Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion – planned, timed, wired carefully – not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Of all literary genres, historical fiction is perhaps the most problematic and the most promising in relation to difficult questions of truth. Ostensibly rooted in some form of historical veracity in the traces of actual events or people, its fictional dimensions (from invented narrative to poetic qualities) nevertheless impress upon readers an imaginative truthfulness. In this way, historical fiction becomes a site of contention over truth; in its modern and postmodern manifestations, the genre becomes an exploration of the nature of truth itself.
Margaret Atwood captures this tension within historical fiction in her lecture, “In Search of Alias Grace.” Speaking of the history behind her novel Alias Grace, Atwood admits to epistemological uncertainty: “I am not one of those who believes there is no truth to be known. But I do have to conclude that, although there undoubtedly was a truth – somebody did kill Nancy Montgomery – truth is sometimes unknowable, at least by us.”1 Atwood posits both the reality and the limits of truth, particularly under historical conditions, and suggests that historical fiction is a fruitful genre for exploring this territory of truth. In the end, she claims that works of historical fiction are about much more than past moments: “They are about human nature, which usually means they are about pride, envy, avarice, lust, sloth, gluttony, and anger. They are about truth and lies, and disguises and revelations; they are about crime and punishment; they are about love and forgiveness and long-suffering and charity, they are about sin and retribution and sometimes even redemption.”2 Although she situates her discussion in a decidedly humanist frame, Atwood nevertheless articulates the essential possibilities of historical fiction in Christian language that invokes an ethical paradigm best understood within a biblical metanarrative.
As Atwood suggests, Canadian writers have been particularly active in the genre of historical fiction. Perhaps this activity is tied to popular feelings of historical inferiority, or has emerged in light of new theories of Canada’s postcolonial identity and a new metanarrative of Canadian multiculturalism. The Canadian postmodern condition feeds powerfully into historical narratives as revisiting, rediscovering, and rewriting history through a range of cultural lenses, which function as ideological windows onto the truth.3 Narratives such as Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient explore Canada’s historical record of war, seeking the truths to be told about the individual traumas experienced within national and global traumas. Other narratives such as Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing, Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers, and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Itsuka explore Canada’s history of racial encounters, which is to say, the truth of traumatic episodes centred on ethnic identity and cultural exchange. In their individual ways, all these writers plumb the historical past for meaningful present truths by establishing a hybrid territory between history and imagination.
In this chapter, I examine this in-between territory, tracing the dynamics by which historical traces and imagined narratives work together to express truth and to foreground issues of knowing the truth. First, I will explore Paul Ricoeur’s contribution to an understanding of narrative’s potentialities for truth telling; second, I will elaborate the way historical fiction functions as a hybrid genre that problematizes Ricoeur’s categories but opens up dialogic possibilities for meaning; and third, I will focus the discussion of historical fiction’s truth-telling potential by examining the genre’s particular concern for traumatic history.
Given his deep concern for history and literature, for the narrative practices that link but distinguish them, and for the rhetorical and ethical dimensions at the heart of narrative, Paul Ricoeur offers a particularly helpful pathway toward understanding historical fiction. His writings examine narrative’s nature and its truth capacities, the past/future orientation of narrative, and its ethical openness.
For Ricoeur, language is, by and large, a necessary condition for meaning, specifically for the kind of recovery or refiguring of meaning that is at the heart of narrative.4 In “The Poetics of Language and Myth,” he writes, “to rediscover meaning, we must return to the multilayered sedimentations of language, to the complex plurality of its instances, which can preserve what is said from the destruction of oblivion.”5 Ricoeur explains that hermeneutics is concerned with what he calls “the permanent spirit of language,” elaborating that “by the spirit of language, we intend not just some decorative excess or effusion of subjectivity, but the capacity of language to open up new worlds.”6 In relation to the past and to historical narrative, language is what forges the temporal link. As Ricoeur explains in Time and Narrative, “the present is . . . indicated by the coincidence between an event and the discourse that states it. To rejoin lived time starting from chronicle time, therefore, we have to pass through linguistic time, which refers to discourse.”7 Narrative discourse, whether historical or fictional, carries tremendous potential for meaning, as it mediates temporal existence.
With respect to historical narrative, meaning finds its locus in traces or vestiges left behind by the actions of those from the past. The paradox, Ricoeur explains, is that “the passage no longer is but the trace remains.”8 Such traces are at the heart of historical narrative’s ability to signify: “So the trace combines a relation of significance, best discerned in the idea of a vestige, and a relation of causality, included in the thing-likeness of the mark. The trace is a sign-effect.”9 In narrative, history refigures these traces and shapes them into a type of story that speaks to the aporias of time, that is, its perplexing, doubt-inducing, and impasse-creating dimensions. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur summarizes his argument this way: “My thesis here is that the unique way in which history responds to the aporias of the phenomenology of time consists in the elaboration of a third time – properly historical time – which mediates between lived time and cosmic time.”10 Historical time is thus humanly meaningful time, so much so that Ricoeur can claim, “the meaning of human existence is itself narrative.”11
For its part, fictional narrative complements historical narrative’s meaning making through the universalizing and figuring properties of imagination. Ricoeur explains, “to this reinscription of lived time on cosmic time, on the side of history, corresponds, on the side of fiction, a solution opposed to the same aporias in the phenomenology of time, namely, the imaginative variations that fiction brings about as regards the major themes of this phenomenology.”12 Later in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur elaborates this discussion of fiction’s “treasure trove of imaginative variations”13 by claiming, “fiction does not illustrate a pre-existing phenomenological theme; it actualizes the universal meaning of this theme in a singular figure.”14 He concludes that the fictional texts and their treatment of time he discusses “possess the principal virtue of revivifying these aporias and even of sharpening their sting. This is why I have so often been led to say that resolving the aporias poetically is not so much to dissolve them as to rid them of their paralyzing effect and to make them productive.”15 In other words, the symbolizing and figuring powers of narrative do not so much erase the puzzles of time as shed light on them. According to Ricoeur, then, the meaning-making potential of fictional narrative resides in its capacity to creatively heal a kind of paralysis in the face of aporias.
A distinguishing feature of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of historical and fictional narrative is its conception of the past’s meaningful relation to the future, as inscribed in narrative itself and actualized in the phenomenon of reading. The past, through narrative, is removed from its isolating existence in history and given the capacity to open up future possibilities. To begin, Ricoeur argues that history functions to create a chain of memories, constructing a bridge “between the historical past and memory by way of an ancestral narrative that serves as a relay station for memory directed to the historical past.” Ricoeur postulates, “if we proceed along this chain of memories, history tends to become a we-relationship.”16 In this way, the present is tied to the past to which it is indebted. However, this relationship finds its fulfillment in narrative’s ability to also posit one or many futures. Ricoeur explains this orientation in “The Poetics of Language and Myth”: “To say that narration is a recital which orders the past is not to imply that it is a conservative closure to what is new. On the contrary, narration preserves the meaning that is behind us so that we can have meaning before us. There is always more order in what we narrate than in what we have actually already lived, and this narrative excess (surcroît) of order, coherence and unity, is a prime example of the creative power of narration.”17 Narrative’s ability to be both retrospective and prospective characterizes its essential openness, both in its historical and fictional forms, in that it can supply a surplus of meaning in its creative activity. This is the ideal narrative situation. However, when past and future are cut off from each other the results are destructive, particularly when historical narratives affirm and inscribe oppressive power structures and when utopian future-oriented discourse severs itself from history. As Ricoeur explains, “ideology as a symbolic confirmation of the past and utopia as a symbolic opening towards the future are complimentary; if cut off from each other, they can lead to a form of political pathology.”18 In this way, open historical and fictional narratives fight against ideological rigidity and pave the way toward future possibilities.
For Ricoeur, such openness and possibility are situated within the narrative text but are activated only in reading. Ricoeur’s concern in Time and Narrative, then, is with “the configuration between two worlds, the fictive world of the text and the real world of the reader,” with the phenomenon of reading being “the necessary mediator of refiguration.”19 As he teases out the implications of this act of refiguration, he explains that “the reception of a work performs a certain mediation between the past and the present or, better, between the horizon of expectation coming from the past and the horizon of expectation belonging to the present.”20 These horizons, argues Ricoeur, never stabilize: “If we admit that the cognitive value of a work lies in its power to prefigure an experience to come, then there must be no question of freezing the dialogical relation into an atemporal truth. This open character of the history of effects leads us to say that every work is not only an answer provided to an earlier question but a source of new questions, in turn.”21 Ricoeur thus grounds truth temporally within an openly dialogic system – a reading system that in answering posits further questions. Within this rhetorical or phenomenological process, the narrative expresses its “communicative efficacy,” which Ricoeur describes in terms of catharsis and symbolic power, in terms of a freeing resulting from a process of disorientation and reorientation.22 In this way, the reader’s engagement of the symbolic within the fictional narrative accomplishes a meaning making parallel to the present’s meaning making of the past through a dialectical exploration of its traces. For Ricoeur, the real reader’s reading transforms the text and recovers time.
Grounded as it is in this phenomenology of reading and this idea of the past and future orientation of narrative, it is not surprising that Ricoeur’s sense of narrative, both historical and fictional, has a deeply ethical dimension. This moral quality grows directly out of the reading process. “The moment when literature attains its highest degree of efficacity,” writes Ricoeur, “is perhaps the moment when it places its readers in the position of finding a solution for which they themselves must find the appropriate questions, those that constitute the aesthetic and moral problem posed by the work.”23 In History and Truth, Ricoeur explores this ethical dimension particularly as it relates to the Christian faith. In “Christianity and the Meaning of History,” he affirms “meaning,” which is “the fundamental source of the courage to live in history,” while at the same time supporting “mystery,” its meaning hidden.24 In “Truth and Falsehood,” he explains a dialectic by which people develop a stable moral code out of a “sedimentation of choices,” but then experience destabilizing challenges: “The result is an endless questioning which assails the main supports of our ethical actions; and the vertigo of our ethical condition lays hold of us.”25 Suggesting that “this movement of dogmatization and of problematization in ethical truth [may be] the source of all the paradoxes of the moral life,”26 Ricoeur nevertheless goes on to argue that this destabilizing is welcome: “For the Christian, the rupturing of the violent unity of truth is desirable. On the one hand, it indicates the conscious awareness of all the possibilities of truth and the range of man. On the other, it signifies the purification of the truth of the Word.”27 With these possibilities of truth framed within the truth of Christ and divine revelation, Ricoeur concludes, “the ultimate meaning of man’s perilous adventures and the values which they unfold is condemned to remain ambiguous: time remains the time of debate, discernment, and patience.”28 The problem, within this framework of historical time, is the will to a unified, single truth, because when such “enters into history as a goal of civilization, it is immediately affected with a mark of violence.”29 In this context, testimony, historical traces, and art counteract this development of a violating, monologic, and even totalitarian vision. Testimony does so by operating as “the ultimate link between imagination and memory”;30 similarly, historical traces preserved within formal and informal archives initiate a “critique of power”31 through historical narrative; and art offers an interpretation of the world and an ethical judgment of human life.32 Taken together, testimony, historical traces, and art thus problematize monologic forces that harmfully seek to contain and wield truth.
This ethical dimension of narrative, its rhetorical mediation of past and present, and its meaning-making capacities in both historical and fictional variations are all relevant to an understanding of historical fiction. However, most relevant is Ricoeur’s actual exploration of the relationship between the historical and the fictional. On the one hand, he repeatedly maintains the distinction between the two forms of narrative. For example, at one point in Time and Narrative he argues, “the recourse to documents does indicate a dividing line between history and fiction. Unlike novels, historians’ constructions do aim at being reconstructions of the past.”33 Later, he reaffirms the gap and claims, “between the ‘reality of the past’ and the ‘unreality of fiction,’ the dissymmetry is total.”34
On the other hand, the history/fiction gap is not total; rather, the two forms of narrative “operate in parallel fashion to create new forms of human time, and therefore new forms of human community.”35 Specifically, imagination operates in both narrative realms and functions both to “bring us outside of the real world – into unreal or possible worlds” and to “put memories before our eyes”; it serves “as a kind of mise-en-scène of the past.”36 Ricoeur calls this paradox of the borderline between imagination and memory puzzling, but maintains the division:
This crucial issue brings us to the borderline between imagination and memory . . . There is a positing act in memory, whereas there is an unrealizing of history in imagination. It is very difficult to maintain the distinction, but it must be kept, at least as a basic recognition of two opposite claims about the past, as unreal and real. In that sense, memory is on the side of perception, whereas imagination is on the side of fiction. But they often intersect . . . This is not to ignore the fact that sometimes fictions come closer to what really happened than do mere historical narratives, where fictions go directly to the meaning beyond or beneath the facts. It is puzzling. But, finally, we have to return to a body count. You have to accurately count the corpses in the death camps as well as offering vivid narrative accounts that people will remember.37
Continuing with this theme of the puzzling intersections of history and fiction, Ricoeur claims, “literature never ceases to challenge our way of reading human history and praxis . . . Literary language has the capacity to put our quotidian existence into question; it is dangerous in the best sense of the word.”38 In the end, he resolves this border dispute by arguing that historical narrative is quasi-fictional and fictional narrative quasi-historical: “History is quasi-fictive once the quasi-presence of events placed ‘before the eyes of’ the reader by a lively narrative supplements through its intuitiveness, its vividness, the elusive character of the pastness of the past, which is illustrated by the paradoxes of standing-for. Fictional narrative is quasi-historical to the extent that the unreal events that it relates are past facts for the narrative voice that addresses itself to the reader. It is in this that they resemble past events and that fiction resembles history.”39 In this configuration, historical and fictional dimensions of narrative resemble and supplement each other. Each dimension deepens the possibilities that each form of narrative contains within itself, and both forms contribute to the meaningfulness of human time and answer the phenomenological aporias of time. In the end, Ricoeur posits mutually enriching forms of narrative that pay their own distinct debts to the past.
Ricoeur takes us thus far in thinking about history and fiction. But can Ricoeur’s thinking extend into the realm of historical fiction? When fiction and history meet in the same narrative, what truth matters emerge? What dynamics of reconfiguring do readers experience when they engage such a text? To begin, the temporal horizons of historical fiction are complex: the narrative itself, which may be extensively multi-temporal, carries traces of past events and historical persons. The imagination then works on these vestiges, which are often documentary and archival, in complex and creative ways. A second temporal horizon involves the historical writer’s moment of authoring the narrative, with its own socio-cultural markers and traces in relation to the historical past of the narrative and with its own relationship to literary history. Finally, there is each reader’s present/future horizon in relation to the authorial past and the historically imagined past of the narrative – the retrospective and prospective dimensions. The relationships in the interplay of authorial, textual, and reading horizons open up rich possibilities for dialogic exchange in relating historical traces and tracing past and present relationships expressed through narrative invention and figuration.
In historical fiction, the truth potentialities Ricoeur outlines in history and fiction as parallel but separate narrative modes seem to fuse and multiply. Anchored in the exploration of historical traces, the imagination operates on truth matters and deepens and problematizes truth issues. Paradoxically, while understanding becomes temporally and relationally contingent, narrative ends up offering an excess of meaning. Fiction’s communicative efficacy – its catharsis and allegory – fuses in historical fiction with history’s dialectic of indebtedness to the past. Understood in this way, historical fiction is a hybridized narrative genre that combines elements of historical and imagined narrative. It suggests that history itself is by nature a hybrid (imagined, figured forth out of historical traces). As a genre concerned with historical and imaginative truth telling, historical fiction typically involves layering the narrative, searching the archives for gaps, inventing within the spaces left between traces, and figuring forth from the historical vestiges through analogy, metaphor, allegory, fable, and fantasy. By foregrounding the work of history and the play of imagination, historical fiction gives readers a playful workload as it makes them witnesses and moves them imaginatively in relation to history and truth, revivifying aporias, to use Ricoeur’s language, in order to deal with them productively. Readers’ experiences are heightened, confronted as they are with questions of what is and is not historical trace, how invention has “completed” the historical traces, and to what end. As a hybrid genre, historical fiction thus has a zone of contact or intersection where historical traces and invented narrative come together.
Within Canadian historical fiction, individual texts offer variations on this hybrid model. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, for example, focuses on the internment and diaspora of Japanese-Canadians during and after World War II by combining historical traces and imaginative methods through the tension between, on the one hand, Aunt Emily’s documents, letters, and reports, and, on the other hand, the narrator Naomi’s tortured and to a degree repressed memories of the past. The archival and textual past comes into contact with the remembered, storied past in order to emancipate what is still captive and alienated, and to re-gather what is dispersed.40 In Timothy Findley’s The Wars, the story of Robert Ross is initiated through archival photographs, the narrator an archivist/historian attempting to piece Robert’s story together from photographs, transcripts, and testimonies; at the same time, the novel is deeply imagistic, even cinematic, in its imagined elements that stand beside and flow out of the archival material.41 In a different way, Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy relies on a double narrative: a third-person account of the events leading up to and including the Cypress Hills Massacre, along with a first-person narrative situated fifty years later in which a screenwriter tracks down a still-living witness-participant and convinces him to share his story.42 As a final example, there is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, in which the character identified in the title, again a fictionalized version of a historical figure, remains deeply attached in his dying days at the end of World War II to a copy of Herodotus’s The Histories into which he has pasted many texts and inscribed his own story without revealing his identity.43 What these briefly described examples suggest is the rich intertextuality of such historical fiction, the polyphony put at the service of imaginatively plumbing that horizon of the past to bring it into contact with the present reader’s horizon. In the diversity of the historical subject matter and in the methods of inventive imagining, the results are typically a meeting of meaning and mystery.
What is striking about so many of these works of historical fiction is their particular focus – in both subject matter and methodology – on historical trauma, understood in both broadly social and more narrowly personal terms. In psychology, trauma refers to the effects of violent and violating events on the self. Such traumatic events and conditions include not only natural catastrophes but also sexual and domestic violence, combat, and political terror.44 Trauma theory provides some particularly potent concepts for understanding the workings of truth in historical fiction. First, this theory describes the dynamic between little-understood perpetrators; victims who face various forms of dissociation, secrecy, and silencing; and witnesses who are enmeshed in a fragmentary vision. Second, it explains the dialectic of, on the one hand, self-preserving amnesia, and, on the other hand, testimony to the trauma. Finally, it addresses the disintegration of human community, trust, and ultimate beliefs through horrific violations, as well as reintegration through healing. Here is how Judith Lewis Herman characterizes the traumatic experience: “Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.”45 Herman further discusses what characterizes these responses to catastrophe: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”46 However, she continues, “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”47
This territory of trauma, what Herman calls “the lacerating moral complexities of the extreme situation,”48 is precisely the territory of many works of Canadian historical fiction. Part of the genre’s work, then, involves remembering and reintegrating trauma into collective consciousness. It involves addressing the silence, bearing witness, and offering testimony. In doing so, the genre plumbs the meaning of violence and violation and its alienating and dissociating effects. Listen to the narrator in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: “I couldn’t turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity – perpetrator, victim, witness.”49 So it goes in many texts: in Boyden’s Three Day Road, the residential school experience of aboriginal people and World War I trench warfare;50 in Kogawa’s Obasan, childhood sexual abuse, internment, diaspora, and a parent lost to the atomic bomb; and in Atwood’s Alias Grace, the psychological head wounds of Grace Marks inflicted by childhood violence, the death of a mother, the botched abortion and death of Mary Whitney, and the amnesia-inspiring murders of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear.51 The litany of global and personal traumas could continue, but it is enough to see how historical fiction speaks truth to power, though it does so best not ideologically and monologically, but dialogically through its expression of indebtedness to the past and its imaginative intensification of truth that directs readers into the future.
Ricoeur’s notions of “a wounded or split cogito”52 and of “axial moments”53 resonate with trauma theory. In his exploration of the quasi-fictive nature of history and the quasi-historical nature of fiction, Ricoeur isolates traumatic history for special attention. First of all, he argues, the historian initiates a critique of power by giving “expression to the voices of those who have been abused, the victims of intentional exclusion,” and by “providing space for the confrontation between opposing testimonies.”54 Similarly, Ricoeur cautions against amnesty as a type of enforced forgetfulness that prevents mourning and leads to melancholy.55 “It is good,” he writes, “that the wounds of history remain open to thought.”56 Such wounds Ricoeur describes as “boundary situations . . . in which the individual or community experiences a fundamental existential crisis,” a destructive threat that presses the community “to return to the very roots of its identity, to that mythical nucleus which ultimately grounds and determines it.”57 In other words, the traumatized face “ultimate questions concerning our origins and ends.”58
Toward the end of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur powerfully articulates narrative’s responsibilities toward historical trauma by meditating on the Holocaust. Discussing epoch-making events, Ricoeur argues that while normally the historian is expected to set aside personal feelings, with events such as Auschwitz that distance is neither possible nor desirable: “In this regard we should recall the biblical watchword (from Deuteronomy) Zakhor, ‘Remember!’ which is not necessarily the same thing as a call to historiography.”59 Ricoeur then goes on to contrast our experience of the sacred and great, tremendum fascinosum, with our experience of the horrific:
The tremendum [fascinosum] . . . has another side to it, the tremendum horrendum, whose cause also deserves to be pleaded. And we shall see what beneficial aid fiction can bring to this plea. Horror is the negative form of admiration, as loathing is of veneration. Horror attaches to events that must never be forgotten. It constitutes the ultimate ethical motivation for the history of victims . . . The victims of Auschwitz are, par excellence, the representatives in our memory of all history’s victims. Victimization is the other side of history that no cunning of reason can ever justify and that, instead, reveals the scandal of every theodicy of history.
The role of fiction in this memory of the horrible is a corollary to the capacity of horror, and also of admiration, to address itself to events whose explicit uniqueness is of importance . . . [H]orror isolates events by making them incomparable, incomparably unique, uniquely unique. If I persist in associating horror with admiration, it is because horror inverts the feeling with which we go forth to meet all that seems to us to be generative, creative. Horror is inverted veneration. It is in this sense that the Holocaust has been considered a negative revelation, an Anti-Sinai.60
As Ricoeur describes the traumatic situation, both history and fiction have deep responsibilities to victims and to memory: there can be no rationalization, no defence of God’s goodness that explains and dismisses the horror. This, too, is the truth territory of historical fiction.
Deeply disruptive trauma de-narrates a life and life itself; the writer of historical fiction who inscribes the traces of traumatic history into novelistic narrative while inventing the truth essentially re-narrates and revives the silenced story. The narrator in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces at one point remembers and meditates on the trauma the victims of the Holocaust experienced, movingly imagining the most profound losses. “But truthfully,” he admits, “I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives.”61 In one sense, the narrator speaks the truth, but in another sense the collaboration of author and reader is what allows the hybrid stories told about trauma by historical fiction to succeed, at least to an extent, in this work of imagining. Historical fiction such as Fugitive Pieces, The Wars, Obasan, Alias Grace, and The English Patient can thus make an ethically rich gesture toward imagining the unimaginable, whether that of the Holocaust, trench warfare, internment and diaspora, murder, burning and crashing, or atomic fallout. In doing so, historical fiction, with its attention to historical traces and its imaginative surplus of meaning, fulfills what Ricoeur describes as our responsibilities to victims and to memory.
The journey toward understanding historical fiction, then, begins with and comes back to Ricoeur’s explication of historical and fictional narrative as related forms of truth telling. His explanation of the meaning-making capacities of historical and fictional narratives, including their ability to expose and productively sharpen the aporias of the phenomenology of time, clarifies narrative’s mediation of past and present and promotes an ethical understanding of its capacity. While historical fiction as a genre complicates Ricouer’s separation of historical and fictional narrative by presenting a rich hybrid possibility, Ricoeur’s insights into historical trauma in turn enrich our understanding of the truth-telling potential of historical fiction in relation to traumatic experience. In the end, readers are left with a sense of historical fiction as a genre deeply committed to imaginative truth telling. Rudy Wiebe expresses the ethical responsibility of historical fiction this way: “A life is a sacred story, and if you are going to tell it you must respect it profoundly.”62 Like Christian writers of historical fiction, Christian readers of historical fiction testify to this belief as they struggle to understand the narrative within the larger narrative of faith. Thus, this genre’s hybridity embraces an ethical debt to the past through engagement with its traces and at the same time opens up a surplus of meaning through imaginative structures, intertextuality, polyphony, and figuration, creating the productive ambiguity that Ricoeur associates with meaning, mystery, and living within time. In the end, Ricoeur’s distinction between history and fiction, problematized by historical fiction, is again relevant. “Does not the difficult law of creation,” he asks, “which is ‘to render’ in the most perfect way the vision of the world that animates the narrative voice, simulate, to the point of being indistinguishable from it, history’s debt to the people of the past, to the dead? Debt for debt, who, the historian or the novelist, is the most insolvent?”63 Given Ricoeur’s equation, it is the case that writers of historical fiction – Canadian writers included – are the most insolvent of all authors. As readers, we are deeply in their debt.
1 Margaret Atwood, In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997), 37.
2 Ibid., 38–9. See also Deborah Bowen’s exploration of the relationship between historical fiction, truth, and biblical meta-narrative in Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 59–98.
3 Particularly relevant here is Linda Hutcheon’s “Historiographic Metafiction,” in The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–77. Also significant in this postmodern, postcolonial approach is Herb Wyile’s Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), in which Wyile investigates the epistemological skepticism present in the genre. A recent study emphasizes the Canadian in Canadian historical fiction: the essays in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, ed. Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010) address “the role that history and fiction have played in the formation of national identity” (vii).
4 This is not to say that for Ricoeur meaning resides only in language. Works such as The Symbolism of Evil and The Rule of Metaphor posit certain forms of pre-linguistic meaning.
5 Paul Ricoeur, “The Poetics of Language and Myth,” interview by Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Continental Thinking: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 110.
6 Ibid., 124. The italics are Ricoeur’s.
7 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 109.
8 Ibid., 119.
9 Ibid., 120.
10 Ibid., 99.
11 Ibid., 100.
12 Ibid., 99.
13 Ibid., 128.
14 Ibid., 134.
15 Ibid., 139.
16 Ibid., 114.
17 Ricoeur, “Poetics,” 104. “To give people back a memory,” continues Ricoeur, “is also to given them back a future” (109), thus emphasizing the ontological potential of narrative. As he argues in Time and Narrative, within this system of symbolic functioning, ancestors become “the icon of the immemorial” and descendants “the icon of hope” (3:116).
18 Ricoeur, “Poetics,” 111.
19 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 159.
20 Ibid., 172.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 176–7.
23 Ibid., 173.
24 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 93.
25 Ibid., 173.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 181.
28 Ibid., 182.
29 Ibid., 176.
30 Ricoeur, “On Narrative Imagination,” Dialogues with Continental Thinking, 50.
31 Ibid., 51.
32 Ricoeur, History and Truth, 174.
33 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 142.
34 Ibid., 157.
35 Ibid., 102.
36 Ricoeur, “On Narrative Imagination,” 50.
37 Ibid., 49–50.
38 Ricoeur, “Poetics,” 106.
39 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 190.
40 Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1981).
41 Timothy Findley, The Wars (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005).
42 Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Englishman’s Boy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996).
43 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage International, 1992). Also of interest are Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter and In the Skin of a Lion. For additional examples by other authors, see George Bowering’s Burning Water, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, and John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright.
44 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 2001), 2–3.
45 Ibid., 33.
46 Ibid., 1.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 69. For additional resources that explore, in particular, the relationship between trauma and literature, see the following: James Berger’s “Trauma and Literary Theory,” Contemporary Literature 38 (3, 1997): 569–82; Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (London: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Laurie Vickroy’s Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002).
49 Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), 140.
50 Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005).
51 Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
52 Ricoeur, “Poetics,” 109.
53 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 108.
54 Ricoeur, “On Narrative Imagination,” 51.
55 Ibid., 42.
56 Ibid., 51.
57 Ricoeur, “Poetics,” 119.
58 Ibid.
59 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 187.
60 Ibid., 187–8.
61 Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 147.
62 Rudy Wiebe, “Walking Where His Feet Can Walk,” interview with Herb Wyile, in Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction, ed. Herb Wyile (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 73.
63 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 192.