Abstract

This paper takes issue with accusations that postmodernist fiction neglects or refuses to engage with history. I offer a reading of John Fowles’s A maggot which demonstrates how postmodernist novels, by way of a self-reflexive interrogation of their own narrative foundation, contest history’s master status and expose the latter’s similar dependence on narrative modes of totalizing representation. Such a demystification process, I maintain, prompts a recognition of the provisional status of history as a human construct, thus undermining its power of totalization and opening it up to rewriting.

Highlights

  • In recent years it has become fashionable to attack postmodernist art for its detachment from politics and history

  • The point of this strategy is to make the reader realize that the difference between the past and the present is merely of a technological nature: the two societies are fundamentally the same. This realization is articulated by Rebecca Lee when she refers to the static society of her tragic vision as being "(t)oo like this world ... all cruelty, killing, pain", and concludes with the comment: "... all we lack are their devilish arts and ingenuity to be the same, as cruel " (382). Her opinion is corroborated by the following observation in the Epilogue, addressed to the reader as a contemporary: "In much else we have developed immeasurably from the eighteenth century; with their central plain question -- what morality justifies the flagrant injustice and inequality of human society? -- we have not progressed one inch" (459)

  • Instead of manifesting a refusal to engage with the present or to think historically, which Jameson cites as being characteristic of this mode (1984a:65-68), it displays a desire to understand present culture as the product of past narrative representations

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Summary

Mike Marais

Denying history or defying History^?? John Fowles’s A maggot and me postmodernist novel. 1 offer a reading o f John Fowles’s A maggot which dem onstrates how postm odernist novels, by way o f a self-reflexive interrogation o f their own narrative foundation, contest history’s m aster status and expose the la tte r’s sim ilar dependence on narrative m odes of totalizing representation. Such a demystification process, I maintain, prompts a recognition of the provisional status of history as a hum an construct, undermining its power o f totalization and opening it up to rewriting

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