History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and Past

Abstract

History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and Past. By David W. Price. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 338 pages. Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas (SelfReflexivity, Historical Revisionism, Utopia). By Santiago JuanNavarro. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000. 367 pages. David Price's History Made, History Imagined and Santiago JuanNavarro's Archival Reflections pose similar questions and arrive at similar conclusions, but in so doing, they occupy very different ideological territories and employ different analytic strategies. The differences will tell us as much as the similarities. Thus, a comparison will allow me to consider their respective arguments without, I hope, doing a disservice to either. The questions asked by Professors Price and Juan-Navarro have been asked by a number of critics and theorists over the past two decades. The questions are, essentially, these: how do works of literature reflect historical realities and at the same time (re)create histories and values? How do writers position their texts so as to critique the abuses of the past and at the same time suggest alternatives futures? These questions form the substratum of much postcolonial fiction, of course. Indeed, without them, a text can hardly be said to belong to this amorphous yet recognizable category, for if a shared history can be taken for granted in dominant cultures, it cannot be in postcolonial contexts that are still in the process of defining themselves against the dominant culture. Both of the works under review treat writers who take this premise as a given, and who ask questions about the nature and relations of historical memory and literary narrative. Juan-Navarro focusses on the self-reflexive narrative strategies of the authors he discusses, whereas Price is concerned to uncover a recurring set of ideas that he identifies with Vico and Nietzsche. Let me begin with Juan-Navarro, who engages postmodernist theory and historiography, rather than postcolonial theory as such, placing particular emphasis on the concept of historiographic metafiction. Adopting Linda Hutcheon's well-known term, he provides descriptive restatements of theorists who have developed this sub-genre, among them Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson, Julio Ortega, Garcia Canclini, Jose Oviedo, and Lucien Dallenbach. Hayden White and Michel Foucault are also duly summarized. Juan-Navarro does not attempt to compare or mediate the critical positions of these theorists, or to integrate them into a theory of his own. This is disappointing, since the author foregoes the rare opportunity to weigh U.S. and Latin American writers and theorists in terms of their cultural positioning. For example, he might have wondered how Canclini or Foucault would apply differently to, say, Fuentes or Doctorow, but he does not. Rather, he describes the theories and then applies one or another of them to a given work. Some cultural distinctions are made in the process, but there is a strong undertow pulling all of the texts into a single interpretive current. In this, Archival Reflections reflects one of the practical weakness of postmodernist theory: its globalizing tendencies. Cultural and social comparisons are not foregrounded, despite the author's broad selection of American writers and theories. Juan-Navarro does, however, describe the historical context of each of the novels in question. Chapters are devoted to Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Julio Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. In contrast to what would be a predictable postmodern-List position, the author assumes that the past can be known, and he goes about describing it to his reader. This is useful, for each of the novels is, on its most basic level, a narrative about a particular time and place, and each of these works has important things to say about that historical context. …