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’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, xii), by contrast, a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (her label for postmodern historical fiction) 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’ as well as the subject of serious academic attention. The three authors whose work we will consider in this chapter, John Fowles, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift – as well as others whom we shall consider in due course, such as Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie – have all enjoyed such dual acclaim. The postmodern historical novel is therefore what we might think of as ‘the acceptable face of postmodernism’ in literary fiction, influenced by postmodern ideas about fictionality and its relationship with reality, but also popular with a general readership on a mass scale.
As Hutcheon's term suggests, historiographic metafiction is a self-conscious work of fiction concerned with the writing of history. Metafiction, as we know, functions as a challenge to the assumptions behind literary realism and ‘lays bare’ its own processes of construction to remind us that reality is similarly constructed or mediated. By extension, we can say that historiographic metafiction is fiction which uses metafictional techniques to remind us that history is a construction, not something natural that equates to ‘the past’. History is not ‘the past’, but a narrative based on documents and other material created in the past.
The accessibility of historiographic metafiction has posed problems for critics seeking to come up with an overall category of ‘postmodern fiction’ because it seems so different from the more avant-garde work of the great pioneers behind postmodernism, such as Beckett or Burroughs, as well as obviously ‘experimental’ authors such as Coover, Barth or B. S. Johnson. Brian McHale's studies of postmodern fiction, Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Constructing Postmodernism (1992), barely mention the examples of British historiographic metafiction which are the primary concern of Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1988), and Alison Lee's Realism and Power (1990). The scope of Hutcheon's and Lee's analyses thus demonstrates that postmodernism in fiction cannot be defined as work which is non-referential or radically innovative at a formal level.
However, we noted in the previous chapter that an interest in self-reflexive historical reconstruction (somewhat contrary to received wisdom) is a strong feature of 1960s postmodern fiction, as in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, for example. Staging a confrontation between metafiction and history became a dominant characteristic of the novel throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. Robert Scholes, in his 1979 study of metafiction, Fabulation and Metafiction, noted that the major novels of the previous decade – and he mentions work by Pynchon, Barth, Fowles and Coover – ‘have tended strongly toward the apparently worn-out form of the historical novel’ (Scholes, 1979, 205).
The historical novel is a long-established category of fiction, whose own history stretches back to the turn of the nineteenth century and pioneering works by Walter Scott, such as Waverley (1814), and includes prominent examples from later in the century such as Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1859), and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1863–9). Typically it dramatizes a specific historical period a few decades at least before the time of writing and focuses on a central character (sometimes a real historical personage, sometimes a fictional one) who is affected directly in some way by real historical dramas, the outcome of which readers already know.
The classic nineteenth-century historical novel renders the conditions of the time, the way of life, and the contemporary worldview persuasively via the devices of realism. The Marxist theorist of the novel, Georg Lukács, in his classic study of the form first published in 1937, argues that its special ability was to present a ‘total’ picture of a society at the point of historical change, a kind of microcosmic snapshot of a real period in time, thereby enabling us effectively to use the fiction as an insight into the very historical processes which gave it its context (Lukács, 1983).
However, postmodern commentators such as Hutcheon and Hayden White note that in the nineteenth century – in stark contrast to the twentieth, for the most part – the disciplines of literature and history were regarded as quite comfortably related, not so much because history was considered fictional, but because the faith in realist art meant that the novel could be considered ‘factual’. Postmodern fiction, somewhat at odds with the rest of the twentieth century (in which aesthetic practice was regarded as quite separate from historiography) once again stresses the similarity of the two modes, though tips the balance and assumes that the writing of history is dependent upon the principles of fiction.
The conviction behind this is summed up by a rhetorical question Roland Barthes asks in his essay, ‘The Discourse of History’:
Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical ‘science’, bound to the underlying standard of the ‘real’, and justified by the principles of ‘rational’ exposition – does this form of narration really differ, in some specific trait, in some indubitably distinctive feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic, the novel, and the drama?
(Barthes, 1981, 7)
Historiography has pretensions to being a kind of ‘science’, that is, seeing itself as a discipline which can analyse its object of study dispassionately and objectively, define its properties and measure its effects. The problem, though, as Hayden White has argued, is that the endpoint of this particular analysis remains ‘a narrative mode of representation’, something which amounts to a failure at both a methodological and theoretical level. ‘A discipline that produces narrative accounts of its subject matter as an end in itself’, he contends, ‘seems methodologically unsound; one that investigates its data in the interest of telling a story about them appears theoretically deficient’ (White, 1984, 1).
Historiography and fiction are both made up of narrative units (events, situations, utterances, and so on) which must be selected and ordered by a narrator, who is by definition partial, limited in the range of perspectives from which he can observe the narrative. This is as true of the historian as it is of the novelist – even allowing for the historian's responsibility to remain objective and detached. After all, the narrator of classic realist fiction often claims the same responsibility to detachment, but he or she, as a range of theorists of the novel, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Belsey, and Colin McCabe have previously demonstrated (Bakhtin, 1973; McCabe, 1974; Belsey, 1980), inevitably favours one character over another and subtly pushes the reader to accept his or her interpretation of events.
Nor, inevitably, can everything be told about an episode in the past. This is obvious when we consider the sheer scale of history, which contains vast potential combinations of narrative units. To invoke a common distinction in postmodern theory, historical events are not ‘found’ objects, things that are effectively waiting to be picked up and represented by the historian, but ‘constructed’ objects. Historiography, like all narrative (indeed like all writing) involves the kind of ‘frames’ foregrounded by metafiction; historiographic metafiction also draws attention to these frames and their function, and often breaks them.
It would be a mistake to push this comparison too far and try to claim that history really is fiction, no more no less. Historiography involves narrative and formal constraints which are far more rigid than those of literature, limiting the possibilities for the kind of writing historians can actually produce. Historical writing is almost never ‘creative’, still less ‘poetic’ (though there are some examples of what we might call ‘metahistory’, like Simon Schama's Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations [1998] or Peter Ackroyd's 1991 biography of Charles Dickens). Historiography must also cater for the particular expectations of its readers, who naturally assume that what they read will reflect the values of objectivity and authority.
We must also, when examining historiographic metafiction, avoid the trap of thinking of history as some naïve, old-fashioned discipline which continues to produce descriptions and analyses of historical events while remaining blissfully unaware of the problems of narrative. Like literary theory, ‘historical theory’ has a long-running tradition in the twentieth century (and further back, if we include philosophers like Hegel in the category), and has often debated the uses of narrative in historiography. The French Annales group of historians, working in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were strongly critical of narrative history. So is Hayden White, whose work (especially the two books Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978), which examine the discipline from the perspective of narrative theory) has had a major impact in forcing historians to reconsider conventional forms of historiography.
It is also important to emphasize here that the critique mounted by works of historiographic metafiction is aimed at the writing of history, not history itself. It may be the case that history is only accessible to us via textual forms, as there is nothing which remains of the past except text (i.e. ‘text’ understood in the expanded, structuralist sense, to mean any document composed of signs which we can read, whether written, recorded orally, or visually represented). However, the actual processes of history ‘itself’ – that is, historical change – are not textual. As Fredric Jameson puts it in his book The Political Unconscious, ‘history…is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational’ (Jameson, 1981, 82). Just because we cannot access them, it does not mean historical processes did not occur.
But of course the unbridgeable gap between the real past and representations of it is precisely what motivates the postmodern historical novel – and those critics who have written about it. Most prominent of these is Linda Hutcheon. Her definition of ‘historiographic metafiction’ goes much further than White's theory in insisting upon the close similarity between fiction and historiography. History and the novel, she argues, citing the theorist of history Paul Veyne, share a series of conventions: ‘selection, organization, diegesis, anecdote, temporal pacing, and emplotment’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 111). Both are forms of narrative which function ‘as signifying systems in our culture; both are what [the American novelist E. L.] Doctorow once called modes of “mediating the world for the purpose of introducing meaning”’ – and meaning is itself constructed and imposed rather than found (Hutcheon, 1988a, 112). Most of all, she contends, the problem historiographic metafiction focuses on repeatedly is the one which also preoccupies structuralism: the recognition that language cannot refer to the real world, but only a conceptual version of it.
Hutcheon regards historiographic metafiction as practically synonymous with postmodernism in fiction (Hutcheon, 1988a, ix). Her overall understanding of postmodernism, we recall, is that it is a phenomenon characterized by doubleness, governed by the logic of ‘both…and…’ rather than ‘either…or…’, wholly at ease with contradiction and paradox. This doubleness is reflected in the way a work of historiographic metafiction presents a moment in history both as a vivid, believable representation and as a discursive, narrativized construct.
Historiographic metafiction also turns on the distinctive double relation with the reader which Hutcheon explored in her first book, Narcissistic Narrative (Hutcheon, 1984), as it is at once didactic, teaching us about history, and also – at the same time – allowing us the freedom to question, interpret, even ‘co-write’ its narrative (in the Barthesian sense). Rather than collapsing history and fiction into one another so that the possibility of representing ‘the real’ is eliminated, it problematizes the boundary, and asks the reader to explore the space in between. The reader is made aware of the fictionality of the historical material in a text while at the same time remaining conscious of its basis in real events.
The real value of the emphasis on the narrativized, textual aspects of history is not that it fatally compromises historiography, urging us to stop believing in its claims to truth, but that it ‘opens up’ to interpretation what would otherwise be a closed, didactic form of rhetoric. Hutcheon quotes Jameson's view (from his essay ‘Periodizing the 60s’) that the problems with adhering to ‘“old-fashioned narrative or ‘realistic’ historiography”’ mean that the job of the historian has changed. It is not ‘“any longer to produce some vivid representation of history ‘as it really happened’, but rather to produce the concept of history”’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 112). Historiographic metafiction presents its readers with history as a concept so that the fiction comes to function as a kind of theory, indirectly, and often directly (as in the work of Julian Barnes or Graham Swift), asking us to consider our relation to history. ‘Opening up’ history to the present in this way is its special political value, for Hutcheon, for it prevents history from ‘being conclusive and teleological’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 110) and asserts that ‘there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 109).
This postmodern critique of historiography through fiction remains constructive, however. While highlighting the historian's dependence on narrative, it also asserts, conversely, the value which fiction offers historiography and the theory of history. Even though it destabilizes its own narrative, the fact is that we can learn about real historical events from a work of historiographic metafiction. Robert Coover's The Public Burning is one classic example, as it brought a traumatic national political event of twenty-five years before back to prominence in the United States at a critical moment. Another novel which performed a similar task on an even wider scale is Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which almost single-handedly, following its publication in 1969, focused historical attention in Europe and the United States on the morality of the Allied bombing strategy designed to hasten the end of the war. Although this novel continually flaunts its fictional status, it still functions as a powerful record of what happened in Dresden in 1944.
This doubleness is what leads to the emotional power of historiographic metafiction. It is not simply a playful parody of history, making fun of our habit of believing in something which is patently fictional. Rather it affirms over and over again that history is crucial to our lives. Like the conventional realist historical novel it shows us that whether we like it or not and whether or not we have been directly affected by historical events ourselves we are the products of history and the course our lives take depends upon it. What a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five makes clear is that History is not some detached thing, like a great novel we read and are moved or shocked by; it is something that intervenes in our lives. The problem is how it does this and how we know what exactly happened in the past. Its accessibility may make it a more conservative form of postmodern writing, yet historiographic metafiction nevertheless engages seriously with one of the crucial dilemmas of postmodern aesthetics: the relation between the real and that which seeks to represent the real.
Until Hutcheon's late 1980s studies British fiction had not significantly featured in the postmodernism debate. The brief emergence of an avant-garde tradition in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s made practically no impact on contemporary discussions about the postmodern, which featured mainly in the United States, even though writers like B. S. Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose were producing metafictional works which could productively have been placed alongside American writing by the likes of Gass, Coover, Barth, or Barthelme.
This was not just an example of American insularity, for the fact is that the post-war British literary mainstream has always been rather conservative, especially compared with other European traditions such as the French and Italian. There may be wide-ranging historical and cultural reasons for this which are too complex to go into here (Britain's island mentality, for example, its deep-rooted suspicion of intellectualism, or even the emphasis on pragmatic and analytic philosophy over ‘continental’ varieties) but one important literary reason is the dominance of the realist tradition in fiction which has always been associated with England. As Ian Watt's landmark study The Rise of the Novel (1957) shows, the realist novel was rooted in England, in the work of writers like Defoe and Fielding, while nineteenth-century ‘classic realism’ (e.g. Dickens, George Eliot) was especially dominant in this country too.
Hutcheon's intervention in the postmodern debate opened the way for a serious consideration of some of the most important British writers to emerge in the 1980s. In a 1990 essay on ‘British Historiographic Metafiction’, Susan Onega lists numerous examples including John Fowles, Maureen Duffy, William Golding, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Rose Tremain, A. S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, and Jim Crace (Onega, 1995, 94). She might also have mentioned D. M. Thomas, Alasdair Gray or Salman Rushdie.
This is not to say that historiographic metafiction was an exclusively British development. I have already mentioned The Public Burning and Slaughterhouse-Five, and Hutcheon's exhaustive studies consider many other examples from North America (e.g. Doctorow's Ragtime), as well as texts from South America and Europe. Nevertheless historiographic metafiction does have a particularly British relevance, given its relation to the realist literary tradition.
Alison Lee, another critic who has championed British historiographic metafiction as symptomatic of postmodern fiction, has suggested that the crucial fact is, paradoxically, the apparent conservatism of this variety of metafiction, which actually gives it an extra subversive power compared with its more obviously radical, dazzling North American counterpart. The metafiction of Gass or Barthelme, she argues, ‘plays with the conventions of Realism in a more overt way’ and this effectively strips these conventions of authority. By contrast, British historiographic metafiction ‘firmly install[s] Realist techniques, and in some cases [such as Graham Swift's Waterland] seem at first to be Realist texts’. As a result, it means that ‘postmodernist techniques challenge Realist conventions from within the very conventions they wish to subvert’ (Lee, 1990, xii). This, she contends, is more powerful than a critique from outside.
In the rest of this chapter I want to consider three of the most significant examples of British postmodern historiographic metafiction: John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Graham Swift's Waterland (1983), and Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984). Each novel is written by a white, middle-class, Oxbridge-educated man, affirming that while this variety of fiction challenges the authority of an established approach to history, it is also the product of the conservative British literary establishment. Before turning to the specific examples, then, it is important to note that besides not being simply a British phenomenon, much powerful historiographic metafiction has been produced by female writers and writers from other ethnic origins than white. These bring a more precise political edge to the general question of ‘opening up’ a closed practice, historiography, and therefore cannot simply be reduced to a single category, as they require separate chapters to themselves. The category of historiographic metafiction will therefore be significant in the following two chapters. Nevertheless, comparatively ‘mainstream’ as it may be, the engaging fiction of Fowles, Swift, and Barnes provides an ideal starting-point, as it so successfully exemplifies the double-coded logic of historiographic metafiction.
Susan Onega has written about sending a letter to the academic and novelist David Lodge in 1983 asking for other examples of ‘pseudo-historical novels’ like Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman only for him to reply that he couldn't think of any. By 1990, the time of her paper about British pseudo-historical novels, the situation had changed dramatically, and the list of British novelists producing this kind of work was (as we have seen) extensive. But Fowles's novel was the pioneer.
At one level The French Lieutenant's Woman is an extraordinarily effective pastiche of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a form Fowles clearly admires. It is as if written by a composite version of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The French Lieutenant's Woman tells an engaging love story set in the beautiful Dorset seaside town of Lyme Regis in 1867. Charles Smithson, a wealthy Victorian gentleman, heir to a title, is engaged to marry Ernestina Freeman, daughter of a representative of the emergent middle class, a haberdasher keen to see his daughter marry into a family higher up the social scale. When the novel begins, their courtship is progressing according to the codes of propriety which operated at the time. Yet Charles becomes obsessively attracted to the mysterious Sarah Woodruff – known as ‘the French Lieutenant's Woman’ (or ‘whore’) by the people of Lyme – who is a social outcast because of the stigma of having had an affair with a French sailor, who has abandoned her. Her outsider status is signified by her habit of wandering around the symbolic ‘wild zone’ of the Undercliff, a counter-space to the domestic interiors where proper social intercourse is conducted.
Charles begins a disastrous relationship with Sarah, breaking off his engagement to Ernestina, and following her to a hotel in Exeter where they briefly have sex. Sarah then disappears, Charles's manservant Sam betrays him, and Mr Freeman makes him sign a humiliating document acknowledging his guilt and effectively condemning him to outcast status too. When he eventually tracks Sarah down, to a house she shares with the historically real Victorian artists, the Rossettis, he discovers she has changed considerably and finds this hard to accept.
Although Fowles professed to have no particular interest in the form of the historical romance, the novel is beautifully constructed, with a faultless replication of nineteenth-century patterns of speech and period detail, and rewards the kind of in-depth reading one might perform on a Hardy novel, noting the patterns in the narrative and decoding its underlying symbolism. Fowles once commented that the novel was, like its predecessors The Collector and The Magus, ‘based on more or less disguised existentialist premises’ and tried ‘to show an existentialist awareness before it was chronologically possible’ (Fowles, 1990, 151).
Sartrean existentialism (a philosophy to which Fowles adhered) begins with the recognition that human existence is pointless, as there is no inherent purpose to life and insists that one's responsibility is therefore to determine the meaning of one's life for oneself by making committed, responsible choices. Fowles's view is that ‘the Victorian Age, especially from 1850 on, was highly existentialist in many of its personal dilemmas’ (Fowles, 1990, 152). Thus his hero Charles is presented with a key moment of choice once he realizes he is attracted to Sarah. He can continue to live in ‘bad faith’, adhere to social convention and marry Ernestina, or he can be true to himself, break off the engagement and pursue the freedom she represents.
The pursuit of freedom is played out on a collective scale, too, as it is linked (as the novel's epigraphs suggest) to the theme of Darwinian evolution, a process governed by the ruthless logic of the ‘survival of the fittest’. The novel uses historical hindsight to suggest that Charles, as a representative of ‘old money’, is effectively part of a dying breed, one which is being supplanted by the ‘new’ money associated with commerce and the middle class, embodied by the appropriately named Freeman. Charles's enthusiasm for paleontology, spending his time looking for fossils on the beach, serves partly as a metaphor for the novel's own excavation of past remnants, but also, by implication, as an analogy of Charles's status as a living fossil who will soon die out.
If this were all the novel consisted of then it would simply be a notable post-war novel, ‘the nineteenth-century novel that century forgot to produce’ (Conradi, 1982, 58), something like Charles Palliser's The Quincunx (1991). From a postmodernist perspective, it would be an example of Jameson's ‘blank parody’, the reflex mimicry of the past. But the novel's engagement with the past is always critical and self-conscious, and its gripping narrative is accompanied by a carefully imposed metafictional framework which enables Fowles to build in his strategies for composing the novel into the novel itself.
For the first twelve chapters of The French Lieutenant's Woman the reader has been able to immerse him or herself in the story, enjoying the kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’ required of realist novels, even though there are anachronistic reminders of the era in which the novel is composed rather than set, such as epigraphs from 1967's Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age. Chapter 12 ends with the questions ‘Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?’
Rather than the in-depth character-study a pastiche of the genre would lead us to expect, what follows is a remarkable act of metafictional ‘frame-breaking’. Chapter 13 notoriously begins:
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in…a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense.
(Fowles, 1996, 97)
The digression continues for most of the chapter, asking questions about the degree of control an author can exercise over his fictional world. For Fowles it is less than one might think. In the spirit of Barthes's essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (written in the same year, 1967, Fowles was composing his novel) he argues that although ‘[t]he novelist is still a god, since he creates…what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority’. For Fowles, ‘[t]here is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist’ (Fowles, 1996, 99).
After this prolonged outburst, Fowles largely retreats into the spaces outside his text as the story continues, though his intervention has permanently changed the atmosphere, like a party following the departure of a disruptive guest. As we read on, we do so in the light of Fowles's comments, and know that the story we read is meant to exemplify its author's views of freedom. It also casts the paratextual elements of the novel – the epigraphs taken mainly from Victorian texts, such as novels, poems, and documents like medical reports, and the occasional footnote clarifying material used in the novel – in a different light. Rather than enhancing the sense of realism, as such elements do in George Eliot, they have the opposite effect, and remind us that this novel – like any novel, even one by the exemplary ‘classic realist’ Eliot – is a piece of rhetoric constructed by its author, a realistically drawn world but not ‘the real world’.
For the rest of the novel we remain conscious of the fact that Fowles is still lurking in the margins. Sure enough, as the novel gets towards the end he reappears on two further occasions, though each time it is not simply his ‘voice’ we hear, but he actually becomes a character in the text, breaking through the conventionally sacrosanct diegetic levels of narrative. In Chapter 55 he enters a train carriage and sits opposite the dozing Charles, wondering ‘what the devil am I going to do with you?’ (Fowles, 1996, 389), and in Chapter 61 appears outside the Rossetti house where Sarah is staying and puts back the time on his pocket watch, effectively returning the narrative to an earlier point (441).
Neither portrait is particularly flattering. On the first appearance Fowles describes himself as prurient and menacing, sizing up his hero disapprovingly in a way which ‘suggest[s] something unpleasant, some kind of devious sexual approach’ (389). The second time he is a kind of ‘foppish’, ‘Frenchified’ version of the flâneur (441). This is a further reminder of how implicated the realist author is in his own text, how far he is from the detached, objective figure of convention. Intervening again, ‘Fowles’ explains that, normally, realist fiction ‘pretends to conform to the reality: the writer puts the conflicting wants [of characters like Charles] in the ring and then describes the fight’. But this is disingenuous, for the author ‘in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favours win’, and, as a result, subtly but firmly imposing his or her views on the reader, showing him or her ‘what one thinks of the world around one – whether one is a pessimist, and optimist, what you will’ (390).
True to his existentialist definition of the author as the ‘freedom that allows other freedoms to exist’ ‘Fowles’ decides he is going to ‘take both sides’ and show the reader two alternative versions of ‘the fight’ – in other words, provide us with two different endings to the novel. He claims to have no preference for either, and tosses a coin to decide which he presents last, as the second one will inevitably be seen to have been endorsed by the author as the genuine one, ‘so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter’ (390). The first ending conforms to the conventions of the realist form he parodies by tying up loose ends and reuniting Charles, Sarah, and Lalage, the daughter born of their brief sexual encounter. In the second Charles realizes that Sarah has manipulated him and will continue to do so and turns away before they have had a chance to speak or he has even met his daughter.
The destabilizing effect of The French Lieutenant's Woman comes largely from Fowles's adherence to the ‘forking paths principle’ which is central to postmodern narrative. Just as Coover's short stories ‘The Magic Poker’ and ‘The Babysitter’ give us contradictory versions of narrative sequences without cancelling any out, so Fowles provides us with two endings that are equally valid. In fact, before these, there has already been a possible third ending for the novel. In Chapter 44 Charles goes back to Ernestina, keeping his encounter with Sarah a secret, and they get married as planned and have ‘what shall it be – let us say seven children’ (325). There is even a possible fourth ending. As he contemplates Charles in the train ‘Fowles’ notes that he has ‘already thought of ending Charles's career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London’ (389), unsure if he will see Sarah again. This is the kind of open ending which appeals to Fowles, and resembles the ending of his earlier novel The Magus (1965) which finishes literally by stopping the action as if in a ‘freeze-frame’.
These last two ‘endings’ are officially ruled out by the narrator. Yet because they have been described and remain in the book, they exist in the represented world of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Fiction, Fowles tells us, enables us to activate the various hypotheses ‘about what might happen’ which we ‘screen in our minds’ (327). This is one reason behind his assertion in Chapter 13 that all novelists write novels for one reason only: ‘we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was.’ (98). His point about ‘the tyranny of the last chapter’ suggests that in a more rhizomatic structure, an alternative form to the page-bound novel, which is by definition linear, it might be possible for all four endings to be ‘active’ at the same time.
Such a space is, of course, as postmodern narrative repeatedly implies, the space in which the printed text triggers the reader's imagination. Thus The French Lieutenant's Woman, like potentially all texts, is a ‘writerly text’. But Fowles actually polices its writerly aspect, for his insistence that we have the freedom to choose which ending we prefer is quite disingenuous. The ‘third’ (Charles reunited with Ernestina) and the ‘fourth’ (Charles remaining on the train) endings are not ones he takes seriously, the former (as he explains) because it is effectively too conventional, the second because it is not conventional enough. And in fact the first ‘official’ ending is apparently not one he can endorse either. Even though he takes it seriously enough to develop a long, largely irony-free chapter describing the reunion between Charles and Sarah, when they embrace at the end Charles hears ‘a thousand violins cloy[ing] very rapidly without percussion’ (429).
In contrast to this ironic note, the second ending, on the very last page of the novel, includes a sincere comment from the author, intervening for the last time, stating, as Charles walks away, that ‘he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build’ (445). Thus ‘the tyranny of the last chapter’ prevails and the reference to existentialism which precedes this comment indicates that it is indeed the one Fowles prefers. The problem for Sartrean existentialism often noted by commentators is that its emphasis on individual choice and freedom works against the notion of society, for one person's determination to act in good faith may impinge upon the freedom of another. This is the outcome of the ‘textual existentialism’ of The French Lieutenant's Woman: in exercising his own freedom to choose between endings, Fowles compromises the reader's capacity to choose freely.
This paradox is entirely in keeping with Linda Hutcheon's insistence about the double logic of historiographic metafiction, according to Hutcheon. The French Lieutenant's Woman is both didactic and ‘writerly’, simultaneously a powerful critique of realism and an attempt to revitalize it. Its replication of a Victorian novel results in a text which is simultaneously a credible portrait of a historical period and a self-reflexive piece of artifice, referring both outside itself to the real historical world and inside to its own workings.
Fowles's interrogation of the Victorian world from the perspective of existentialism makes The French Lieutenant's Woman a fascinating and valid analysis of the social and personal dilemmas faced by the Victorians: love, freedom, the emerging middle class. At the same time, its self-conscious textuality – its narratorial interventions, its epigraphs and multiple endings – reminds us that our knowledge of the nineteenth century is in fact chiefly a literary one, as it is mainly constructed, just like Fowles's own novel, from imaginative literature and historical texts. After reading it we cannot help but wonder about how accurate or inaccurate our own impression of the Victorian world, gained from other texts and media, might actually be.
Graham Swift's Waterland is similarly double with regard to ‘real’ history, as one of its functions is to recount the histories of the French Revolution and of the Fens region in eastern England where the novel is set. Hutcheon suggests that there are two principal modes of narration employed in historiographic metafiction: ‘multiple points of view (e.g. as in [D. M.] Thomas's The White Hotel), or an overtly controlling narrator (as in Swift's Waterland)’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, 117). As an example of the latter,Waterland presents itself in its entirety as the rambling oral narrative delivered by a disaffected history teacher to his class.
Right away this device positions the reader of the novel in a typically contradictory way: it makes it a highly didactic, rhetorical piece of text, as the reader becomes one of the listening schoolchildren with no other option than to follow his or her authoritative teacher. At the same time, the way the novel gathers together a wide range of individual narrative strands within the teacher's larger discourse places the emphasis on the reader to determine the meaning of the relationship between them.
Tom Crick has started to tell his story because he has arrived at a crisis point in his life: his wife Mary has been placed in an asylum after kidnapping a baby, his job is under threat because the school is (in a phrase with obvious symbolic resonance) ‘cutting back history’, and his students have become disillusioned by Crick teaching them the French Revolution, for they feel it has no relevance to the present. Worried by contemporary fears about terrorism and nuclear war, they believe – as Price, the emblematically named dissenter of the class, puts it – that what matters ‘is the here and now.…The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it's got to the point where it's probably about to end’ (Swift, 1992, 6–7).
Besides representing widespread fears in the 1980s about nuclear holocaust, Price's comments and the metaphorical significance of his headteacher's warning about the end of history suggest that the appropriate context for Waterland is the philosophical argument, often associated with postmodernism (though a counterpart is advanced in right-wing political thought of the likes of Arnold Gehlen or Francis Fukuyama), which suggests that from the late twentieth century we have entered a period of ‘posthistory’. This is an argument developed by postmodern thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who (in different ways) characterize postmodern culture as being increasingly devoid of historical ‘depth’, prone to engage continually in reflex simulations of previous historical events. This marks an alternative approach to understanding history as a ‘Grand Narrative’ in a Hegelian or Marxist sense, that is, as a kind of teleological progressive sequence which makes revolution possible.
Crick maintains an ambivalent attitude to history, alternatively mocking its pretensions and believing in its ability to expose the truth. It is at once a dangerously seductive fabrication and an essential mechanism for making sense of our lives. A feature of the novel is Crick's restless efforts to define history. His analogies include ‘a fairy-tale’ (6), ‘a lucky dip of meanings’ (140), and ‘the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears in the dark’ (53). Most pertinent, though, is the dictionary definition which features as the first of the novel's two epigraphs: ‘Historia, -ae, f. 1. inquiry, investigation, learning. 2. a) a narrative of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, tale, story’. This definition indicates that the ambiguity upon which historiographic metafiction is founded is at the heart of the very term history itself, and characterizes Crick's narrative to his listening class: a composite of official History and personal and family history (‘his story’) which draws upon a range of other kinds of fiction, such as fairytales, romance, and detective fiction (the novel's opening chapter ends with the childhood discovery of the body of one of Crick's friends floating in a lock).
One of the most important of the literary forms invoked by the novel is the retrospective first-person narrative, as suggested by the second epigraph, from Dickens's Great Expectations: ‘Ours was the marsh country…’. This line indicates that the novel repeats The French Lieutenant's Woman's point that our construction of the past depends frequently on literary material rather than any more ‘authentic’ documents. More precisely it also makes the comparison between the geography of the Kent marshes, where Great Expectations is partly set, and the East Anglian Fens. The idea of marshland, denoted by the novel's title, has metaphorical importance, too, for the continual process of ‘reclaiming’ the land from water which preserves the Fens and the lives of those who inhabit the region mirrors what Crick is trying to do with his own past: preserve some solidity in the face of impending collapse. ‘History’, he tells his class, ‘if it is to keep on constructing its road into the future, must do so on solid ground’ (86).
This suggests another parallel between Swift's novel and Dickens's. The protagonist of each uses his narrative to trace the origins of his present experience. In Crick's case this involves explaining his wife's breakdown by the story of her aborted pregnancy as a teenager. But it also involves uncovering a complex family story, most immediately affecting Tom, his mentally retarded brother Dick, and his father Henry (the names ironically suggesting the situation of the characters is that of every ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’), which also stretches as far back into the seventeenth-century into the history of his ancestors.
But, unlike Pip, Crick's relentless storytelling and drawing of endless parallels between the stories leave him unable to establish a set of rational conclusions nor even to end the story with a proper sense of closure. He is determined ‘to disentangle history from fairy-tale’ (86) but finds that history and story collapse into one another: ‘the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people's imagination’ (139–40). One reason for the adult Mary's inability to conceive is because of her crude abortion at the hands of the ‘local witch’ Martha Clay. But another is that Freddie Parr once dropped a live eel into Mary's knickers and, according to local legend, ‘a live fish in a woman's lap will make her barren’ (208).
One of Waterland's most striking features is its complex structure. The vast linearity of its narrative, which stretches back over centuries and undertakes historical ‘inquiry’ into momentous public events such as the fall of the Bastille and the First and Second World Wars, more localized history of places, families and individuals, and curious cultural histories of things like the eel and a bottle of beer, creates a more typically postmodern spatial set of narrative possibilities. As Alison Lee has pointed out it is actually unlike many works of metafiction – The French Lieutenant's Woman, for example – in that it does not seek to ‘foreground its structure’. In fact it might even be approached, she says, as a Barthesian ‘readerly’ text, because its story ‘is so engaging and the manipulation of affect so intense that it can certainly be read (if naively) on this level’ (Lee, 1990, 42).
Though it can be reassembled chronologically its narrative is not presented to the reader in a linear manner. As Lee notes, the end of the novel tells of events which occur only half way through the overall story and subsequent events are covered in the first few chapters. The narrative is effectively circular: as soon as we have finished reading we need to go back to the first chapter. Thus Crick's narrative reflects his recognition that history is not ‘a well-disciplined and unflagging column marching unswervingly into the future’ but something which ‘goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards. It loops. It takes detours’ (Swift, 1992, 135).
But a more expansive metaphor than the one-dimensional ‘circularity’ is invited when we consider more carefully how Waterland works. It is made up of fifty-two chapters, each of which has a title which points to its subject-matter, most of them directly beginning with the word ‘About’: ‘About the End of History’, ‘About My Grandfather’, ‘About Beauty and the Beast’, etc. Unusually, the chapters literally run into one another. For example:
[end of chapter 2:] let me tell you[title of chapter 3:] 3. ABOUT THE FENS[beginning of chapter 3:] which are a low-lying region in Eastern England.(Swift, 1992, 8)
But despite the way they interlock, they are also, to an extent, interchangeable, almost as if the result of a Burroughs-style ‘cut-up’. The impression is that each is self-contained and we can theoretically proceed from any one of them to any other, reading the novel the way we read a dictionary or an encyclopaedia rather than in a linear manner.
This is another novel, then, with an implicit rhizomatic structure reminiscent of the internet. It is surely no accident that one of the first hypertext projects in literary studies (now part of the well-known ‘Victorianweb’) was devoted to Waterland (Fishman, 1989). It is important not to overstate this dimension, however, for the overarching circularity of the narrative can only work with the chapters placed in the order they are; they have not simply fallen together like The Naked Lunch. Once again the novel is both readerly and writerly, didactically organized and open to free interpretation.
Nevertheless, aside from its actual structure, the novel does create a huge rhizomatic web of narratives and associations. Crick comes to seem like a machine generating story after story and suggesting pattern after pattern, and will carry on doing so eternally. Thus he embodies the two ‘definitions of Man’ he proffers: he is ‘the story-telling animal’ (Swift, 1992, 62) and ‘the animal who craves meaning – but knows – [Events elude meaning]’ (140). His strategy is to convince us that every story, public or personal, is somehow linked (the French Revolution somehow relates both to his wife's breakdown and to the story of his brewer grandfather's production of a special beer to mark the coronation of George V), that everything impacts on something else in a pattern of cause and effect (e.g. the watery foundations of the marsh country make the people who live there ‘phlegmatic’), that everything is equivalent to everything else (Mary's vagina, ‘a moist labyrinth of inwardly twisting, secret passages’ becomes like T. S. Eliot's ‘cunning corridors’ of history).
Crick's determination to connect these things with one another is an example of that familiar postmodern effect: paranoid reading. He inhabits the ‘significance world’ of fiction, where nothing is accidental, every sign is meaningful. And of course this presents a particular challenge to the reader of Waterland, who is invited to inhabit a similar world. Moreover, Swift's novel, which envelops Crick's rambling narrative, adds another layer of potential significance to the narrator's web of stories and equivalences. The reader's job is to decide how far to connect these as a way of interpreting the novel. To take one example, there are numerous echoes of Christian stories in the novel, such as Tom's ‘potato-head’ brother Dick being named by his father Ernest Atkinson (who also happens to be his grandfather) ‘The Saviour of the World’, his incest perhaps (or perhaps not) causing Dick's mental retardation, while the appropriately named Mary steals a child and tells her husband she ‘got it from God’ (265). But this ironic reworking of the story of Christ does not ‘explain’ Swift's novel. It figures as just one more metanarrative which promises to keep unfathomability at bay.
Towards the end Crick tells his class: ‘What do you think all these stories are for…. It helps to drive out fear’ (241). For in the end all that is tangible in the novel is the very process of telling and listening to (or reading) stories. With appropriately circular logic, the point of the story becomes its narration.
In its basic scenario Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, published two years later, in 1984, is similar to Swift's novel. Its narrator looks into history to find the truth that will also help explain his own life. His narrative is also divided into sections which could easily be arranged in a different order without disrupting any necessary coherence.
The narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a recently widowed and retired English doctor, ‘writes’ about his obsession with the nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Flaubert and, in particular, his quest to identify the actual stuffed parrot which provided the inspiration for his 1877 story ‘Un Coeur Simple’. The problem, as he explains in the novel's first chapter, is that on a visit to Normandy he has discovered two equally plausible candidates in two different Flaubert museums. He had equated the idea of finding a real historical object which had sat on Flaubert's desk as he wrote the story with ‘knowing’ the real man behind it. Looking at the first bird, he ‘felt ardently in touch with this writer’ (Barnes, 1985, 16). On discovering the second, however, he feels as if it is asking him in reply: ‘The writer's voice – what makes you think it can be located that easily?’ (22).
Braithwaite's dilemma is thus a metaphor for the problem at the heart of historiographic metafiction: the limits to our attempt to know the past. We cannot access it directly – all we have are textual documents (such as the letter Braithwaite has photocopied in which Flaubert mentions the stuffed parrot sitting on his desk) which divert us away from the real object or event as much as direct us towards it. Either of the parrots may be the ‘real’ one, but equally, as Braithwaite realizes, Flaubert may just have invented the idea of the parrot sitting on his desk. At the end of the novel, appropriately enough, the mystery of the parrot is deepened rather than solved. A Flaubert expert informs Braithwaite that the original parrot had been borrowed by Flaubert from the Museum of Natural History and then returned. When the curators of the two Flaubert museums each tried to retrieve it they were taken to a room which contained fifty stuffed parrots and then ‘did the logical thing, the intelligent thing’: went back to the description in ‘Un Coeur Simple’ and ‘chose the parrot which looked most like his description’ (Barnes, 1985, 187). So in this case the representation comes before the referent, or to recall Baudrillard's analogy about just this problem in postmodernity: the ‘map precedes the territory’.
Faced with his two candidates for Flaubert's original referent, what Braithwaite embarks upon is an alternative kind of Flaubert biography, one we might legitimately describe as a work of metahistory – a piece of historiography which acknowledges its status as a subjective, incomplete, often unverifiable piece of construction. More precisely, the novel deconstructs the particular genre of historiography which is biography. We cannot ‘know’ Flaubert directly, but we can build up a multi-faceted portrait of him based on all the texts – fiction, letters and other documents – which he left behind or in which he ‘appears’, like putting together a collage made up of textual fragments in such a way that the silhouette of the person to whom they relate appears in the middle.
Braithwaite's own metaphor for this process is to compare biography to catching fish in a net, which he defines not as something for catching fish but ‘a collection of holes tied together with string’: ‘The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he does not catch: there is always far more of that’ (38).
Braithwaite's narrative divides itself into themed chapters (not unlike Crick's strategy in Waterland) which enable the reader to become introduced to different facets of Flaubert. Chapter 4, for example, entitled ‘The Flaubert Bestiary’, is an analysis of all the different recurring animal references in Flaubert's writings and his life: bears, camels, sheep, dogs, and of course the parrot. Chapter 9, ‘The Flaubert Apocrypha’, traces the references to all the books Flaubert planned to write, or imagined writing, but did not.
The result is a clever (and near academically valid) study of an important writer. It convincingly makes the point that any historical individual – just like any real-life present-day one, in fact – is not a stable, consistent unchanging character, like a portrait, but a series of different characters, all complementing and clashing with each other. This exemplifies the postmodern approach to subjectivity, of course, and it has particular consequences for history. Just as we cannot be sure what really happened in a particular historical event, or which historical object is genuine, so we cannot be sure which portrait of a person most represents the ‘real’ one. Subjectivity, postmodernism asserts, is always changing, always ‘in process’ rather than stable.
This point is made most forcefully in the second chapter of the book, ‘Chronology’. It begins by presenting us with the kind of official ‘Biographical Outline’ which is standard practice in academic works about single authors, and moves from birth to death with all the significant events in between, such as marriages and publications. But it is followed by two other ‘chronologies’, each of which cover the same ‘timeline’ but include completely different events: the second chronology concentrates upon deaths, illnesses, and failures, while the third is made up of quotations from Flaubert about himself. These three versions represent, respectively: ‘official’ history, for example, public events in the writer's life; ‘emotional history’, or the extent to which life is affected by death and unhappiness; and Flaubert's own interpretation of his life, a first-person counterpart to the conventional detached third-person authority of the first chronology. These are three versions of a life, each designed to complement rather than rival the other.
‘Chronology’ also makes the point that the problem of the elusive historical referent is compounded by the fact that the historiographer is also inevitably a selective and partial narrator. This is implied in the points throughout the novel when Braithwaite unintentionally undermines his efforts to present an authoritative though multi-faceted portrait of Flaubert by spouting forth his opinions on all sorts of things, from the kinds of novel which should no longer be written, to his feelings about coincidences, to where to get the best cheese in Dieppe. In one chapter he passionately rubbishes criticisms of Flaubert and in another parodies Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas. Moreover his examination of the author is blended with personal reminiscences, such as previous visits to France and his dealings with patients while he was a doctor.
Braithwaite is obviously an unreliable academic narrator in the tradition of Nabokov's Kinbote or Borges's unnamed narrator of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, whose partiality seriously compromises his narrative's sense of historical accuracy. What makes Barnes's use of the device differ from the modernist unreliable narrator is the ironic self-reflexivity of Braithwaite's discussion of the merits and problems of fiction and literary criticism. He tells us about his dislike for literary critics, meditates on what might constitute ‘the perfect reader’ (Barnes, 1985, 75), and discusses moments when ‘a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty, misunderstands, plays games and falls into error’ (89). When Braithwaite ridicules the idea of a writer ‘provid[ing] two different endings to his novel’ in a pretence of ‘reflecting life's variable outcomes’ (89) – just like Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman – the metafictional aspect becomes a kind of ironic ‘double bluff’. What we are presented with is a postmodern narrator condemning postmodern techniques.
The increasingly intrusive autobiographical element to Braithwaite's narrative and his dislike of chance and coincidence becomes explained in the appropriately numbered chapter 13 (another echo of The French Lieutenant's Woman) when he begins to talk directly – or as directly as he is able to – about the death of his wife and his relationship with her. He begins by stating that ‘[t]his is a pure story, whatever you think’ (160). We realize that the trauma of her death has been increased by the fact that he made the decision not to resuscitate her as she lay in a coma, and also by the fact that she had been adulterous during their marriage and this had stopped him loving her. It becomes clear that his obsession with Flaubert stems from the parallels between his life and Flaubert's (e.g. Braithwaite's wife had a ‘secret life’, like Emma Bovary, Flaubert's most famous character) and becomes a way of controlling the past, or at least analysing it from a ‘safe’ position. Because he and his wife never spoke about her affair, it means Braithwaite has ‘to invent [his] way to the truth’ (165):
Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
(Barnes, 1985, 168)
Braithwaite's narrative is an example, to use Barnes's own description of the novel, of what psychiatrists call the ‘displacement activity’, as his ‘inability to express his grief and his love…is transposed into an obsessive desire to recount to you the reader everything he knows and has found out about Gustave Flaubert, love for whom is a more reliable constant in his life than has been love for Ellen’ (Barnes, 2002, 262). Once we realize this, the preceding discussion of Flaubert comes to seem less objective still, as the very mode of analysis (e.g. the morbid second section in ‘Chronology’), and the lines of enquiry he chooses to pursue (such as ‘Is it ever the right time to die?’ [22]) are evidence of his personal motivation.