A Postmodern Reading of Auster's Leviathan As an Example of Historiographic Metafiction

Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 A Postmodern Reading of Auster’s Leviathan as an Example of Historiographic Metafiction Moutman Hameed Mousa MA, English Literature, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran Email- [email protected] Dr. Nasser Maleki Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran Abstract- History is a narrative written or documented by human beings, and human beings are never free from their subjective preferences and their political as well as socio-cultural biases. Postmodern historical fiction, especially the genre of “historiographic metafiction”, highlights this issue more than traditional historical writings by foregrounding the subjective nature of historiography, at the same time as it reflects the process of writing about history. Those postmodern novels which can be called “historiographic metafiction” do in fact awaken readers to the nature of historical events and their truth values. With the fall of grand narratives, no established historical fact maintains its authority against marginalized historical events and their importance. Paul Auster’s Leviathan is a postmodern novel which can be read through Linda Hutcheon’s discussion of the characteristics of “historiographic metafiction” since there are counter- cultural historical facts in this novel that Auster has tried to highlight. Set in the 1980s United States, Leviathan is the story of a peaceful writer who becomes a bomber against the Republican policies of the era and tries to deliver his message by exploding the replicas of the Statue of Liberty. By foregrounding the subculture of the leftists and radicals of the period, Auster has tried to let his readers know about marginalized groups whose voice could not be truthfully heard in the face of authorities, meanwhile incorporating several postmodern narrative techniques that contribute to his postmodern historiography as befits the principles of “Historiographic Metafiction”. Keywords – Auster, historiograpic Metafiction, identity, Leviathan, Postmodernism. I. INTRODUCTION When we talk about history, we should know that it is written by occasional witnesses to certain events or historians (who might be first-hand witnesses or not). This issue already makes it clear that history is written by individuals with certain subjective viewpoints towards events, viewpoints which are not immune from personal biases and faulty interpretations of historical events. Moreover, not all people on earth experience historicizing the events of the past and it is left to those interested in history, historians, and historiographers to write what has happened to humankind throughout centuries. Accordingly, many people and their accounts of past events are left untold, buried under certain historical accounts which mostly present us with the mainstream events in history that live through books and are retold over and over, sometimes with exaggeration over certain events, in each historical era. History as such includes merely the “grand narratives”, as Lyotard (1984) puts it now and then in The Postmodern Condition, based on which (historical) truth is considered as having only one version according to those traditional hierarchies which have been transmitted generation by generation in the form of established facts and principles. As Lyotard says, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond : these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth. (1984 p. xxiv) Volume XII, Issue VI, 2020 Page No: 760 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 It is only in the postmodern world or through postmodern thinking that such “grand narratives” or “metanarratives” are dismantled to open some space for all the available versions of truth, whether they are historically documented, orally transmitted or deliberately produced to serve political, religious, social, cultural, or even economical purposes. To have all the versions or accounts of history available at hand, to have all the historical gaps told and exposed to public judgment, postmodernism has given rise to its own historiography to respect all the local/petit/little narratives of events. In Lyotard’s words: We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives – we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse. But . , the little narrative remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention. (1984, p. 60) This view, when compared to literature in general, contributes to what Horsely says, Many of those currently interested in exploring the affinities between history and literature have argued that historical narratives do not derive their authority from a ‘reality’ imitated but merely from the cultural conventions or subjective preferences which determine the nature of the paradigms constructed. (1991, p. 1) Subjective historical constructions account for what in postmodernist fiction has led to the creation of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” in which the postmodern writer’s intrusion into the text is accompanied by a selection of historical events as the writer considers them important in helping his/her plot. Postmodernist historical fiction mocks official history but not randomly. Many novels of this kind “rewrite history from the perspective of groups of people that have been excluded from the making and writing of history”. Oppressed communities or individuals are thus given central roles in leading a historical era “as the bearers of a new future”. Accordingly, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1974) identify with “American blacks,” Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983) and Gunter Grass’s Der Butt (1977) with women, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) with “the first generation of a recently liberated India,” and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) with the Africans who “suffered severely from German colonial rule” (Wesseling, 1997, p. 206). Since we can find both metafictionality and historiography in postmodernist novels, those postmodernist narratives which combine both of these elements are called “historiographic metafiction”. “Historiographic metafiction” denies the natural ways of differentiating between historical facts and fictional ones. It refuses the view that the truth of history by challenging historiography and asserting that “both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity.” This kind of fiction includes “the extra textual past” into to the realm of historiography. It also shows that both history and fiction “construct as they textualize” the past (Hutcheon 2004, p. 93), hence their contingency. By employing such devices as “unreliable narrators, multiple frames for the narrative, stylistic transformations, mixtures of magical and realistic events, and parodies of earlier literary and historical works,” this sort of postmodern fiction tries to challenge traditional ways of narrativizing history (Malpas 2005, p. 101). By intruding into the main body of his/her novel, the postmodernist writer contributes to the metafictional aspect of postmodernist fiction and at the same time allows himself or herself to talk about and comment on a selection of historical events to deliver a special message to readers. This message is somehow alienating and defamiliarizing – “the ‘metafictional paradox’ of self- conscious narratives that demanded of the reader both detachment and involvement” (Hutcheon 2004, p. ix) – since it is not to follow what “grand narratives” have to say about history but what they refrain from saying or alter while saying. Hutcheon believes that “historical discourse and its relation to the literary,” as manifested in its postmodern sense in “historiographic metafiction,” is concerned with: issues such as those of narrative form, of intertextuality, of strategies of representation, of the role of language, of the relation between historical fact and experiential event, and, in general, of the epistemological and ontological consequences of the act of rendering problematic that which was once taken for granted by historiography – and literature. (2004, p. xii) By “historiographic metafiction” Hutcheon means “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.” In many of such critical works on postmodernism, “it is narrative – be it in literature, history, or theory – that has usually been the major focus of attention.” “Historiographic metafiction” includes all three of these domains: “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (2004, p. 5). Volume XII, Issue VI, 2020 Page No: 761 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 Hutcheon in this regard cites several novels, or “paradoxical works” like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Fowles’s A Maggot and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Doctorow’s Loon Lake and Ragtime, Reed’s The Terrible Twos, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words, Rushdie’s Shame and

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