ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: FACT, FICTION, AND FABRICATION: HISTORY, NARRATIVE, AND THE POSTMODERN REAL FROM WOOLF TO RUSHDIE Eric L. Berlatsky, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003 Dissertation directed by: Associate Professor Brian Richardson Department of English While most accounts of Western attitudes towards history in the nineteenth century suggest that Victorians had a faith in its origin, teleology and meaning, twentieth - century assessments of history more often suggest the opposit e. Both poststructural theory and postmodern historiography in the wake of Hayden White’s Metahistory present a relativist view of the possibility of either objectivity or material referentiality in historical discourse, particularly through the medium of narrative. From this perspective, historical narrative is defined as a discursive creation that obscures the material relations of its production and as an instrument of ideology and oppression. “Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication” investigates what political and ethical repercussions this attitude towards and theorization of history has and how much contemporary fiction typically labeled “postmodern” both initially reflects and ultimately denies this model. This study argues that the assessment of contemporary postmodern fiction as reflecting poststructural models of endless textuality denies an important element of the novels studied: their commitment to the possibility of accessing material reality and the importance of such access both for the const ruction of an ethics and for political agency. By looking closely at contemporary novels that explicitly theorize history and historiography, it becomes clear that they instead insist on a sense of the “real” at least in part because of these political concerns. These novels, which I label “postmodernist historical fiction,” insist that although an inviolable origin, teleology, and even consistent referentiality cannot be obtained in historical reference, there can be a provisional referentiality and acce ss to the real without a return to the classical history of foundationalism, immanence and teleology that contributes to hegemony. These texts are also tied together by their deployment of nonnarrative methods that counter the deformation of the real that takes place within narrative discourse according to White, among others. The primary texts considered are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Graham Swift’s Waterland, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. FACT, FICTION, AND FABRICATION: HISTORY, NARRATIVE, AND THE POSTMODERN REAL FROM WOOLF TO RUSHDIE by Eric L. Berlatsky Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2003 Advisory Committee: Professor Brian Richardson, Chair Professor Susan Leonardi Professor Sangeeta Ray Professor Charles Caramello Professor James Gilbert ©Copyright by Eric L. Berlatsky 2003 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction: “Memory as Forgetting”: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus…………………………………………...1 Memory and Its Politics in Kundera and Spiegelman…………………………….7 History, Memory, and Collective Memory………………………………………15 Kundera and Postmodern Memory………………………………………………25 Spiegelman and Postmodern Memory…………………………………………...39 Kundera, Spiegelman, and the Problem of Ideology………………………….....62 Postmodernist Historical Fiction and Finding the Real………………………….72 Notes……………………………………………………………………………..99 Chapter I: The Pageantry of the Past and the Reflection of the Present: History, Reality, and Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts ………………………………………………..112 The Picture and the Portrait…………………………………………………….114 The Woolfian Artist and the Relativist Historian………………………………125 The Pageant, Patriarchy, and Deconstruction…………………………………..130 Irruptions of the Real…………………………………………………………...149 Narrativity as Reality and the Problem with Plot………………………………159 Bergson’s Present and Woolf’s “Moments of Being”………………………….180 The Pageant and the Present……………………………………………………190 The Pageant and the Present (Take 2)…………………………………………..202 The Absence of the Present and its Presence…………………………………...210 Plot’s Return……………………………………………………………………216 Notes……………………………………………………………………………222 Chapter II: “Swamps of Myth…and Empiri cal Fishing Lines”: Historiography, Narrativity, and the “Here and Now” in Graham Swift’s Waterland…………………………………..237 The Progress of the Atkinsons………………………………………………….248 Process and the Cricks………………………………………………………….262 “A Knife Blade Called Now”…………………………………………………..284 Curiosity………………………………………………………………………..305 Reproduction, Representation, and the Reality of the Real…………………….311 Notes……………………………………………………………………………324 Chapter III: “What’s Real and What’s True”: Mahatma Gandhi, Errata, and the Shadow of the Real in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children …………………………………………….332 Midnight’s Children, Postcolonial Historiography, and Class Politics……………………………………………………………337 iii Mistakes and Lies………………………………………………………………343 Literal Metaphors and Metaphorical Truth……………………………………..356 The Epistemology of Metaphor and Fictional Worlds…………………………368 “What’s Real and What’s True”………………………………………………..381 Narrative and its Leftovers (Ectomies and Turds)……………………………...399 Gandhi and the Ethics of Inclusion……………………………………………..410 Notes……………………………………………………………………………429 Conclusion: Ethics, Universality and Postmodernist Historical Fiction……………………………………………….444 Works Cited………………………………….................................................................459 iv List of Figures 1. Excerpt from Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale/And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman 51 2. Excerpt from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman 53 1 Introduction Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus In one of poststructuralism’s most -quoted statements, Jacques Derrida declares in his Of Grammatology that “there is no outside-the-text” (158). While Derrida is principally interested in revealing the internal contradictions of foundational philosophy based upon binary divisions, his above declaration also suggests the impossibility of finding “truth,” not merely in its transcendental philosophical sense, but also in the possibility of a material and historical referent. This assertion of the textuality of exis tence and the difficulty/impossibility of accessing a reality outside of representation and signification were not initially applied specifically to “history” as a concept by Derrida, but its implications for history in the postmodern world still resonate, particularly, as we shall see, in the case of traumatic events and historical incidents that serve as sites of communal and individual identification for oppressed peoples. Likewise, one of the most prominent philosophers of the postmodern, Jean -François Lyotard asserts that postmodernism (and modernism itself) 1 takes place in the realization that Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism are not tied to objective truth and reality, but rather are merely “language games,” like narrative itself, that create “the effects of reality,” that, in a postmodern age, become “the fantasies of realism” (Lyotard 2 74). In this context, “realistic” fiction, “objective” history, and positivist science become not only misled in their attempts to configure the world as an eminently understandable and coherent system, they also become ideologically charged deceptive practices that posit an immanent and essentialized world where none exists. 2 This postmodern/poststructural emphasis on the “real” as inextricable fro m the constructed and the textual has also found its way into both historiography and historical fiction with potentially troubling social and political repercussions. This is particularly the case because of the ways in which the historical real is a sit e of political contestation. In the West, for instance, the ontological verifiability of the Holocaust is central to the identity formation of Jews and others. Relativist postmodern historiography that would theoretically insist that accounts of the Holo caust are closer to fiction than to “fact” (in their discursive and linguistic construction), undercut the communal insistence of Jews that the Holocaust be maintained as the “real” in communal history and memory as a bastion against future repetitions of the traumatic event. 3 Similarly, a novel like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children provides a sense of the “real” history of the Amritsar Massacre as opposed to the “official” history perpetuated by the British colonizers. It is this politically necess ary real that would seem to be threatened by a radical 3 poststructuralism that denies the referentiality of any discourse, whether hegemonic or oppositional. Linda Hutcheon has attempted to arrest this problem somewhat by redefining the postmodern as a discourse that is both historical in the traditional sense and deconstructive, both presenting the past as if such representation is easily accessible and transparent and exposing the linguistic, discursive, and ideological barriers to transparent representa tion. In Hutcheon’s sense, postmodernism is simultaneously complicit