. 614 pages.* It sometimes seems apt to imagine the history of the Indian subcontinent as a ~alimpsest of' literary forms. First a sub- stantiai layer of myth and epic, then a burning layer of tragedy, then melodra- ma and farce and so forth. Lately, the fu- rious discoveiry of political scandals wit- nessed in India might suggest that it is now an action thriller, Hindi-film style,' which is currently being written out in subcontinental space. Rohinton Mistry's new novel, A Fine Balance, takes us back to the time that many observers of Indi- an history would unhesitatingly identify as that criticdl moment when the compo- sition of this villainous tale of corruption in high places began. The declaration of the Emergency2 exactly twenty years be- fore the publication of Mistry's fictional account was ai blunder of such mammoth proportions that there's little doubt that it will continue to stimulate the imagina- tion of writers for a long while to come. Having said that, however, one wonders whether there is any correlation benveen the fact that the blurb of Mistry's book tells us that he has dived in Canada since 1975)) and the fact that his recall of events stops precisely at that traumatic point in the inception of our symbolic politicai thriller. The task of writers, it has often been said, is to keep memory alive. Were not the holocaust, or colonial repression or the slave trade fictionally redescribed in the public mind from time to time, a numbing amnesia would descend. Na- tions could be condemned in perpetuity to repeat those terrors of history that they had, willy-nilly, forgotten. To  this extent, Mistry, like Rushdie before him, performs commendably in reminding the world of the horrors of the nus- bandi.3 operations, the mowing down of jhuggis.* and those repeated fascist lies that were the stamp of the Emergency. * A longer version of this review was first published as «Bombay's Balzac)) in Biblio, March 1996. Reprinted with permission. 1. The Hindi film, with its characteristic song and dance routines and stereotypical plots, is now being recopised by critics as a distinct cinematic genre. Spawned by the Bombay film industry, which is the largest in the world and humorously known as 'Bollywood', the Hindi filni embodies many aspects of the popular culture of contemporary India. 2. A srate of Emergency was declared in 1975 by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, after she had been indicted for election malpractices by the Allahabad High Court. Almost d i  opposition leaders were jailed and nationwide censorship imposed. Despite these dra- conian measures, however, when a sgeneral election was held in 1977, Indira Gandhi was decisively voted out. The Emergency years: 1975-1977. 3. nusbandi (Hindi): vasectomy. 4. jhuggis (Mindi): small hutments in urban slums. 

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