RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

Attack of the “Latté-drinking Relativists”: Postmodernism, Historiography, and Historical Fiction

183 aTTaCk of The “LaTTé-drinking reLaTivisTs”: Postmodernism, HistoriograPHy, and HistoriCaL fiCtion hERb WyilE Part of the prevailing mood in Canadian literature and literary criticism with the turn of the millennium is a sense that postmodernism might have reached its zenith. This collection, which follows the publication of Linda Hutcheon’s influential study The Canadian Postmodern by some twenty years, constitutes , among other things, a retrospective assessment of the fate of the Canadian postmodern. In the context of such a task, Canadian historical fiction offers itself as a crucial arena for consideration of the impact of postmodernism, not only on Canadian literature but also on historiography and, more broadly, on contemporary cultural and intellectual practices. One of the principal “grand narratives” undermined by postmodernism, of course, has been the view of history as an empirically viable and explanatory narrative about the past, and historical fiction in Canada, as elsewhere, has played a large part in that deconstructive project. As in other disciplines, however, the legacy of postmodernism for our understanding of history has been a highly ambivalent one, and the aim of the discussion that follows is hERb WyilE 184 to offer a contribution to the reassessment of postmodernism in Canada by exploring the reverberations of that legacy in the genre of historical fiction. Over the last forty years, through the work of historians such as Hayden White, Joan Scott, and Keith Jenkins and critics such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certau, the prevailing view of history has shifted from history as a unitary, objective view of the past to history as the product of multiple, subjective perspectives; from history as a continuous and unified fabric to history as a necessarily synthetic and intertextual discourse; from history as authoritative and positivist to history as speculative and contingent. Postmodern historiography foregrounds how, as Marc Colavincenzo (drawing on Roland Barthes’s view of history) puts it, “historical discourse has mythologized itself—it has masked its historical contingency and constructedness” (4). Whereas most traditional historians create the impression that they have ringside seats to the past, postmodern historiography suggests instead that we are way up in thebleachers,inobstructed-viewseats—andyes,thereisaJumbotron ™, but all it shows are images of the audience reacting to what is going on in the ring. This postmodern turn in historiography has been mirrored in Canadian fiction. Looking at the work of Timothy Findley , Margaret Atwood, Rudy Wiebe, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, and many others, various critics have followed the lead of Hutcheon in articulating how Canadian writers have deployed frame narratives, multiple narrators, unstable points of view, narrative self-reference, parody, the recontextualization of documents, and various other strategies associated with postmodernism to explore and subvert both traditional history and traditional historical fiction. Critical discussion of contemporary historical fiction in Canada has been profoundly influenced by Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction , which she defines as “fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political attack of the “Latté-drInkIng reLatIvIsts” 185 realities” (Canadian Postmodern 13). Such novels differ from traditional historical fiction, Hutcheon argues, because “[t]hey are both self-consciously fictional but also overtly concerned with the acts (and consequences) of the reading and writing of history as well as fiction” (Canadian Postmodern 14). In That Art of Difference: ‘Documentary-Collage’ and English-Canadian Writing Manina Jones’s conceptualization of what she calls “the documentary-collage” in English-Canadian fiction has drawn valuable attention to the significance of the resituating and recontextualization of documents in contemporary historical fiction. As Jones argues, works making use of such a strategy destabilize traditional textual hierarchies and “invoke and undermine the oppositions between categories such as textual /referential, intratextual/extratextual, literary/non-literary, or fiction/non-fiction, and thus stage a kind of documentary dialogue” (13–14). Her key insight that the “document […] is foregrounded as a strategic site of contending readings” has particularly significant implications for postmodern historical fiction (14). In a similar vein, in Framing Truths: Parodic Structures in Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels Martin Kuester theorizes contemporary English-Canadian historical fiction as a parodic resituating of non-fictional material that results in a questioning of both the authority of history and the nature of literary realism (148). In New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction, Marie Vautier’s conceptualization of New World Myth in contemporary English-Canadian and Québécois fiction as a...