THE FICTION OF HISTORY: THE PRESENTATION OF HISTORY IN RECENT AMERICAN LITERATURE

RAYMOND ALLAN MAZUREK, Purdue University

Abstract

The treatment of history as discourse in the novels of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover represents a movement away from the traditional historical novel and its attempt to directly represent the past, instead exploring the ways history is constructed and mediated by the culture of the present. The tension between metafiction and history revealed in these texts helps to illuminate the relation between literature and history, the problem of genre, and the interaction of text and ideology. The metafictional novelists' production of fiction which emphasizes its own artiface and attacks the conventions of realism is paralleled by the development of a metahistorical analysis of history as discourse by contemporary historical theorists--especially Hayden White. The presentation of history as a "fiction" in texts such as Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is not a repudiation of history as a form of knowledge, but a reflection of the reemergence of the idea that history is partly rhetoric, and that the representation of reality in both history and literature can be viewed as an act of construction or poesis as well as an act of mimesis. However, the rise of the metafictional historical novel points to the inability of even a literature based on an aesthetic of poesis to be completely self-referential. In examining history, as well as literature, as discourse, the metafictional historical novel collapses the idea of the peculiar autonomy of the literary text and raises the question of the relation between text and culture. In bringing to consciousness the process by which readers naturalize cultural conventions, metafiction points beyond literature to the social context of the text. This is especially apparent in Gravity's Rainbow and The Public Burning, which present a critique of the hegemonic use of "official" history in contemporary culture. However, such a critique implies the need to evoke the social structure in which historical narratives and ideologies function, and suggests the desirability of a synthesis between metafictional and realist modes. Indeed, the movement toward such a synthesis--necessarily discontinuous and incomplete--can be seen in the historical novels of Ishmael Reed, E. L. Doctorow, and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as in the new journalism of Norman Mailer and the science fiction of Ursula LeGuin.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature

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