Seeing through English Disguises: Historiographic Metafiction as a Postcolonial Narrative Strategy in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight
Dirk van Rens 300315 MA Thesis English Language and Culture School of Humanities University of Eastern Finland April 2020
Table of Contents
Abstract ... 2
1. Introduction ... 3
1.1 Aims and Structure ... 3
1.2 “Barely Held Stories”: Introduction to Warlight ... 5
1.3 “Magic from a Past Master:” The Reception of Warlight ... 6
2. A Postmodern Mould: Historiographic Metafiction as a Framework for Voicing Postcolonial Concerns ... 8
2.1 (Hi)stories: Historiographic Metafiction ... 9
2.2 Voicing the “Silent Cacophony”: Historiographic Metafiction and Postcolonial Literature ... 22
3. Analysis ... 33
3.1. “No Records Were Kept”: Warlight and the Challenging of History ... 33
3.2 “Meander if You Want to Get to Town”: The Challenging of the Distinction between History and Art in Warlight ... 46
3.3 “To Be Unknown”: The Role of Ex-centrics in Warlight ... 64
3.4 “When He Comes, He Will be like an Englishman”: Quintessentially English Intertexts in Warlight ... 89
4. Conclusion ... 118
Bibliography ... 122
Abstract
ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Tiedekunta – Faculty
Philosophical Faculty Osasto – School
School of Humanities Tekijät – Author
Dirk van Rens Työn nimi – Title
Seeing through English Disguises: Historiographic Metafiction as a Postcolonial Narrative Strategy in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä – Date Sivumäärä – Number of
pages English Language and Culture Pro gradu -tutkielma X April 2020 127
Sivuainetutkielma Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma Tiivistelmä – Abstract
This thesis focuses on the question of to what extent Michael Ondaatje uses historiographic metafiction to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective in his novel Warlight (2018). In order to answer this question, Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction is first outlined by means of focusing on the four main characteristics of the postmodern concept. Additionally, the theoretical section also focuses on the compatibility of a postmodern approach to historical fiction and postcolonial concerns.
What follows is a four-part close reading of Warlight, each revolving around one of the major characteristics of historiographic metafiction. Postcolonial issues that come to the fore in the novel through these aspects of historiographic metafiction are discussed throughout these sections. Section 3.1 shows that Warlight challenges history because of the way it exposes the unreliability and subjectivity of principles key to the creation of history, such as a reliance on memory, textuality, and recording.
Section 3.2 indicates how Ondaatje’s novel blurs the traditional distinction between history and art in several ways. Section 3.3 highlights that ex-centrics play a major role in Warlight. The ex-centrics in the novel are generally found to be marginalised due to spy fiction-related issues of invisibility, silence, and anonymity. Section 3.4 shows that quintessentially English forms of
intertextuality feature frequently in Ondaatje’s novel, causing Warlight to resemble a postcolonial con-text which uses texts from the centre ‘against itself.’ In sections 3.1 to 3.4, each feature of historiographic metafiction is found to be working in tandem with the voicing of postcolonial critique. As a whole, this thesis shows that Ondaatje’s Warlight is a contemporary work of historiographic metafiction which employs the postmodern approach to history for postcolonial purposes, suggesting that historiographical metafiction remains a viable postmodern framework through which to voice postcolonial critique.
Avainsanat – Keywords
Historiographic metafiction, Postcolonial literature, Postmodern literature, Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
1. Introduction
1.1 Aims and Structure
In this thesis I will present an analysis of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, attempting to answer of to what extent Ondaatje uses the strategies of historiographic metafiction in order to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective. In order to answer this question, I will first outline Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction in Chapter Two, as well as pointing out its compatibility with postcolonial views. Subsequently, I will analyse Warlight in four sections in Chapter Three, with each section addressing one of the main characteristics of historiographic metafiction: the challenging of history (3.1), the challenging of the traditional distinction between history and art (3.2), the important role of ex-centrics (3.3), and, lastly, the highly intertextual nature of works of historiographic metafiction (3.4). The section on intertextuality will largely focus on the considerable intertextual role of the spy fiction genre within Ondaatje’s novel.
Throughout the analysis, postcolonial concerns that come to the fore through these four main features of historiographic metafiction are discussed as well. This thesis will show that Warlight is a historiographic metafiction in which Ondaatje employs the mode of writing of historiographic metafiction as a postmodern means to facilitate the voicing of postcolonial concerns. In his novel, the key features of historiographic metafiction go hand in hand with postcolonial critique, as they undermine and counter the power discourses created by the traditional centre. This effectively removes traditional boundaries and hierarchies, enabling marginalised, postcolonial (hi)stories to be voiced on equal footing with those of the centre.
May 2018 saw the publication of Warlight, Ondaatje’s most recent novel – and his first in seven years. Warlight has been preceded by six other novels, ranging from Coming Through Slaughter (1976) to The Cat’s Table (2011). Ondaatje’s prose is characterised by fragmentation,
often features several voices, and, as Douglas Barbour argues, is characterised by a “desire to speak the inner worlds of figures silenced by either far too much documentation or far too little”
(7). Similarly, Hirsh Sawhney notes in The Times Literary Supplement:
Ondaatje’s novels explore the ways in which political and domestic violence make people feel alienated and disillusioned […] His traumatized characters tend to retreat into cloisters of art or work, and Ondaatje brings to life this work […] with meticulous detail.
Some of his novels contain a-linear plots and are told in a multitude of voices, and one novel, Divisadero (2007), is composed of disparate fragments which aren’t connected to one another in any obvious way. (par. 1)
Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner’s characterisation of Ondaatje’s writing is more to-the-point, if not slightly more critical: “[b]y now we know what we’re going to get from an Ondaatje novel: A moody, murky, lightly pretentious and mostly nonlinear investigation of lives and stories that harbor tantalizing gaps” (par. 3). The high degree of fragmentation and “his play with the possibilities of documentation” provide a few pointers as to why Ondaatje is often seen as “a specifically postmodern writer” (Barbour 6-7), while his interest in voicing the silenced groups in history causes him to be labelled as a postmodern as well as postcolonial writer (McVey 141). This combination of postmodernism and postcolonialism are noticeably present in, for example, Ondaatje’s most renowned novel The English Patient (1992), which presents a fragmented story of multiple voices and is clearly engaged with postcolonial concerns (Sawhney par. 4).
Ondaatje’s critical attitude towards traditional history and his tendency to give a voice to postcolonial viewpoints has, at times, resulted in fairly outspoken criticism. “Perhaps what truly angers people,” Sawhney proposes as an explanation, “is that this Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer has, on occasion, undermined historical tropes and myths that are existentially vital to
Anglo-American society” (par. 3). If anything, Sawhney’s words are indicative of the way Ondaatje’s novels are deeply embedded in a postmodern context highly critical of traditional notions of (Western) history and alleged (historical) truth, as also my analysis will show.
1.2 “Barely Held Stories”: Introduction to Warlight
Warlight presents a body of fragmented memories of its single narrator, Nathaniel, as well as several histories based on historic documents discovered by Nathaniel during his adult life. A description even as brief as this suffices to establish that Warlight makes use of what Hutcheon would call “an overtly controlling narrator” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 117). Sawhney accurately describes the novel as “tak[ing] the form of a memoir” (par. 5). More specifically, it is a memoir divided into two parts – in the literal sense of “Part One” and “Part Two” (Ondaatje, Warlight 1 and 119). The former is concerned with Nathaniel’s teenage years, while the latter focuses on the past through the eyes of an older Nathaniel, as well as the pasts of multiple other characters – these histories are explicitly constructed by Nathaniel himself.
Nathaniel’s recollections begin in 1945, when his parents “went away,” allegedly to Singapore, “and left [him and his sister] in the care of two men who may have been criminals”
(Ondaatje, Warlight 5). What follows are fragmented descriptions of a fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, “telling the story of his youth from his position as an adult,” growing up amongst a group of strangers of whom the legality of their occupations appears questionable (Sawhney par.
6). During Part One, Nathaniel finds out that his mother actually never left for Singapore, and a myriad of questions surrounding her activities arise.
Part Two of the novel is narrated by Nathaniel, now in his twenties, who relates to the reader his attempts of discovering his mother’s true identity as “a high-level spy who was
involved in murky acts of espionage” in eastern Europe after World War II (Sawhney par. 7). He presents fragments from the pasts of his mother and a few or her colleagues based on files found during his work in the archives of the Foreign Office, having hence constructed narratives based on historical documents – much like real historiography.
1.3 “Magic from a Past Master:” The Reception of Warlight
At the time of writing, no research appears to have been done on Warlight. Ondaatje’s oeuvre, however, has been the subject of considerable academic attention – particularly the way his writing combines postmodern and postcolonial features.1 Warlight has been generally well received by critics, arguably best reflected by the novel’s longlisting for the 2018 Man Booker Prize (Booker Prize Foundation par. 1). In a review in The Guardian, Alex Preston describes Warlight as “a work of fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory” (par. 9). The novel, he argues, suggests that “memory is the memory of the older self looking back” (par. 1). Andrew Motion reaches a more critical judgement, arguing that, when considered in the light of previous novels, the writing style and central themes Warlight are repetitive. “[W]e don’t really feel the threat on our pulses,” Motion writes, “since […] we’re either too used to living among shadows, or at risk of finding these continuing evasions rather absurd, because so predictable” (par. 7). In this comment, Motion refers to the central role of the postmodern questioning of history, memory, and documentation in virtually all of Ondaatje’s works of prose.2 Although other critics such as Anna Mundow praise
1 See Spinks (233-43) for a concise overview of criticism on Ondaatje’s works.
2 See, for example, Spinks (233-43).
the novel for, among others, its “mesmerizing” narrative, a sense of disappointment is also noticeable among several critics (par. 4). To Sawhney, for example, the novel feels “stripped […]
of the multifaceted sense of story, voice and language that many have unfairly derided, and, as a result, Warlight fails to live up to the promise of [Ondaatje’s] best work” (par. 8). More specifically, Garner argues that the story is “told at a distance”, featuring sentences that “don’t snap to life,” causing the “unpleasant sense that Ondaatje is regaling us rather than simply putting across a story” (par. 19-24; emphasis original). Such comments appear to indicate that Warlight differs from Ondaatje’s earlier works in terms of its writing style or, perhaps, its strategies. In addition, the novel may differ thematically as well, since Mundow points out that
“Ondaatje’s new novel is leaner than The English Patient and its focus tighter, a searchlight’s focus” (par. 9). On the whole, the literary reviews concerning Warlight seems to indicate that Ondaatje’s latest novel is similar to his previous works in terms of its postmodern approach to history, but slightly different with regard to its subject matter.
2. A Postmodern Mould: Historiographic Metafiction as a Framework for Voicing Postcolonial Concerns
In this chapter, I will provide an outline of the theoretical framework for my research on Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight. My study will focus on to what extent Ondaatje uses the conventions of historiographic metafiction in order to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective. As such, this chapter outlines the concept of historiographic metafiction and introduces the ways in which authors, such as Ondaatje, have employed this concept to (re)write history from a postcolonial perspective.
“[B]oth a postmodern and postcolonial writer” (McVey 141), as well as “one of the best known and most highly praised Canadian writers,” (Barbour 5) Michael Ondaatje’s fiction has been the subject of a considerable amount of academic attention. Scholars have often connected Ondaatje’s writing to historiographic metafiction, either implicitly or explicitly. As an example of the former, Pamela Smorkaloff points out that In the Skin of a Lion voices Toronto’s ‘unofficial history’ by using art to question official historiography (94). Eleanor Ty, on the other hand, labels the same novel as historiographic metafiction but does not further engage with the concept, focusing largely on its position as a “global Canadian novel” (100). Hutcheon, however, engages at length with a selection of Ondaatje’s novels in the light of historiographic metafiction, but gives little attention to the postcolonial side of his works (The Canadian Postmodern 82-104).
McVey is one of few scholars who have analysed Ondaatje, The English Patient in this case, in the light of both historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism.
Little criticism has been devoted to the study of multiple Ondaatje novels from the perspectives of both historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism, focusing on the way in which the former is employed for the concerns of the latter. As such, I have tried to fill this niche
by analysing In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992) from these perspectives in a previous study.3 Warlight was published as recently as 2018. Given the niche that existed around Ondaatje’s 1987 and 1992 novels concerning the combination of historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism, as well as the extremely recent publication of Warlight, my study will aim to provide one of the first analyses of Ondaatje’s latest work in the light of the aforementioned perspectives.
2.1 (Hi)stories: Historiographic Metafiction
The distinctly postmodernist concept of historiographic metafiction was coined by Linda Hutcheon and described in A Poetics of Postmodernism, and, to lesser extent, in The Canadian Postmodern – both published in 1988. As such, I will largely refer to these works in my attempt to provide a description of the concept of historiographic metafiction.
Hutcheon’s first mentioning of the term may serve as a suitable starting point, introducing historiographic metafiction as “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages,”
incorporating the domains of literature, history, and theory by means of a “theoretical self- awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction)” (Poetics 5;
emphasis original). In other words, it is “fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (Canadian 13). Historiographic metafiction is “most typical of the paradoxes that characterize the postmodern”: it adheres to conventions
3 BA Thesis “Messages in a Bottle: Historiographic Metafiction and the Voicing of Marginalised Groups in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient,” Radboud University, 2018.
only to subsequently subvert them, “using and then abusing” the traditional way of western history writing (Hutcheon, Poetics 98). As such, these works present what may be called an uncanny manner of presenting history, as they are familiar in how they present themselves as traditional works of history writing, yet their “metafictional self-reflexivity works to render problematic any such familiarization” (Hutcheon, Poetics 128). While Hutcheon’s works introduce and describe historiographic metafiction, they are largely focused on placing it in its postmodern context, resulting in a rather fragmented outline of the concept itself. Hence, in order to obtain a clearer view of historiographic metafiction itself, it may be helpful to focus on its main characteristics, outline its theoretical anchor points, and describe how these are manifested in historiographic metafiction.
Firstly, historiographic metafiction challenges the traditional distinction between history and art, and between historic ‘fact’ and fiction, as it attempts to “demarginalize literature through a confrontation with the historical” (Hutcheon, Poetics 108). Instead of following the divide created between the two entities in the nineteenth century, historiographic metafiction corresponds with postmodernist theory by calling attention to the similarities between the two. As Hutcheon points out:
They [the literary and the historical] have both been seen to derive more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth; they are both identified as linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent in either terms of language or structure; and they appear to be equally intertextual, deploying the texts of the past within their own complex textuality […] [T]hese are also the implied teachings of historiographic metafiction. (Poetics 105)
Dennis Duffy notes, with regard to Hutcheon’s claim concerning verisimilitude, that historical
‘facts’ “do not tell themselves;” rather, they have to be constructed on the basis of (often textual)
signs of the past (Duffy qtd. in Hutcheon, Canadian 66). As the sceptical character of Adrian Finn puts it in Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending (2011): “[h]istory is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (17). History, as such, “is made by the writer, even if events are made to seem to speak for themselves” (Hutcheon, Canadian 66; emphasis original). From this perspective, history indeed resembles fiction in the way it employs narrativisation to produce, in its case,
‘facts.’ Accordingly, Paul Veyne points out that history and fiction are the result of the same practises, those of “selection, organization, diegesis, anecdote, temporal pacing, and emplotment”
(qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 111). The final words of Barnes’s historiographic metafiction The Sense of an Ending arguably voice a distrust in this unreliable process of historiography: “[t]here is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest”
(Barnes 150). Preceding the processes noted by Veyne is the process of interpretation, also shared by history and fiction, for “[n]arrativized history, like fiction, reshapes any material (in this case, the past) in the light of present issues” (Hutcheon, Poetics 137). In other words, texts produced by historians, just as by novelists, are always to some extent influenced by the ideological context and subjectivity of the writer. Hutcheon further weakens the boundary between history and fiction by noting that “[n]ovels (with the exception of some extreme surfictions) incorporate social and political history […]; historiography, in turn, is as structured, coherent, and teleological as any narrative fiction [and] [b]oth historians and novelists constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative representation” (Poetics 111). As such, both modes of writing are human constructs, although the awareness of this appears much stronger concerning fiction than with regard to history, arguably resulting in the latter being regarded as “privileged and superior”
because of its “way to ‘truth’” (Hutcheon, Poetics 95).
Challenging this traditional claim, historiographic metafiction “refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems”
(Hutcheon, Poetics 93). This is not to say that historiographic metafiction views history and fiction as identical. Rather, it wishes to show how very similar history and fiction are. In paradoxical postmodernist fashion, novels of historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon explains,
“both install and then blur the line between fiction and history” (Poetics 113). These works may feature, for example, historical documents or personages which seem clearly distinguishable from the author’s fictional input. However, historiographic metafiction can subsequently mix the historical and the fictional in a way which renders one indistinguishable from the other as they are interwoven on equal terms. Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, for example, features interactions between the historical figure R.C. Harris, and the fictional character Patrick Lewis (248). Similarly, the well-known historical document of Herodotus’s The Histories is drastically edited by Almásy in The English Patient: “he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or new clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts with faded unknown animals alongside them” (Ondaatje, English 261). As a result of its intermingling of history with art, historiographic metafiction treats fictional components like Patrick’s views and Almásy’s additions to history as equally valuable historical accounts, since they are results of the same processes.
Secondly, historiographic metafiction challenges the concept of history in several ways. It rejects the possibility of one historical truth and, in addition, questions how we can know the past. Hutcheon writes: “[h]ow can we know the past real? Postmodernism does not deny that it existed; it merely questions how we can know real past events today, except through their traces, their texts, the facts we construct and to which we grant meaning” (Poetics 225). This quotation
contains several aspects of the postmodern attitude that also applies to historiographic metafiction. It strongly emphasises that the transmission of the past real to the present is essentially compromised due to its inherently textual nature. Historical events “once existed; but [they are] only accessible to us today in textualized form: documents, eye-witness accounts, archives” (Hutcheon, Poetics 93). Given the much-debated problematic nature of language as a signifying system, history, even in its ‘purest’ sense – in the shape of primary sources, that is – is compromised. The subsequent processes of collecting and selecting described by Veyne further add to this. The past is, in Hutcheon’s post-structuralist words, “always already irremediably textualized for us” (Poetics 128). While historiographic metafiction is keen to point out the problematic textual nature of history and historiography, Hutcheon points out that “[t]here is not so much,” in Gerald Graff’s words, “a loss of belief in a significant external reality” (qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 119), “as there is a loss of faith in our ability to (unproblematically) know that reality, and therefore to be able to represent it in language” (Poetics 119; emphasis original).
Historiographic metafiction, as Hutcheon’s earlier quotation indicates, also rejects the possibility of a single historical truth. In line with its postmodernist roots, it does not acknowledge “the master narratives of bourgeois liberalism” (Hutcheon, Poetics 6). This “loss of faith in what were once the certainties” does not, however, subsequently lead to a sense of disillusionment and pessimism, as is characteristic of modernism (Hutcheon, Canadian 23).
Instead, as Hutcheon explains, it results in “a new vitality, a new willingness to enter into a dialogue with history on new terms” (Canadian 23). This new dialogue, where history and fiction work side-by-side rather than under a traditional hierarchy, forms the foundation upon which the concept of historiographic metafiction is built:
It is this realization of the potential for change that postmodern fiction can exploit and expose. In trying to unsettle our unexamined convictions about the status of fact and truth,
it sets up a new tension between the fictive and the historical. But it does not do this in order to debunk or exalt either one. Nor does it intend to […] use the conventions of realism to ‘novelize’ history. Historiographic metafiction questions the nature and validity of the entire human process of writing – of both history and fiction. (Hutcheon, Canadian 22)
In other words, historiographic metafiction destabilises traditional convictions about historical truth or historical facts that Hutcheon mentions. One way it achieves this is by its modes of narration, “both of which problematize the entire notion of subjectivity” (Hutcheon, Poetics 117).
The first is its use of multiple points of view, the second that of “an overtly controlling narrator”
(Hutcheon, Poetics 117). Central to both modes is the way in which neither offers a perspective that appears to show a reliable, certain view of the past. In Hutcheon’s words, in neither mode
“do we find a subject confident of his/her ability to know the past with any certainty” (Poetics 117). By always providing a questionable – if not unreliable – narrator or a set of fragmented narrators, historiographic metafiction brings its questioning of how one can know the past to the fore. In addition, it exposes the problematic processes of history making. Novels with a single narrator, for example, often focus on characters attempting to make sense of their past – attempting to write or at least understand their personal history. In Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, for example, “we watch the narrator […] trying to make sense of the historical facts they have collected. As readers, we see both the collecting and the attempts to make narrative order”
(Hutcheon, Poetics 114). In this way, readers are directly confronted with the subjective nature of the historiographic processes of collecting and interpreting, hence explicitly voicing the distrust of history characteristic of historiographic metafiction.
Other works that feature a single narrator are arguably even more explicit in this regard, such as Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980) and Nigel Williams’s Star Turn (1985).
Hutcheon points out that the protagonist of the former is “‘uncommitted to verifiable fact’ and the latter a self-confessed liar” (Hutcheon, Poetics 118). Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, too, explicitly undermines its own story. After presenting a conversation between two characters who represent opposite views on history, its narrator remarks: “[w]as this their exact exchange?
Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange” (Barnes 19). Another manner in which historiographic metafiction subverts pre-postmodernist views on history – that is, views which see history as reliable, factual, and strictly scientific – is by incorporating historical ‘facts’
from ‘real’ history and subsequently altering these facts explicitly as to “foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error” (Hutcheon, Poetics 114). Historiographic metafiction can also expose the problematic nature of history presenting interactions between fictional and non-fictional characters. As I have mentioned earlier, In the Skin of a Lion features an interaction between the fictional character of Patrick, and the historical figure of R.C. Harris. In the same section of the novel, Patrick – a marginalised figure who, together with the labour immigrants of Toronto, helped build Harris’s architectural dreams – confronts Harris with the human cost of the latter’s wishes:
You forgot us.
– I hired you.
– Your goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets cost more than half of our salaries put together.
– Yes, that’s true.
– Aren’t you ashamed of that […] Do you know how many of us died in there?
(Ondaatje, Skin 248)
Harris’s response, Hutcheon remarks, “is historically damning” (Hutcheon, Canadian 102):
“[t]here was no record kept” (Ondaatje, Skin 248). Since the novel, to a large extent, focuses on Patrick’s life, the reader is aware at this point that his anger towards Harris is justified. Through Harris’s reply, the reader is confronted with the exclusivity, selectivity, and thus subjectivity of history: Harris’s official documents deny – or at least exclude – Patrick and his companions from history. For history, as historiographic metafiction points out, is based on documents – documents such as Harris’s records. This section of In the Skin of a Lion is thus an example of how historiographic metafiction attempts to convey its postmodernist view on history to its reader. In this case, Patrick represents ‘unofficial’ or personal history, a notion that forms a key part of historiographic metafiction, while commissioner Harris is a symbol of official history and historiography.
Patrick and Harris representing ‘unofficial’ and official history, respectively, is an example of the major focus of historiographic metafiction on the marginalised, the unknown, the Other. Indeed, Hutcheon writes the following on the confrontation between working-class Patrick and wealthy commissioner Harris: “[c]lass and gender relegate some to the position of outsiders, ex-centrics, a position that this novel [In the Skin of a Lion] uses as its paradoxical (and very postmodern) centre” (Canadian 94). In a way, this is part of its postmodernist response to the traditional historical novel, which, according to critics such as George Lukács, should represent a fictional world that is essentially a shrunk-down version of the ‘real’ world that manages to represent the essences of human life in this ‘real’ world (Lukács in Hutcheon, Poetics 113). In other words, historical fiction, in the conventional sense, should “present a microcosm which generalizes and concentrates” (Hutcheon, Poetics 113). As a consequence, the protagonist of a historical novel “should be a type, a synthesis of the general” (Hutcheon, Poetics 113), or, in
Lukács’s words, a specimen that contains and represents “all the humanly and socially essential determinants” (Lukács qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 113).
Historiographic metafiction, au contraire, focuses on characters that certainly do not fall under Lukács’s description. It wants to open up or create a dialogue for the histories of people like Patrick in In the Skin of a Lion in an attempt to inscribe their stories in history – it is not important to historiographic metafiction if this inscription into history is achieved by means of fiction or non-fiction, since it views both as equal. As such, historiographic metafiction focuses on characters who are marginalised, silenced, or unknown because of their class, race, ethnicity, gender, or all of these at once (Hutcheon, Canadian 11). Hence, with regards to Lukács’s view on the main characters of historical novels, Hutcheon writes: “it is clear that the protagonists of historiographic metafiction are anything but proper types: they are the ex-centrics, the marginalized, the peripheral figures of fictional history” (Hutcheon, Poetics 114). Highly distant from traditional perspectives on history, “historiographic metafiction espouses a postmodern ideology of plurality and recognition of difference,” in which there is no place for a modernist sense of cultural universality (Hutcheon, Poetics 114). In addition, and true to the postmodernist practice of reversing and subverting, historiographic metafiction takes exactly those aspects that were traditionally confined to the margins and places them in the centre. “Hail to the Edges!”
quotes Hutcheon (Wolfe qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 58), and this, indeed, appears to be the motto of historiographic metafiction, as it “rethink[s] margins and borders” and by doing so moves away from the universal, general and arguably stereotypical towards a view that echoes one presented by Edward Said in his Orientalism (Hutcheon, Poetics 58).
The central place for ex-centrics in historiographic metafiction brings with it an attempt to inscribe these ex-centrics into written history. This is closely related to its postmodern interest not in truth, but “whose truth gets told” (Hutcheon, Poetics 123; emphasis original), since the
postmodern does not view history as a story of the past in which there exists merely one truth, but rather an array of stories and truths, told and untold. The stories or histories of the ex-centrics generally do not make it to the pages of official history, nor to those of historical novels. They generally remain marginalised, unknown, voiceless. J.M. Coetzee’s historiographic metafiction Foe (1986) deals with this point, as the novel “reveals that storytellers can certainly silence, exclude, and absent certain past events – and people – but it also suggests that historians have done the same” (Hutcheon, Poetics 107). In subverting the status quo of excluding ex-centrics, and in the postmodernist style of blurring virtually all existing boundaries, historiographic metafiction “render[s] inextricable the public and historical and the private and biographical,” as all are eligible to become part of history in its postmodern approach (Hutcheon, Poetics 94).
Ondaatje’s The English Patient, for example, follows the untold private lives or histories of several ex-centrics within the publicly historical context of World War II. The novel’s interplay between these two types of history also exemplifies what Hutcheon means when noting that “[i]n historiographic metafiction, the collective often balances the individual” (Canadian 64). By means of The English Patient, the lives of ex-centrics are written into history, a practice characteristic of historiographic metafiction. From the postmodernist perspective of historiographic metafiction, fiction is an effective and powerful tool for doing this because of its view that “[h]istoriography and fiction […] decide which events will become facts” (Hutcheon, Poetics 122). Naturally, this is closely related to its rejection of the distinction between history and art – or, specifically in this case, fiction. It is with regard to the major focus of historiographic metafiction on ex-centrics that its connection to postcolonialism is perhaps most obvious, for postcolonialism focuses strongly, if not exclusively, on characters that correspond precisely with Hutcheon’s definition of ex-centrics. Subsequently, postcolonialism, too, relies on
and believes in the power of fiction to (re)write history in order to empower those who do or did not find themselves in the centre, that is, those that are or were left behind in silence.
Lastly, works of historiographic metafiction are highly intertextual and generally present what Roland Barthes would refer to as “writerly texts” (4). In certain ways, this high degree of intertextuality is a consequence of the focus of the genre on the historical. Hutcheon points out how, like historiography, historiographic metafiction “cannot avoid dealing with the problem of the status of […] ‘facts’ and of the nature of their evidence, their documents” (Poetics 122). As such, it employs historic intertexts, but, as a result of its views on history and art, also to literary intertexts (Hutcheon, Poetics 132). In addition, and as a part of its postmodernist principles, historiographic metafiction does not distinguish in its use of intertexts. That is, its intertexts are free from judgements on ‘low’ or ‘high’ culture or history. As Hutcheon describes, “[i]n historiographic metafiction, it is not just (serious or popular) literature that form the discourses of postmodernism. Everything from comic books to fairy tales to almanacs and newspapers provide historiographic metafiction with culturally significant intertexts” (Poetics 132-3). While Hutcheon presents Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977)as an example of historiographic metafiction in which newspapers form a central intertext (Poetics 133), Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet (1997) arguably serves as an example of the way the genre uses fairy tales. The frequent use of Herodotus’s The Histories in Ondaatje’s The English Patient is an example of the use of a more ‘conventional’ historical source. At the same time, the novel, as well as its prequel In the Skin of a Lion, is filled with references to various visual art forms.4
Hutcheon identifies five types of intertextual references in historiographic metafiction (Poetics 154). Intra-textual references (i) allude to “the universe of reality of fiction” (Hutcheon,
4 See, for example, The English Patient (74) and In the Skin of a Lion (151-2).
Poetics 154). These, in other words, refer to other fictional worlds. Self-reference or “auto- representation” (ii) comes as the result of the belief that language can only hook into itself and not to reality, resulting in metafictionality (Hutcheon, Poetics 155). Intertextual references (iii) are arguably the most conventional type: they refer to other works of prose or poetry.
Connections to other works are generally established in two ways. Most common is reference “on the level of word,” that is, using the same language as the original or language that evokes the words used in the original work (Hutcheon, Poetics 155). Secondly, reference can also work on the structural level. Significantly for historiographic metafiction, historic documents also form a part of the possible intertexts in the third category (Hutcheon, Poetics 155). The “textualized extratextual kind of reference,” type iv, is similar to the intertextual type of reference, but “the difference is one of emphasis” (Hutcheon, Poetics 155). Essentially, the difference lies in the way the type of intertextuality presents history. Type iii presents history in its traditional sense, that is, it presents historical documents capable of presenting fact or historical ‘truth’, while type iv appears to correspond with a postmodern view on history as it provides “extratextual documents as traces of the past” (Hutcheon, Poetics 155). As such, textualized extratextual references present their intertexts in a postmodernist way which “acknowledge[s] that historiography is […]
in short, mediating the past,” rather than a direct representation of the past (Hutcheon, Poetics 156). The notion of hermeneutic reference (v) was coined by Hutcheon and is closely linked to Barthes’s concept of readerly texts. Hutcheon explains:
[A] static model of reference must be avoided, for we cannot ignore the role of the hermeneutic process of reading: historiographic metafiction does not just refer in textual (that is, product) ways (intra-, inter-, auto-, extra-). The postmodernist’s text’s self- conscious return to performative process and to the entirety of the enunciative act
demands that the reader, the you, not be left out, even in dealing with the question of reference. (Poetics 156; emphasis original)
In short, hermeneutic references, to a certain extent, ensure the reader’s involvement in the presented fiction. This type of reference works well in parallel with historiographic metafiction’s metafictionality and its postmodern ‘self-awareness’ as a piece of art to be read by a reader. The role this sort of intertextuality attributes to the reader is what clearly connects it to Barthes’s concept of writerly texts. Writerly texts, as opposed to readerly texts, are works of fiction which place major importance on the reader for ‘making sense’ of the text, rather than on the author (Barthes 4). In other words, writerly texts break through “the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, […] between its author and its reader” (Barthes 4). Barthes’s concept is not only relevant with regard to Hutcheon’s fifth type of intertextuality but is also applicable to historiographic metafiction as a whole: postmodern fiction presents fragmented, critical, self-reflexive stories that are ‘self-aware’ of their status as art, and thus require the reader to thoroughly engage with its texts. In fact, Barthes’s description of readerly texts below appears to describe as much the opposite of historiographic metafiction as it does his own concept: “th[e] reader is plunged into a kind of idleness – he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself […] he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text” (Barthes 4; emphasis original).
Intertextuality is often associated with, or seen as interchangeable with, the concept of rewriting. Intertextuality is a major characteristic of historiographic metafiction, and its ‘twin concept,’ that is, rewriting, is often employed by writers of postcolonial fiction. Andrew Teverson presents Salman Rushdie as an example of a writer who rewrites fairy tales “[to] serve his own fictional agendas,” while John Thiemepresents a plethora of postcolonial rewritings,
ranging from works by Chinua Achebe, to Robert Kroetsch, to Sam Selvon.5 The connection to intertextuality/rewriting that historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism share is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the connection between both theories and their writings. Some of these connections have been touched upon briefly in the section above. In the following section, I will elaborate on these connections and explore the ways in which postcolonial authors have employed historiographic metafiction as postcolonial narrative strategy, with a particular focus on Ondaatje.
2.2 Voicing the “Silent Cacophony”: Historiographic Metafiction and Postcolonial Literature
As mentioned, the postmodern focus of historiographic metafiction on the silenced ex-centrics forms a major connection to postcolonialism. In this section, I will elaborate on the compatibility between historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism. In other words, this section will outline why historiographic metafiction is highly suitable for facilitating postcolonial concerns. Several postcolonial historiographic metafictions are mentioned in order to illustrate the ways postcolonial authors have used the postmodern mode of writing.
The postmodern origins of historiographic metafiction are in many ways similar to postcolonialism. Mita Banerjee argues that “[p]ostmodernism embarks […] on a mission against all claims to exclusivity” (134; emphasis original), and paraphrases Hutcheon by writing how
“postmodernism’s very essence is the inclusion of the hitherto excluded margins” (110).
Similarly, postcolonialism focuses exactly on these margins or ex-centrics. As Hans Bertens notes, “[i]t [postcolonial literature] is especially, although by no means exclusively, interested in
5 See Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing back to the Canon.
postcolonial rewritings of English classics […] that contest the implicit ideology of the original, and in texts that in other ways critically analyse the colonial relationship” (192). These postcolonial rewritings, briefly touched upon earlier in section 2.1, relocate the silenced from the margins to the centre. This practice is similar to, if not the same as, that performed in historiographic metafiction. It thus seems fair to assume that historiographic metafiction offers an appealing mould in which to pour postcolonial views. Indeed, Sara Upstone remarks how historiographic metafiction is “frequently employed” in a postcolonial context (280). Banerjee, more specifically, names postcolonial writers like Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, and Bharati Mukherjee as authors who “blend […] postmodernist theory and postcolonial concerns” (55).
This is not to give the impression that that postcolonial literature is limited only to rewritings that seek to voice the marginalised voiceless. Catherine Innes presents no less than five phases or categories of postcolonial literature, and rewritings may be seen as part of “literature of resistance,” as they undermine traditional Western perspectives on history and culture (Innes qtd.
in Bertens 190-1).
From a theoretical point of view, there clearly is “considerable overlap” between the postmodernist theory of historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism (Hutcheon qtd. in D’Haen 210). As Bill Ashcroft points out, “postcolonial theorists have little trouble in appropriating postmodern approaches to subjectivity, discourse, representation, and the general deconstruction of master narratives without abandoning the political imperative of the field”
(“Critical Histories” 14). However, I should mention that there has also been critique on the practice of employing postmodern theory for postcolonial purposes. Theo D’Haen, for example, claims that the postmodernist theory presented by Hutcheon is “ill-equipped to accommodate the postcolonial or the multicultural” (208). He mentions arguments presented by Kumkum Sangari, as well as Stephen Slemon, who, in short, argue that the apolitical and highly sceptical stance of
postmodernism are incompatible with the political agenda of postcolonialism (209-10). Slemon, for example, claims: “whereas a post-modernist criticism would want to argue that literary practices such as these [intertextual parody] expose the constructedness of all textuality […] an interested post-colonial critical practice would want to allow for the positive production of opposite truth-claims in the text” (qtd. in D’Haen 210; emphasis original). In other words, D’Haen and Slemon argue that the apolitical view of postmodernism and its tendency to expose the constructedness and relativity of texts and ‘facts’ – also very much part of historiographic metafiction – in a sense form an ‘impractical’ framework for postcolonial writers. The reason for this, Slemon’s comment implies, is that postcolonial texts wish to successfully present counternarratives, or, in his words “allow for the positive production of opposite truth-claims”
(qtd. in D’Haen 210). What he seems to argue is that postmodernism does not provide a suitable framework for this aim, since its tendency to question, subvert, and expose would undermine the establishment of the postcolonial counternarrative. That being said, it may be relevant to point out that the critique by D’Haen and Slemon is rooted in a 1980s/1990s understanding of postcolonialism, as indicated by Slemon’s use of the hyphenated “post-colonial,” as opposed to the contemporary unhyphenated form (Slemon qtd. in D’Haen 210).6
While doubts on the compatibility of postcolonial concerns with a postmodern mode of writing have sporadically been voiced in more recent years, such questioning appears largely based on a difference in view on what postcolonial literature aims to do. Nick Bentley, for example, writes:
Where postmodernism’s desire to undermine any position of power lends itself greatly to [the] debunking of the ideological frameworks that uphold the colonial centre, [yet] its
6 See, for example, Ashcroft, “On the Hyphen in ‘Postcolonial.’”
simultaneous questioning of any fixed set of ideological world views means that a practical politics of postcolonialism cannot find an easy philosophical ground on which to launch its resistance. (213-14)
Bentley’s concerns seem to imply the idea that postcolonial literature aims to construct a ‘counter ideology’ based upon a firm “philosophical ground” in order to resist, reject, and arguably supplant the previously dominant ideology of the centre (Bentley 213). However, while postcolonial literature often defies the (hi)stories produced by the centre – fit for labels such as
“literature of resistance”, counternarratives, or rewritings – its aim is generally not to replace the (hi)stories of the centre with those of its own (Innes qtd. in Bertens 191). Banerjee, for example, points out that works by Mukherjee, Ondaatje, and Rushdie “subscribe to the postmodernist tenet that one master narrative […] should not be substituted by another” (55). McVey, too, rejects the
“traditionally perceived antagonism between postmodernism and postcolonial studies” and argues that “a postmodern critique of historical objectivity and the aesthetic practices associated with postmodern writing marks not a disavowal of political responsibility, but a political commitment of a different kind” (158).
Rather than aiming to replace the centre’s (hi)stories with its own, postcolonial fiction presents its own (historical) stories to offer other perspectives, perspectives which have hitherto been left without a voice. As Banerjee writes: “the process of chutneyfication [fictionalisation]
can be read as a critique of historiography as such; in his/her chutney, the narrator pickles his/her own version of history. This historiography, however, by no means aspires to becoming a new
masternarrative” (10).7 Doing the latter, Upstone points out, would “only repeat the totalising power structures which are used against those in liminal or marginal positions” (288). As such, historiographic metafiction may function as a vehicle for postcolonialism simply by presenting a hitherto silenced historical perspective. Importantly – due to the postmodern way historiographic metafiction destabilises history as a whole – this new, postcolonial voice enters the historical arena on equal footing with the histories from the traditional centre. In this sense, postmodernism, and historiographic metafiction in particular, precisely offer a highly suitable framework for postcolonial historical narratives, in the way that it does not exclude any (hi)stories or voices and greatly problematises the traditional historic and cultural practises of the centre. Historiographic metafiction, in other words, provides a place which allows for the “silent cacophony of oppressed languages, voices and identities, in which language […] equals power, and in which, conversely, to be without language is to be voiceless is to be powerless,” to voice itself (Bak 295). Upstone’s discussion of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) may serve an example of such a novel which voices the previously voiceless through historiographic metafiction:
[The Long Song] not only destabilises official histories, it conterminously is evidence of the ability to claim ownership over one’s own narrative; it affirms the possibility of a subaltern who can speak, and with the same subjectivity as any other narrative voice.
There is no suggestion here that July’s [the protagonist] marginal status means she must speak a discourse of positive essentialist representation. And yet, at the same time, she does speak. (288; emphasis original)
7 Regarding the use of the term ‘chutneyfication,’ Banerjee explains: “I wanted to investigate what I perceived as key issues in the postcolonial debate by looking at the way this metaphor of ‘chutneyfication,’ that is, the fictionalization of history, could be used” (6).
Instead of providing political narratives intended to replace those of the centre, then, postcolonialism focuses on the process of voicing and representing the marginalised in a way that is often inherently personal and subjective – the latter a characteristic shared with historiographic metafiction. As Banerjee adds, postcolonialism’s “‘private’ historiographies suggest that there is an infinite number of other historiographies to be written about the events they describe; a chutney recipe is both private and idiosyncratic; there are as many chutneys as there are people”
(10-11).
Considering the joint focus of historiographic metafiction and postcolonial writing on voicing the marginalised and subverting or problematising traditional notions of history and truth, the former forms an understandably appealing framework for the latter. Accordingly, this has produced an array of works that have used historiographic metafiction as a highly compatible framework to voice postcolonial concerns. Hutcheon names Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981) and Coetzee’s Foe as the arguably best-known examples (Poetics 107; Postmodern Paratextuality and History 302). The former, for example, calls attention to the marginalised histories of India and Pakistan by “by revisiting [these histories] through historiographic metafiction while critiquing, questioning, and deflating that (official) history through the intertextual use of parody and irony” (Shamshayooadeh 219). Novels such as Midnight’s Children, which employ historiographic metafiction for postcolonial purposes, are able to effectively, and quite literally, give voice to postcolonial concerns by presenting a history focused on the marginalised. Because of the postmodern way in which historiographic metafiction levels the playing field for everyone’s history, these (hi)stories concerning the hitherto excluded are an effective way of calling attention to postcolonial concerns.
While Midnight’s Children has been the subject of considerable attention – Rushdie being, in Ashcroft’s terms, “the cause celebre of the meeting of postcolonial concerns and
postmodern style” – the novel is, of course, strongly connected to postcolonialism in its
‘traditional context’ (“Critical Histories” 13). That is, Rushdie’s story sheds light on the perspective of the marginalised in (former) colonies, in this case India and Pakistan. It may be important, however, to also point to the fact that historiographic metafiction has been used as a form to express the form of postcolonialism which does not focus on voicing the silenced, othered, and marginalised in a (post-)colonial situation per se, but which is interested in similar historical environments that feature a powerful, traditional centre marginalising and silencing the subaltern Other. As Upstone notes, “historiographic metafiction [is] a term frequently employed in postcolonial studies but rarely explored in the black […] context” (280). Some works of black fiction may use historiographic metafiction to engage with what might be referred to as “neo- colonialism” (Ashcroft et al. 146). As Bertens explains: “neo-colonial relations abound – not only between Western nations and their former colonies but within those countries, between national majorities and ethnic minorities” (176). Upstone mentions Bernardine Evaristo and Andrea Levy as authors engaged with such neo-colonialism through historiographic metafiction. According to Upstone:
Evaristo and Levy employ satirical, self-referential and consciously reflexive histories in order to destabilise not only the nineteenth-century racial science which provided justification for the perpetuation of slavery, but also twenty-first-century new ‘cultural racisms.’ […] [T]hese strategies evidence a broader range of black […] fictions which renew postmodernism as a strategy for literary political comment. (280)
Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008), for example, presents an alternative history of slavery in which black Africa takes the role of “the slaveholding continent, and Europe its slave market” (Upstone 281). Although set in the past, the novel – as historiographic metafiction – destabilises the history it relates to the reader by, for example, a multitude of anachronisms, as well as by presenting a
“self-conscious awareness of how, in David Lowenthal’s terms, ‘the past is largely an artefact of the present’” (Upstone 282). Blonde Roots employs the postmodern features of historiographic metafiction to create a text which voices the marginalised in both past and present. Indeed, Upstone describes it as “a strategic rewriting of history intended to simultaneously speak to the silencing of black voices in conventional historiography, and the realities of race relations” (280).
According to Upstone, such novels as Blonde Roots and Levy’s The Long Song “affirm Hutcheon’s positioning of historiographic metafiction as a strategy in the service of identity politics, offering an explicitly political postmodernism” (292). Works like these – and, even more recently, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad (2016) –
“oscillate between affirming marginalised voices and destabilising the notion of any singular historical truth,” thus mobilising to great effect historiographic metafiction’s natural compatibility with postcolonial concerns (Upstone 292).
In the light of the scope of this research it is, of course, important to focus, too, on Ondaatje’s work in particular. Historiographic metafiction combined with postcolonialism has a prominent role in his oeuvre. His 1987 work In the Skin of a Lion is recognised by several scholars as a clear work of historiographic metafiction with the intent to voice the marginalised.8 Perhaps Hans Bak touches upon this essential aspect of the novel most succinctly, as he notes:
[T]he novel had best been seen as a piece of “historiographic metafiction” (in Linda Hutcheon’s well-known phrase), a self-referential act of literary and historiographical revisionism, in which Ondaatje seeks to do poetic justice to the anonymous masses of laborers who actually built the city [of Toronto], but whose lives have remained
8 See Ty (100); Bak (291); Hutcheon, Canadian (91-104); Smorkaloff (94-5).
unwritten, they have remained silent in the public record of the city, without a voice in official urban historiography. (291)
In the way it voices marginalised (Eastern-)European labour workers in Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion perhaps does not immediately appear postcolonial in the traditional sense – that is, centred around ex-centrics in the post-colonial sense as, for example, Jean Rhys’s WideSargasso Sea (1966) (Ashcroft et al. 173).9 Ondaatje’s novel is, nevertheless, postcolonial, for postcolonialism can also be interested in a Western metropolis such as Toronto. Bertens notes how postcolonial critics see a “relevance of their enterprise for the world of the early twenty-first century” (176).
Their point, he adds, is that “colonies may have (largely) disappeared, but […] neo-colonial relations abound – not only between Western nations and their former colonies but within those countries, between national majorities and ethnic minorities” (176). In the Skin of a Lion clearly ties in with this ‘postcolonialism of the twenty-first century.’
Other works by Ondaatje are arguably closer to ‘traditional’ postcolonialism. His best- known work, The English Patient, revolves around a group of ex-centrics, one of whom is Kirpal Singh, though often referred to as “Kip,” “[t]he young Sikh” (Ondaatje, English 74). Banerjee views the novel as a mix of a postmodern framework voicing “postcolonial concerns,” (55) while McVey explicitly labels The English Patient as historiographic metafiction with a “clearly politicized, postcolonial dimension” (153). In addition, McVey appears to hint at the larger body of Ondaatje’s work to be almost exclusively historiographic metafiction (141). While verifying this seemingly implicit claim would require thorough analysis, Hutcheon’s analysis of Ondaatje’s 1982 novel Running in the Family seems to point in the same direction as McVey, as it is described as:
9 See also Ashcroft et al. 168-73.
[O]ne of the most complex of Ondaatje’s postmodern challenges to boundaries, its fragmented collection of memories, research, poems, and photographs works to reconstruct a more immediate and personal history – the writer’s own familial past in what was then called Ceylon. But, as we have seen, to write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to fictionalize. (Canadian 82)
Its colonial setting and its obviously postmodern view on history make it highly plausible that Running in the Family is another Ondaatje novel that combines historiographic metafiction with postcolonialism. In fact, considering Hutcheon’s comment on the similarities in style between the previously mentioned novel and Coming Through Slaughter, as well as Ondaatje’s collection of poems The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (1970) (Hutcheon, Canadian 84), one might indeed argue that the postmodern combination of historiographic metafiction and postcolonialism is, as McVey appears to suggest, Ondaatje’s trademark style (141). The reception and brief description of Warlight discussed in Chapter One certainly do not dismiss the possibility of Ondaatje’s latest novel conforming to this style as well.
* * *
In this chapter, I have presented the theoretical framework for my research on Ondaatje’s Warlight. As such, I have outlined Hutcheon’s postmodern concept of historiographic metafiction and touched upon the close connection of the concept to postcolonialism, featuring examples of postcolonial works which have employed historiographic metafiction to voice postcolonial concerns. The latter section has focused primarily on Ondaatje, as his most recent work will be the subject of my subsequent analysis.
A distinctly postmodern genre, historiographic metafiction problematises the very notions of history and historic truth in several ways. Furthermore, it features an emphasis on art – and thus fiction –, which works on equal footing as, and together with, ‘official’ history or historiography. Its subversion of traditional Western conceptions of history is similar to postcolonialism, but it is historiographic metafiction’s focus on voicing the voiceless, marginalised, and othered ex-centrics which is arguably its most explicit connection between the two genres. In short, it is understandable why casting postcolonial concerns into the postmodern mould of historiographic metafiction has drawn the attention of postcolonial writers, since the concepts – both in theory and practice – work in tandem particularly well. The abovementioned works by writers such as Rushdie, Evaristo, and Ondaatje certainly support this point. The following chapter will feature a close reading of Warlight in the light of the above-presented theoretical framework.
3. Analysis
This chapter will provide an analysis of Warlight in four sections, each in the light of one of the main characteristics of historiographic metafiction outlined in Chapter Two. Postcolonial issues which come to the fore in relation to these aspects of historiographic metafiction are discussed simultaneously. The aim of this chapter is to identify to what extent Warlight can be seen as a work of historiographic metafiction and, additionally, the degree in which the novel uses its supposed postmodern approach to history to give voice to postcolonial concerns.
3.1. “No Records Were Kept”: Warlight and the Challenging of History
As In the Skin of a Lion, Warlight features a protagonist set on discovering the past of those around him because of his position as an outsider. While Patrick obtained this position by moving from a place which is “pale green and nameless” (Ondaatje, Skin 11) on Canadian maps to the metropole of Toronto, Warlight’s Nathaniel finds himself estranged not from his London surroundings, but from his ‘family,’ that is, his parents – particularly his mother – and the “table full of strangers” that took care of him during his teenage years after his parents’ supposed departure to Singapore (Ondaatje, Warlight 3). This obsession with the past is what drives both characters to search for historic evidence concerning the people they know, knew, or thought they knew. While Patrick searches the Riverdale Library for historical documents and finds “[o]fficial histories and news stories, […] always soft as rhetoric,” Nathaniel’s work for the British Foreign Office allows him to access archives containing confidential information on his mother’s covert
World War II efforts (Ondaatje, Skin 152). Nathaniel has, in other words, access to unofficial history, whereas Patrick is limited the official history present in the library.
Nathaniel’s discoveries in the Foreign Office archives are the foundations of the second part of the novel, which is largely a reconstruction of the life of Rose Williams – Nathaniel’s mother – based on the unofficial, confidential documents read by her son in the Foreign Office.
Early in Part Two, Nathaniel reflects on the possibilities the job offered him for discovering his mother’s past:
[A]ccepting a job that included sifting through the details of the war might, I thought, be a way of discovering what my mother had been doing during the period she left us under the guardianship of The Moth. We knew only the stories of her radio broadcasts from the Bird’s Nest […] Perhaps there was now a chance of discovering that missing sequence in her life. (Ondaatje, Warlight 131)
Reflections such as these establish the novel as a clear narrativisation of historical documents – or, in fact, unhistorical, as the files are kept hidden from the public eye. As such, the second part of Warlight is, to use Louis Gottschalk’s term, an example of “imaginative reconstruction”
(Gottschalk qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 92). Nathaniel, in other words, collects the fragmented historical documents and pieces together a narrative based on his personal interpretation. What he presents to the reader is, essentially, history, and thus the result of what Hutcheon calls
“explanatory and narrative emplotments of past events,” thereby creating a text filled with “what we may consider historical facts” (Hutcheon, Poetics 92; emphasis original). Naturally, however, Nathaniel’s historical narrative – and by extent history in general, the novel appears to suggest – is inherently flawed because of its subjective nature. Warlight is thus a paradox. On the one hand, it establishes the history or the historical narrative by presenting it to the reader as if it were true.
Yet, on the other hand, it simultaneously counters its own history by leaving fragments which
