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68 the minnesota review Pamela McCallum Postmodernist Aesthetics and the Historical Novel: John Berger's G. History or text? Referent or sign? If the historical novel succumbs to pure textuality, to the arbitrary play of signifiers, it tends to become synonymous with the elimination of referential phenomena. If, on the other hand, it clings to the now-dated, archaic forms of mimetic realism, it ignores questions of textual representation and self-reflective construction . This painful formal dilemma serves to locate the enormously difficult problem of representing historical experience in a postmodern culture. The special attraction of John Berger's G. derives from its effort to bring together two contradictory terms—history and language. That is why G. in some ways seems to be a traditional historical novel and in other ways can be taken as contemporary postmodernist metafiction.1 That is why its dissonant and problematic narrative form lends itself to articulating the structural discontinuities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history. Here the importance Berger places on the "text in history" differs from both the narrative mimesis of the historical novel which forgets its status as a fiction, and the ultratextual formalism of a postmodernist écriture which turns its back on the referent. Such a novelistic practice originates in an attempt to "re-present" history that uses certain techniques borrowed from modernism and postmodernism; it projects a formally innovative kind of historical novel which draws attention to itself as a constructed meaning. Berger's G., while preserving the older ideas of "experience" and "event," is characterized by a new way of expressing them in a self-reflexive and non-mimetic historical metifiction.2 The chief character of Berger's experimental text is G. But who is G.? What does this enigmatic figure represent? Unlike Joyce's Ulysses, whose title establishes a mastertext, all Berger's novel volunteers is the strangely cryptic sign of an upper case letter. In this sense G. resembles Kafka's K. or Robbe-Grillet's A. . . whose anonymity frustrates any free and easy access to the "real" or external referent. G's puzzling composite identity is not directly accessible in the form of a "flesh and blood" person. An arbitrarily designated letter is put in the place of a straightforward presentation of character. Such a stylistic device staves off a definitive "rendering " of G.'s identity—though, to be sure, we can still speculate about who G. might be. This flux and indeterminacy, which takes as its norm the arbitrariness of assigning the protagonist a particular name ("whom I will now call, for the sake of convenience, G.," [142]),3 shows unmis- McCallum 69 takable signs of a postmodernist sensibility. In any case, Berger's novel would appear to be dominated by an emphatically discontinuous literary mode that assumes a rift or gap between the text and its referent. With his hieroglyphic-like title, Berger indicates that the puzzle ofG.'s identity has no hard and fast answer. But of course, little by little various possibilities present themselves. One might say, for instance, that G. is Giovanni, which is the name proposed by Umberto for his son and which falls fully within the framework of the Don Juan myth. This affiliation has been noticed by several critics, and everything suggests that G. is a rewriting of the Don Juan myth/ There are many instances in G. where Berger reappropriates the Don Juan theme: G.'s sexual initiation with his cousin Beatrice, his seduction of Leonie, the young peasant woman, and Camille, the wife of a French industrialist, his desire for Marika, the wife of an Austrian banker and Nusa, the working-class Slovene woman. Other prominent motifs also bring to mind G. as Don Juan—the arousal of his sexuality at age five, the lengthy and self-conscious meditations on sexual experience, even the erotic drawings sketched in rough outline. This rewriting of the Don Juan source texts has quite special formal affinities with postmodernism in its strong emphasis on the "writerly" text and the "already-written." Indeed, it is peculiarly characteristic of G. that Berger is more concerned with reproblematizing the representational conventions of the Don Juan myths than with elaborating yet another Don...

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