Speaking in Tongues: The Novelist as Historiographic Fool

Historiographic Metafiction as Postmodern, Postcolonial InterventionMost historical novelists accept as a starting point a broadbrush pattern of general events that proceed teleologically as the passage of a protagonist hero/heroine is charted across key stages of life. This is, as it were, the factual and temporal basis of such novels. But in relation to conventional stylistic rendering, standard plotting, and illusionistic consistency of realist voice, as may be found in the classic historical novel (and its cognate sub-genres, the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman), the genre conventions deployed by contemporary postcolonial novels, with the possible exception of realist novels such as Grenville's The Secret River and Courtney Collins's The Burial, are also shown to be periodically unstable and discontinuous; they are variously subject to narrative displacement, distortion, and inversion.These artistic 'deformations' deconstruct conventional approaches to the historical novel. One critical deconstructive technique is historiographic metafiction. Metafictional techniques are understood as forms of writing about writing that allude to histories of writerly process, thereby drawing attention to the fact that and fiction are themselves historical terms and that their definitions and interrelations are historically determined and vary with time.1 Or, as Hutcheon otherwise puts it, Both history and fiction are cultural sign systems, ideological constructions whose ideology includes their appearance of being autonomous and self-contained.2 Metafiction draws attention to the written text as artifice, undercutting the drive to mimetic representations of the surface of reality and the streamlined appearance of the novel. Thus, it unpicks the seams of the cultural artefact, drawing attention to the novel as a provisional cultural invention in and of its time. The metafictional work clearly has some affinity with the 'straight or originating text, which it reworks, comments on, and knits together with other texts. In its modern and postmodern variants, metafiction as cultural intervention has drawn strength from writers such as Borges, Grass, Nabokov, and Pynchon.3 These writers paved the way for more recent novelistic experimentation that reveals the fabulator behind the fable.4Despite the recent intensified exploration of metafiction, it is not a form that is historically confined to the hothouse of postmodern narrative. Nor can it be confused or interchanged with intertextuality as such. Margaret Rose makes the useful distinction:While meta-fiction can be defined as a work of fiction which comments or reflects upon another text, its 'intertextual' element can be described as the presence in its text of the words, passages, or messages of others.5Rose notes further that legacies of thecreation of interruptions to the narrative flow by such 'meta-fictional' interpolations and the ensuing foregrounding of the author's construction of the narrative and its component parts, have not only been of interest to classical and postmodern experimenters but of particular interest to twentieth-century critics such as the Russian formalists.6Bakhtin, of course, wrote adjacent to the Russian Formalist circle. Hutcheon's analysis of historiographic metafiction in contemporary historical fiction owes much to Bakhtin's notion of parodic and travestying laughter destroying the distance where the individual (character) is represented on a plane distanced from the zone of contact with the inconclusive events of the present, and consequently of the future.7 The rich historical legacy of parody is one reason for their [the Russian Formalists'] selection of meta-fictional parody texts as paradigms of the literary work in general.8Simon Leys's The Death of Napoleon9 is an 'Australian-made' historical novel that comically dissolves the idea of Bakhtinian epic distance. …