Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960 Fiction (review)

This book purports to examine post-1960 historical fiction in relation to “postmodern cultural assumptions and the traditional historical novel form, which was (at least in Walter Scott’s novels, the most famous case) predicated on epistemological and historiographical assumptions of the Age of Reason” (ix). Drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern sublime and postmodern theories of the historical sublime (as defined by Hayden White, F.R. Ankersmith, and Jean-Luc Nancy), Elias makes a twofold claim: first, that “the metahistorical romance reverses the dominant focus of the classic historical romance genre from history to romance,” and second, that “it does so because, like the postmodernist historiography and postmodernist philosophy of its own time, it turns from belief in empirical history to a reconsideration of the historical sublime” (xi). The book is well structured around the poles of theory and its practical application, in that part one lays out the theoretical groundwork for the close readings of specific texts in part two. While impressed with the breadth and depth of the author’s analysis, I was occasionally frustrated with the heavy theoretical jargon in which supporting ideas are worded and then reworded. Unfortunately, in many cases, these reiterations tend to confuse rather than clarify the issues at stake in author’s argument.

In the first section, Elias discusses at some length three “interlocked, sometimes contradictory” definitions of postmodernism—epistemological, socio-cultural, and aesthetic—all ranging widely among various disciplines. She then reviews different approaches to the historical novel genre in order to resituate postmodern historical fiction as a form that evolved from, or rather in opposition to, the classical historical romance. Thus, unlike classical historical romances, metahistorical romances project skepticism about the possibilities for true historical knowledge and suspicion of any social or historical narrative that purports to make sense of a chaotic world of seemingly endless and contradictory life-styles, cultures, and political viewpoints. For the postmodern, post-traumatic, metahistorical imagination, history is “sublime, impossible to articulate, outside of representation, and as such leads to ethical action in the present” (97).

The analytic chapters in part two serve to illustrate the defining attributes of the metahistorical romance, most importantly, its rejection of linear models of time, history, positivism, and progress for other models or metaphors such as flatness, roundness, circularity, or pendulum motion. Focusing on Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Ishamel Reed’s Flight to Canada, and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Elias explores the role of two narrative strategies—parataxis and simultaneity—for recovering the historical sublime “often repressed in history’s linear model” (104). She also extends the scope of research beyond the literary genre into historiography, with a particular emphasis on Michel Foucault, whose work has replaced linear models of history with the so-called “spatial” models. A detailed examination of Ackroyd’s Chatterton and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn allows Elias to argue that these novels inscribe two opposing stances characteristic of the metahistorical imagination: on the one hand, the “ironic, even nihilistic” stance, “aligned with a postmodernist sensibility and novels written by authors who situate themselves within the arena of First World politics”; and, on the other, “a reconstructed ‘secular-sacred’ belief” that “seems aligned with a postcolonialist sensibility and novels written by authors who situate themselves outside the First World cultural arena” (143).

As Elias shows, however, both the postmodern and postcolonial metahistorical romances share “an attempt to counter the forces of modernization” and represent “a reaction-formation to the trauma of history itself” (xiv). In chapter four, she turns to another group of contemporary novels, all set in the 18th century and foregrounding, through fabulatory techniques, the critique of modernity that was arguably “immanent” in the very historical frame of the Enlightenment. Francis Sherwood’s Vindication, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, John Fowles’s A Maggot, and Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance, to mention but a few titles, center on an “event that erupts unspeakably from the modern, and...