Postmodern Challenge of Historiography in Postmodern Canadian Fiction

Palacký University Olomouc Philosophical Faculty Department of English and American Studies English and American Literature Vladimíra Fonfárová Ghosts that Sell Memories to Shadows: Postmodern Challenge Of Historiography In Postmodern Canadian Fiction A Case Study Duchové, již prodávají vzpomínky stínům: Postmoderní výzva historiografie v odrazu kanadské postmoderní fikce Případová studie Ph.D. dissertation / dizertační práce Supervisor / vedoucí: Mgr. Pavlína Flajšarová, Ph.D. Olomouc 2015 Prohlašuji, že jsem dizertační práci vypracovala samostatně, pouze s použitím citovaných pramenů a literatury. I hereby declare that I have written this dissertation by myself, using only literature and sources cited below. V Olomouci 31. 8. 2015 / Olomouc, August 31, 2015 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Pavlína Flajšarová, Ph.D., for her patience and encouragement throughout my studies. I would also like to express an immense gratitude to prof. Tomáš Kubíček, whose lectures and comments provided me with invaluable impulses and inspiration for this thesis. The same goes for Mgr. Libor Práger, Ph.D., who contributed to the emergence of the ideas that gave the final shape to this dissertation, and Mgr. Roman Trušník, Ph.D., my valuable colleague and friend, who helped me in the initial and final stages of writing. I am also grateful to my partner for being informative and supportive and my friends for their patience. Abstract This dissertation deals with problematics of postmodern challenge of historiography, which originted from works of Friedrich Nietzsche, R. G. Collingwood and Hayden White. It examines how postmodern challenge reflected in selected English-written postmodern Canadian novels by female authors. Postmodern challenge of historiography called into question an objective enquiry and truth value of historiography, and Hayden White developed a theory that on the level of discourse, historiography is a mere narrative and therefore no different from fiction. This dissertation demonstrates, on three selected novels, that Canadian postmodern fiction embraces postmodern challenge of historiography, namely by using unreliable homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators, thematizing history and historiography, or using metafictional elements. Thus novels emphasize the irretrievability of the past and the impossibility of knowing it. Also, by creating mysterious female characters, whose mystery remains unresolved and undisclosed, the novels point out to the existence of so called lost, silent voices, whose testimony remained lost for the official historical record. Abstrakt Tato dizertační práce se zabývá problematikou postmoderní výzvy historiografie, která vychází z myšlenek Friedricha Nietzscheho, R. G. Collingwooda a Haydena Whitea, a zkoumá, jak se tato výzva odrazila ve vybraných anglicky psaných románech kanadských postmoderních autorek. Postmoderní výzva historiografie zpochybnila objektivnost a pravdivostní hodnotu historiografie, přičemž Hayden White rozvinul teorii, že historiografie je na rovině diskurzu narativem a neliší se tudíž od fikce. Tato dizertace se na třech vybraných románech snaží demonstrovat, že v kanadské postmoderní fikci dochází k reakci na postmoderní výzvu historiografie, a to zejména použitím nespolehlivého homodiegetického a heterodiegetického vypravěče, tematizací historie a historiografie, či užitím metafikčních prvků, čímž romány zdůrazňují téma neuchopitelnosti minulosti a nemožnosti ji doopravdy poznat. Zároveň vytvořením tajemných ženských postav, jejichž tajemství nedokáže nikdo odhalit, upozorňují na existenci tzv. ztracených, umlčených hlasů, jichž svědectví zůstalo před oficiální historií skryto. Contents Introduction The Weak, the Anonymous, the Defeated: Those who Leave Few Scratches on the Face of History 1 Chapter 1 Postmodern Challenge of Historiography: Hayden White Against Historians 7 Chapter 2 “The Relationship Between Fiction and History Is Assuredly More Complex than We Will Ever Be Able to Put Into Words:” Dorrit Cohn and Lubomír Doležel Against Hayden White 15 2.1. Historiography Versus Fiction: Lubomír Doležel᾽s Perspective of the Possible Worlds Theory 20 2.2. Historiography Versus Historiographic Fiction 22 2.3. Historiography Versus Historiographic Metafiction 25 2.4. Historiography Versus Alternative Historiography 28 Chapter 3 How Historiography is Challenged in Postmodern Canadian Fiction 33 3.1. Historiographic Metafiction: Linda Hutcheon᾽s Concept 35 3.2. The Voice That May Be Lying: Unreliable Narrator, an Elusive Category 38 Chapter 4 Margaret Atwood᾽s Alias Grace: The Eternal Lure of urder Mysteries 42 4.1. Unheard Playful Voices: Margaret Atwood᾽s Grace Marks as an (Reliably) Unreliable Narrator 43 4.2. To Prove the Sources Wrong: “Just Because a Thing Is Written Down, Does Not Mean It᾽s God᾽s Truth” 61 Chapter 5 A Witch and a Whore: Kate Pullinger᾽s Weird Sister 70 5.1. Witches of Warboys: Children, the Devil᾽s Cesspool 71 5.2. Who is Agnes? Recreating a Historical Figure in Contemporary Environment 76 5.3. Truth Where One Expects Lies, Lies Where One Expects Truth: Narratological Analysis of Homodiegetic and HeterodiegeticNarrators in Weird Sister 89 5.4. Thematization of History: Agnes Samuel and the Throckmorton House as Symbols 103 5.5. Thematization of History: The Irretrievable Past 111 Chapter 6 Carol Shields᾽ Mary Swann: “A Beautiful Toothless Witch Who Kept to Herself 114 6.1. Hunger for Life Stories: Carol Shields and the Burden of Biographies 114 6.2. Mary Swann Recreated, but Never Found: Reconstruction of a Fictional Poetess 122 6.3. Memory, An Instrument of the Ultimate Loss: Irretrievability of Historical Fact Thematized 138 Conclusion 145 Bibliography 153 “He had begun to lose faith in his old belief that the past is retrievable” (Carol Shields, Mary Swann) “Human kind. Cannot bear very much of reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets) Introduction The Weak, the Anonymous, the Defeated: Those who Leave Few Scratches on the Face of History In A History of the Canadian Peoples (1998), J. M. Bumsted hypothesizes about the numbers of aboriginal population of the North American continent “on the eve of European intrusion,”1 claiming that it is impossible to determine them.2 However, he is clear on one point: “The Native population, lacking immunities to a variety of European diseases, was quickly decimated by epidemics, which spread silently across the land, often in advance of the actual appearance of a European carrier. ... The size of the population observed by the first European arrivals may have already been considerably modified by disease brought by the earliest fishermen.”3 Contact with Europeans proved deadly for indigenous cultures inhabiting North American continent, as it eventually decimated them or wiped them out altogether. Physical extermination was accompanied by cultural extermination and many indigenous people vanished, together with their myths, folklore and history. As Bumsted᾽s opening line states: “once upon a time, a history of Canada would typically begin with the arrival of the European ‘discoverers.᾽”4 According to this statement, native peoples were denied a place in Canadian history, for which they were the silent, unheard, unrecorded voices, swallowed by history. Their testimonies, their perspectives, their personal histories did not survive and were erased from official history of Canada. And just how we cannot know how many of them actually existed, we also cannot retrieve their past. 1 J. M. Bumsted, A History of the Canadian Peoples (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 2 See Bumsted, A History of the Canadian Peoples, 7. 3 Bumsted, A History of the Canadian Peoples, 7. 4 Bumsted, A History of the Canadian Peoples, 1. ~ 1 ~ The existence of the silent voices, those never recorded and deeply buried and forgotten, who still were an undeniable part of the past of the continent, inspired many postmodern authors, who found themselves fascinated by the process of how history is created and the concept of what exactly is a historical fact. Historiography, writing of history, has long been considered a science that strives for objectivity and factual correctness of the presented data. However, the objectivity of history was called into question by numerous historians, literary theoreticians and philosophers of history, most importantly by Robin George Collingwood, Edward Hallet Carr, and later by Hayden White, an author of the theory that, as both historiography and fiction are narratives, on the level of discourse they are no different. Moreover, historiography is inevitably a result of an interpretation of facts, provided by an historian. White, among others, contributed to the assertion of postmodern challenge of historiography, which aimed to qustion the historical truth and trustworthiness of historiography, pronouncing history a construct. It is safe to claim that 1980s and 1990s were the decades when the postmodern challenge of historiography, whose first notions became visible in 1940s, was still a raging subject among historians and philosophers of history. Although the idea of challenging historiography as an objective science, presenting the trustworthy and undisprovable factual evidence about the dealings in the past was hardly a new thing in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was that particular decade when many works were published, in which the term postmodern challenge was fully

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