Dottorato di ricerca in Filologia Moderna XXIII ciclo Scuola di dottorato in Lingue, Culture e Società A.A. 2007/2008 ÷ A.A. 2009/2010 The End of History in English Historiographic Metafiction Settore scientifico-disciplinare di afferenza: L-LIN/10 LETTERATURA INGLESE Tesi di dottorato di ALICE MANDRICARDO n. matricola 955487 Direttore della Scuola di Dottorato: Tutore della dottoranda: ma ssa mo Ch. Prof. ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI Ch. Prof. FLAVIO GREGORI “True, novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on. Yet the worlds so created aspire to pattern and shape and moral point. A novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason.” (Martin Amis, The Second Plane , September 11: 2001-2007 , p. 13.) The End of History in English Historiographic Metafiction TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE The Philosophical Debate on the End of History 1.1 On History and its Meaning(s) 10 1.2 Kojève’s Dialectics and End of History 24 1.3 Fukuyama’s Welcome to the End of History 42 CHAPTER TWO The Postmodern Answer to the End of History 2.1 The End of the Enlightenment Trust 62 2.2 Goodbye Metanarratives 79 2.3 How to Make Sense of the Past (?) 89 2.4 Post-history without Meaning: the System of Production and Consumption and the End of Experience 100 2.5 Historiographic Metafiction: Framing History in Fiction 108 CHAPTER THREE Literary Interpretations of History and of its End 3.1 Dredging up the Past: Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock - Waterland - Last Orders 115 3.2 Making History more Accessible: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot - A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters - England, England 140 3.3 Is This the End? An Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor , Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News , and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or the Nature of the Offence 172 I CHAPTER FOUR A Question of Roots and a Way to Multiculturalism 4.1 National History and Individual Fate in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 197 4.2 Englishness, Tradition and Hybrid Identities in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Andrea Levy’s Small Island 223 CONCLUSION 270 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources 280 Secondary Sources 285 Journals Consulted 298 II Introduction Introduction Introduction A sense of an ending, a symptom of something completed and over, is widespread in the postmodern era, in the life, thought and culture of the late twentieth century. A sense of impoverishment and historical failure, distress and disillusion, characterises the spirit of the whole post-war period. It seems that all solid foundations, all coherent means of comprehending the self, society and the world have dissolved or appear to be inconsistent. Postmodernism is the direct result of a great disillusion with science, progress, universal truth and teleological history. The prognosis of the various ‘ends’, such as the end of ideology, the end of metanarratives, the end of all those convictions once considered surely enduring, defines postmodern relativism and scepticism towards epistemological claims. Undoubtedly, endist thinking is one of the distinctive qualities of postmodern culture. In my thesis the end of history is taken into account both as an important feature of postmodern culture and as a suitable topic through which contemporary fiction can be read and interpreted. The end of history in postmodernism is the end of the belief in history’s direction and purpose, in history as progress. The American critic Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernity is characterised by a crisis in historicity; the postmodern age has forgotten how to think historically and this exasperating condition “determines a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation”. 1 Despite the prognostication of the end of history and the demise of historical telos , postmodernism entails a return to history, which is not a positive and simple return, but a critical one. Postmodernists claim new and diverse approaches to history, refusing to impose positive meaning and intention upon history and offering an alternative historical understanding. This study aims to define the relationship between the philosophical concept of “the end of history” and postmodernist models and critiques of history in contemporary English literature; in particular, my interest focuses on the genre of the novel and on “historiographic metafiction”. My understanding of historiographic metafiction is informed 1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, Introduction, p. XI. 1 Introduction by the Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon, who has coined the expression and has provided 2 both a definition and commentary on it. Hutcheon considers historical consciousness and reflection upon history to be fundamental in the postmodern literary experience; according to her, historiographic metafiction perfectly represents the poetics of postmodernism. In its contradictory nature, historiographic metafiction refers both to the world of history and that of fiction, namely it is the meeting point of history and fiction, allowing us to approach the subject of history and historical study from the related area of literature. I will explore twelve representative texts within English historiographic metafiction that bring into focus the importance of history and its literary interpretation. These novels cover a period of thirty years, from 1974, which is the date of publication of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor , to 2004, the date of publication of Andrea Levy’s Small Island , yet most of them were written in the 1980s. They all deal with twentieth-century history, focusing in particular on the Second World War and its consequences. The novelists I will dwell particularly on are Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Andrea Levy. These novelists produce critical histories through postmodernist modes of representation. Since they repudiate some of the fundamental assumptions behind received accounts of history, they rewrite history by showing the limits and biases of conventional models of history. I will approach their position through the philosophical debate on the end of history and the end of a certain concept of history. Their novels (analysed in chapter three and chapter four) are among the most significant for, and representative of, the theme of the end of history in contemporary English fiction. However, it is beyond the scope of this study to examine the complete oeuvre of each of these writers and my choice of their novels according to the theme outlined above does not mean to be exhaustive. 3 The starting point for my research is an analysis of the meaning(s) of history and its end. The first chapter deals with those philosophers who meditated upon the end of history and their influence on postmodern understanding of the end of history. I particularly focus on the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who offers an end of history doctrine 2 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism , London: Routledge, 1988. 3 Undoubtedly, there are other texts which address similar questions to those discussed in my thesis: for instance, the topic of the end of history could be analysed in dystopian novels, or in the work of American novelists such as Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace. It could also be interesting to apply the same method of research not only to literary works written in the English language, but also to contemporary novels in comparative literature. 2 Introduction based on his personal and original interpretation of Hegelian dialectics. 4 Kojève argues that the principle of history is grounded on human satisfaction and desire for recognition: human beings create themselves and the world around them, continuously fulfilling their desires; they transform nature in order to satisfy their aspirations and strive for mutual and equal recognition. They finally lead history to its end, its climax and exhaustion with the creation of “a universal and homogeneous State”, which is a realm of freedom where people’s needs are recognised, legitimised and defended. Kojève maintains that the end of historical evolution has already occurred; he shares the Hegelian belief in a historical completion in 1806, with the battle of Jena, and believes that what happened after 1806 served to fulfil the quantitative task of extending the end of history to the rest of the world. However, Kojève suggests that the moment of triumph is also a moment of terminus and impasse: the future ceases to be dominated by negativity and change, by man’s intention and resolve to transform the world and alter the status quo . Post-history has no meaning; there is no vision of the future except centuries of boredom. At the end of history, man looks and behaves like an animal: he cares only for his survival and comfort. My aim is to shed light on those aspects of Kojève’s philosophy – such as the disenchantment with modernity, the rejection of homogenising and totalising principles, or the perspective of history as a source of consumption and pleasure – which can be considered the seed of postmodern thought and are echoed in English historiographic metafiction. I also pay attention to Francis Fukuyama’s approach to the end of history and to the differences between his position and postmodern attitudes. His famous book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), has had the merit of reopening the debate on the post- historical world; yet, its thesis is almost impossible to agree with and has been sharply criticised as universalistic and totalising. Fukuyama argues that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies has come to an end and thus he optimistically welcomes the end of history. He suggests that the system broadly known as liberal democracy is the last stop, where sooner or later the socio-political development of every nation on earth will come to rest, and predicts the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism.