The peripheral is connected with art, but the connection is not causal.

Art must
have new raw materials, infusions of the peripheral. In the nineteenth century,
literature and history were considered branches of the same tree of learning, but
then they were separated, resulting in the distinct disciplines of literary and
historical studies today. Recent theories of both history and fiction have focused
more on what the two modes of writing share than on how they differ.
Historiographic metafiction asks us to recall that history and fiction are
themselves historical terms and that their definitions and interrelations vary with
time. Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra's work and the internalized challenges to
historiography in novels like Shame, The Public Burning, or A Maggot reflect a new
skepticism towards history writing. Postmodernism is a contradictory cultural
enterprise that uses and abuses the very structures and values it takes to task.
Historiographic metafiction, for example, problematizes the very possibility of
historical knowledge. The history of the discussion of the relation of art to
historiography is relevant to any poetics of postmodernism, because the separation
is a traditional one. The postmodern novel has done the same, and the reverse, and
confronts the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation. History and fiction
have always been notoriously porous genres, and in the eighteenth century the focus
of concern tended to be the relation of ethics (not factuality) to truth in
narrative. The notion of historical "fact" entered this debate only with the
passing of the Historiographic Metafiction 107 Acts of Parliament. Michael
Coetzee's novel Foe addresses the question of how historians and storytellers
relate to "truth" and exclusion in the practice of Defoe. Foe reveals that both can
silence, exclude, and absent certain past events - and people. Coetzee offers the
teasing fiction that Defoe did not write Robinson Crusoe from information from
Alexander Selkirk or other travel accounts, but from information given to him by a
subsequently "silenced" woman, Susan Barton, who had also been a castaway on
"Cruso's" [sic] island. In frustration, a female castaway begins her own tale of
life on a desert island, but discovers that the problems of writing history are not
unlike those of writing fiction, and ultimately decides that "what we accept in
life we cannot accept in history". Outsider, trespasser, poacher, pirate! We reject
your authority, you foreign language wrapped around your neck like a flag, what can
you tell but lies? The eighteenth-century concern for lies and falsity becomes a
postmodern concern for the multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s), truth(s)
relative to the specificity of place and culture. Yet the paradox still exists:
history was rewritten by immigrants, in Urdu and English, the imported tongues.
Historiographic metafiction, in contrast to late modernist radical metafiction,
attempts to demarginalize the literary through confrontation with the historical.
Christa Wolf's No Place on Earth is about the fictionalized meeting of two
historical figures, dramatist Heinrich von Kleist and poet Karoline von Günderrode.
The metafictive and the historiographic meet in the intertexts of the novel, and
the theme is the conflict between art and life. The novel reminds us that the
nineteenth century gave birth to both the realist novel and narrative history. A
standard historian's preconception about the relation of art to history is that art
creates its own reality, while history is an empirical search for external truths.
This is not far from a description of the basic assumptions of many kinds of
formalist literary criticism. Historiographic metafiction suggests that truth and
falsity may not be the right terms to discuss fiction, but for different reasons.
Fiction and history are narratives distinguished by their frames, and postmodern
fiction challenges the claims of both "authentic" representation and "inauthentic"
copy alike, and the very meaning of artistic originality is forcefully challenged
as is the transparency of historical referentiality. The end of Lucienne Crozier's
diary is translated twice, once by Willa Rehnfield and once by her younger
assistant after her death. The two translations are so vastly different that the
entire activity of translation is called into question. Ian Watson's Chekhov's
Journey opens as a historical novel, but the next chapter sets up a tension between
this and a 1990 frame: a film-maker, a scriptwriter, and a Chekhov look-alike actor
meet to plan a film about Chekhov's 1890 trip across Siberia. A spaceship in the
future is about to launch backwards into time past, but the commander realizes that
he is experiencing the rewriting of history, and is caught in a time loop which
renders any firm sense of history or reality impossible. The team decides to make a
cinéma vérité film about the Tunguska expedition, despite the reader's awareness
that it was the hypnotic tampering with time that brought on the time warp. Past
events can be altered, and history gets rewritten. Maybe the real history of the
world is changing constantly, because history is a fiction, and humanity is forever
striving toward perfection. The problematizing of historical knowledge in novels
like this points to the need to separate and to the danger of separating fiction
and history as narrative genres. However, history and fiction share social,
cultural, and ideological contexts, as well as formal techniques. Both historians
and novelists constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative
representation, and the very structures and language they use to present those
subjects constitutes them as the object of our understanding. Both forms of
narrative are signifying systems in our culture, and historiographic metafiction
like Coover's The Public Burning reveals that history itself depends on conventions
of narrative, language, and ideology in order to present an account of 'what really
happened'. Fredric Jameson has argued that historical representation is in crisis,
and that the most intelligent solution is to reorganize historiography on a
different level, rather than abandoning it altogether. I would change the word
"modernist" to "postmodernist", though Jameson would never agree. Historiographic
metafiction blurs the line between fiction and history, but this blurring has been
a feature of literature since the classical epic and the Bible. Umberto Eco claims
that there are three ways to narrate the past: the romance, the swashbuckling tale,
and the historical novel. His medieval characters talk like Wittgenstein, for
instance, which points to a fourth way: historiographic metafiction. It is
difficult to generalize about nineteenth-century historical fiction because history
plays a great number of different roles, at different levels of generality, in its
various manifestations. The historical novel is a genre that is modelled on
historiography to the extent that it is motivated and made operative by a notion of
history as a shaping force. The protagonists of historiographic metafiction are
anything but proper types: they are the ex-centrics. Historiographic metafiction
espouses a postmodern ideology of plurality and recognition of difference, and the
protagonist in Doctorow's Book of Daniel is overtly specific, individual,
culturally and familially conditioned in his response to history. Lukács believed
that the historical novel is defined by the relative unimportance of its use of
detail, and that accuracy or even truth of detail is irrelevant. Postmodern fiction
contests the defining characteristic of historical fiction by incorporating and
assimilate historical data, while historiographic metafiction acknowledges the
paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today.
Lukács's third major defining characteristic of the historical novel is its
relegation of historical personages to secondary roles. The metafictional self-
reflexivity of postmodern novels prevents any such subterfuge, and poses the joins
between fiction and history as a problem. Historical novels are not histories
because they deny the reader participation in the communal project. Historiographic
metafiction reinstalls a kind of (very problematic) communal project. In the 1960s
a new form of narrative fiction called the non-fictional novel was born, which used
techniques of fiction in an overt manner and made no pretence to objectivity of
presentation. The non-fictional novel is linked to historiographic metafiction by
its metafictionality and provisionality. The New Journalism was an American
phenomenon, and was overtly personal and provisional, autobiographical in impulse
and performative in impact. The new mixing of fiction and fact is clear on popular,
if not academic, history in the years following. The nonfictional novel in its
journalistic variety influenced writers like Thomas Keneally who write historical
novels. I have tried to avoid all fiction, but sometimes it has been necessary to
reconstruct conversations. Keneally points to his reconstructions by self-reflexive
references to the reader, but as the story continues, he uses a generalized use of
the past tense and a single authoritative voice. The non-fictional novel of the
1960s and 1970s did not just record the contemporary hysteria of history, but
seriously questioned who determined and created that truth. This particular aspect
of the non-fictional novel enabled historiographic metafiction's more paradoxical
questioning. In many ways, the non-fiction novel is another late modernist
creation, in that it is self-conscious about its writing process and stresses
subjectivity. However, postmodern novels like Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People
parody this stance. There are non-fictional novels that come
very close to historiographic metafiction in their form and content, like Norman
Mailer's The Armies of the Night, which acknowledges the limits of "reporting" or
writing of the past, recent or remote. Postmodern novels raise issues regarding the
interaction of historiography and fiction, including the nature of identity and
subjectivity, reference and representation, and the ideological implications of
writing about history. Historiographic metafictions appear to privilege two modes
of narration, both of which problematize the entire notion of subjectivity. In
Midnight's Children, nothing survives the instability caused by the rethinking of
the past in non-developmental, non-continuous terms. Postmodernism establishes,
differentiates, and then disperses stable narrative voices that use memory to try
to make sense of the past. These voices are both assertive and capable of
shattering traditional concepts of subjectivity. In John Fowles's A Maggot, the
textualized past is literally incorporated into the text of the present through
parody. There are many references to eighteenth-century drama, but most often to
the fiction of the period. Postmodern intertextuality is a desire to close the gap
between past and present, as well as a desire to rewrite the past in a new context.
It uses and abuses intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and
then subverting their power through irony. Historiographic metafiction
problematizes the notion of reference, arguing that we can know the past only
through its textualized remains. This is not an emptying of the meaning of
language, but a loss of faith in our ability to know that reality. Fiction and
historiography are not different in this regard, as postmodern fiction poses new
questions about reference. In the visual arts, the issue of reference is perhaps
clearer, as Sherrie Levine frames Andreas Feininger's photographs of real subjects.
Postmodern art is more complex and problematic than extreme late modernist auto-
representation might suggest, because it acknowledges that there is no presence, no
external truth which verifies or unifies, that there is only self-reference.
Historiographic metafiction selfconsciously suggests this, but then uses it to
signal the discursive nature of all reference. Postmodern art is doubled and
contradictory, and rethinks the sign/referent relation in the face of the
realization of the limits of selfreflexivity's separation from social practice.
Historiographic metafiction shows that fiction is historically conditioned and
history is discursively structured, and that history loves only those who dominate
it. It also broadens the debate about the ideological implications of the
Foucaldian conjunction of power and knowledge. Characters never constitute a
microcosmic portrayal of representative social types; they experience complications
and conflicts that embody important tendencies in narrative plotting, often
traceable to other intertexts. Postmodern fiction has the same ideological
implications as history, but it is paradoxical, because it depends upon and draws
its power from that which it contests. The Epiloguist of A Maggot may claim that
what we have read is indeed "a maggot", but Thomas Pynchon's obsession with plots
is an ideological one, and contemporary philosophers of history like Michel de
Certeau have reminded historiographers that no research of the past is free of
socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions. The problematized relations
between history and fiction in postmodernism are underpinned by narrative, which is
seen as a central form of human comprehension. The conventions of narrative are
both installed and subverted in postmodern fiction, as happens with Oskar's
drumming in The Tin Drum. In Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, Goya's
"Desastres de la guerra" series provides the visual representations of the novel's
descriptions of revolutionary war, which are left aside by Carpentier as an ironic
signal of his own point of view. Historiographic metafiction, like historical
fiction and narrative history, must deal with the problem of the status of their
"facts" and of the nature of their evidence. The postmodern raising of these
questions offers few answers, but does not result in some sort of historical
relativism or presentism. Historiographic metafiction suggests that events are
configured into facts by being related to conceptual matrices. Historiography and
fiction decide which events will become facts. The postmodern problematization
points to our unavoidable difficulties with the concreteness of events and their
accessibility. has argued that all documents process information and are therefore
not neutral evidence for reconstructing phenomena. Historiographic metafiction
often points to the fact that historical sources and explanations are both
inscribed and undermined by the paratextual conventions of historiography, and that
the past once existed, but that our historical knowledge of it is semiotically
transmitted.