Postmodern Rats in the Ranks: The Novelist and the Historian as Raiders of the Colonial Archive

Abstract

Some of us have lived through it, are living through it. It is not an exercise in historiography alone, and therefore presents problems beyond that of traditional historiography.1IN recent years, creating postcolonial literary fiction has become fraught beyond, and adjacent to, navigating narrative depictions of Indigenous subject-matter. I am speaking here of the well-mediated and aforementioned phenomenon of the 'history wars', which initially saw infighting between groups of largely white historians over the veracity of archival statistics in relation to the probable genocide of Indigenous peoples.2 This chapter sets this phenomenon in context in order to analyse the offshoot of antagonism between novelists and historians. This arose as a sub-set of a broader ideological 'Culture Wať that was variously inflamed by left and right political factions. The raiding of colonial archives by white novelists has caused consternation among historians, resulting in a distancing of history from literature and solidification of disciplinary boundaries. Such creative pilfering has provoked more contestation than at any other time in Australian 'history.Here I examine in detail the relevant commentaries, historicizing these against the cultural and political moment that produced the 'history wars'. This analysis will help to reveal the distinct ideological differences that attend novelists and historians writing for or against the inheritances of colonial culture. In so doing, I aim also to gain insight into the vociferously negative reception of historical novels that has occurred in recent years. Certain prominent historians (Inga Clendinnen and John Hirst among them) have spoken out against the purportedly muddy poetic truths of historical fiction, as evoked in Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005). I consider that their positions were a betrayal of historians' recent embrace of postmodernist narrative techniques and frameworks, and I show how their statements often manifested a denial of the shared narrative techniques at the disposal of both disciplines - history and literature. A concluding examination of the ways in which Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, and Kim Scott seek to imaginatively recuperate colonial sources suggests the important role postcolonial fiction plays in evoking and telling the past. This chapter, finally, advocates for the important role of the novelist as 'historiographic fool' in the colonial archive.The Trouble with History: Scaling the ArchiveThe late Greg Dening has written that the first realization that the past belongs to those on whom it impinges, rather than to those who have the skill to discover it, was felt by the history camp as a kick in the stomach in the 1990s.3 In colonial Australia, he observes, the salutary lessons of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth took time to digest. As Dening records,In a world of victims of colonisation, he [Fanon] wrote, there are no innocents. No-one can mediate between the dispossessed living and the voiceless dead. Suddenly Strangers felt intruders writing about the victimised cultures of our first peoples. At conferences and seminars, indigenous scholars attacked us. How could know their past? they asked. How could speak for them? (45)These were hard times, Dening notes, and we each had to give our own answer (45). Dening believed that he could not give life to the dead or justice to the victims in the past. But he nevertheless believed that he could change history:The function of my history is not just to understand the world. It is also to change it. If my history by story or reflection disturbs the moral lethargy of the present, then it fulfils a need. I haven't silenced anyone's voice by adding mine. (46)Despite the mildly defensive, unprovable aspect of this last sentence, Dening^s sentiments stress engagement with the archive rather than disengagement, but also stress engagement with living Indigenous Australians. …