Empiricist Fictions, Fictions of Empiricism

Abstract

Since the 1970s, when Hayden White's influential work on historiography arrived in the form of the book Metahistory and the series of essays collected in Tropics of Discourse, literary scholars have often thought of the question of the legitimacy of historical narratives as constructed and contingent. Following White, literary scholars tend to dismiss empiricist claims about historical accuracy in favor of a recognition of the narrative structure and formal strategies that endow certain texts and speakers with more or less of an aura of legitimacy. This turn to form raises important questions about the nature of the archive and whose voices it preserves and enfranchises, the emplotment of historical narratives, and the relationship of the scholar to the historical past and present, and prompts a reconsideration of what exactly constitutes the past other than various language acts, genres, or performances. It is striking, therefore, that Hamish Dalley's The Postcolonial Historical Novel bypasses those conversations in order to pursue a different tack. Dalley argues for an empiricist understanding of history, crediting the historical novel for playing a central role in the construction of the historical record. His strategy is not to deny the authority of traditional historical methods or narratives but to challenge their claim as exclusive arbiters of historical truth.To make his argument for the validity of historical fiction as a legitimate source of historical knowledge, Dalley asks readers to rethink their understanding of realism. He contends, in a theoretically dense pair of chapters, that the historical novel, and particularly the postcolonial historical novel, is a form of realist fiction. But Dalley does not mean realism in the conventional sense. Recognizing that postcolonial theory and criticism has been “suspicious of—when not explicitly hostile to—literary realism” (6), he develops a theory of “allegorical realism,” routed through Georg Lukács and Ian Baucom with a few other stops along the way, that redeems realism for postcolonial and, I dare say, poststructural theory. If “allegorical realism” sounds paradoxical, that is because it is. Never explicitly defined, the term emerges out of a critical exploration of the analogies between contemporary critical discussions of realism and allegory. As I understand it, allegorical realism captures the tension between “singularity” and representativeness endemic to the protagonists of postcolonial fiction. As Dalley puts it, “allegorical realism allows historical novelists to fracture linear temporalities and imperial theodicies to break open our understanding of the past” (16). Ironically, this move requires Dalley to rescue both realism and allegory from their somewhat unfashionable standing.The goal of this project is not only to challenge traditional chronological and ideological frameworks but also to claim for the historical novel the status of history. Where White had aimed to destabilize the legitimacy of traditional historical narratives by pulling the empirical rug out from under their skillfully orchestrated fictions, Dalley grants authority to the traditional historical method and uses it to legitimize the historical novel as capable of delivering objective narrations of past observations and experiences. The category of realism thus becomes important to Dalley as a kind of surrogate for truth or fact. Trading in imaginary events, characters, and conversations, historical novels will not offer entirely factual accounts of the past. By filling in the gaps in the historical record—perhaps to expose the partial nature of the records kept by those in power—these novels offer truths about the meaning of that record. Dalley cites Ann Rigney to capture this point: “The relevant question for the historical novel, as Rigney notes, is thus not whether something is ‘literally true to actuality,’ but whether it is ‘true to its meaning’” (20).Although Dalley does not say so outright, part of his book's argument is to point out that postcolonial historical fictions generate an additional layer of allegorical realism beyond what Lukács saw as the flatly realist novels produced during the nineteenth century in Europe. Nineteenth-century European historical novels, Dalley implies, did not manifest the same sense of urgency in contesting the nature of the past. This may strike Dalley's reader as a strange claim to make about a genre generally regarded as an alternative to the historical narratives produced by empirically oriented historians. Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other early novelists known for writing in the form were certainly interested in challenging the received wisdom on their subjects. Today, such historical novelists as Hilary Mantel and Pat Barker (to take two recent British examples) are certainly no less concerned about how those in power have distorted the historical record. I am not interested in denying the radical changes taking place in the postcolonial iteration of this form, but I do want to call attention to Dalley's tendency to characterize earlier brands of historical realism as flat and seemingly uninteresting usages of historical material that predictably reinforce nationalist or imperialist ideologies and cultural narratives. This brings me to a deeper question concerning Dalley's book: is this an argument about a form and its ongoing evolution or about developments in postcolonialism, for which the historical novel serves as an index of a changing view of historiography? Does the novel, in this respect, demonstrate a before-and-after pattern, before postcolonialism being flat and after being robustly innovative?Dalley reads a sequence of six twenty-first-century postcolonial historical novels: four from Australasia (one apiece from Australia and Tasmania and two from New Zealand) and two from Nigeria. The first pairing, of Kate Grenville's The Secret River with Fiona Kidman's The Captive Wife, explores the questions arising from the very different reception of their novels. The controversy over Grenville's account, which has been attacked as an apology for the violence of colonization, contrasts with the positive reception Kidman's novel has received. Dalley argues that this difference has as much to do with each author's approach to the archive or historical record as with the historical content of her novel. Grenville adopted what seems like a naive approach to the historical record, which became especially evident in interviews about the book. The Captive Wife, by contrast, offers multiple viewpoints of the events in question in order to tell an unflinching story of the violence of settlement from the perspective of one of Kidman's ancestors, but the absence of other perspectives opens it up to the charge that it sympathizes and even justifies the violence perpetrated by her characters. What we think of those arguments aside, Dalley's pairing underscores the fact that Kidman's novel sidesteps such accusations by offering other perspectives within its narrative framework.Part 3 of the book pairs Witi Ihimaera's controversial The Trowenna Sea with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun. Again, Dalley's critical exploration foregrounds the importance of these novels as occasions for debate among academics and public intellectuals. In this way, he calls attention to the real stakes of the historical novel as a shaper of historical knowledge and perceptions. This is also where, in my opinion, feminism, diaspora studies, and other approaches that question the status of the archive, including that followed by Benedict Anderson's highly influential Imagined Communities, might have helped Dalley develop further the theory of history and historiography that informs his study. By insisting on what he considers a more objective account of the historical, Dalley does not consider how these novels often improvise or invent an archive to challenge the status of the historical archive as a record of truth. The status of those archives tends to be the source of the problem in debates over the legitimacy of fictional representations of settlement and colonization.At the same time, the fact that Ihimaera appears to grant the authority of the historical method suggests that Dalley may be onto something. In the controversy that followed the publication of The Trowenna Sea, Ihimaera apologized for “plagiarizing” from the documentary record in sections of the novel rather than citing his borrowings from primary or secondary sources. In so doing, according to Dalley, he “[conceded] that the norms of disciplinary history did constrain him as a historical novelist” (103). He regards Grenville's very different response to the charge of unacknowledged borrowing from historical sources as an indication that the question is hardly settled. Unfortunately, though, he does not support this observation with a fuller analysis of Ihimaera's sourcing strategies and what they say about the status of the archive, the novel's generic tendency to cannibalize other forms of writing, and the balance between the leeway afforded the fiction writer and the obligation to acknowledge historical sources. These questions impinge on Dalley's notion of the “realist imperative” in current discussions of the postcolonial historical novel. He turns instead to an analysis of the content of the novels under consideration.While I find his close readings provocatively attentive to the details of the text, I was disappointed that he dropped rather than developed his interrogation of the relationship between literary realism and historical objectivity and his consideration of why the ethical obligation to acknowledge historical sources does not redound in the other direction, as the obligation of historians to acknowledge when their narratives were first established by the novelists. What does Ihimaera's use of history say about his concept of realism? In other words, I would be as interested in how his novel dealt with the question of historical material as in what Ihimaera said to the press when confronted with accusations of plagiarism. It feels to me as if Dalley leans more toward intentionality, or what Ihimaera claims that he was doing, than toward an analysis of what the novel actually did with history. Indeed, Ihimaera's subsequent comments suggest a discontinuity between the novel and what he has said about his writing process. How could so sophisticated a writer not have thought through his use of borrowed voices? Given that Dalley's own reading of the novel turns on the relationship between mobility and deterritorialization, it strikes me as odd that he does not find those terms useful for thinking about his approach to historical borrowing: Does the historical novelist deterritorialize and reterritorialize archival materials by repurposing them as fiction? What would annotations do to the strategy of narrative reterritorialization?After the chapter on The Trowenna Sea, Dalley leaves Australasia and turns to Anglophone African literature to produce an interesting reading of Adichie's celebrated Half a Yellow Sun. Set in relation to Ihimaera's novel, Half a Yellow Sun affords Dalley the opportunity to broaden the basis of his comparison, as does his chapter that pairs Nigerian novelist Chris Abani's Song for Night with the Australian novel Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish. These comparisons raise the dreaded question of why Dalley considers only Anglophone novels from Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Nigeria. Why not include representative texts from South Africa, India, and other Anglophone postcolonial contexts? It is not that Adichie and Abani are not relevant or congruent here. The question Dalley's selections raise for this reader is why not focus entirely on Australasia, where the author clearly feels most at home? That focus would have allowed him to pursue the question of the archive, historiography, and the role of fiction to a fuller and more satisfactory conclusion. If, alternatively, the turn to Anglophone Africa is an attempt to broaden the comparative basis for a study of the historical novel in the age of postcolonialism, then the reader would like to see how “allegorical realism” manifests in the novels of a greater variety of Anglophone former colonies. In this case, the absence of a substantive discussion of the Indian postcolonial historical novel weighs heavily. One could claim that Salman Rushdie haunts Dalley's book, because his ties to magical realism pose a serious challenge for Dalley's narrative.Undoubtedly, The Postcolonial Historical Novel takes up an important and topical subject. It is almost inevitable that a book this ambitious in scope and far-reaching in its claims should generate as many questions as answers. By focusing on the historical novel, Dalley has identified not only an important thread in the postcolonial novel but also a trend that extends well beyond the postcolonial world. As Perry Anderson noted in a recent London Review of Books essay, the efflorescence of historical fictions in the past quarter century has been remarkable and certainly warrants more critical attention. This points to yet another question that Dalley leaves for future scholars to address: how actually different are the concerns and accompanying techniques of the postcolonial historical novel from those of the historical novel now being written in the former colonial metropole? It seems to me that novelists such as Barker, Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Mitchell are as concerned with the authority of the historical record and the difficulty of recovering the past as any of the novelists in Dalley's study. The Postcolonial Historical Novel is a provocative study that opens up what I hope will be a long and fruitful conversation about a genre that certainly warrants further scholarly attention.