‘The recounting of a life is a cheat’: Unreliable narration and fragmentary memory in historical fiction

Abstract

It is well known that fiction can be used to narrate the lives and experiences of those who have been marginalised within, or by, historical discourse. However, is revealing or recuperating the past the most authentic way to write narratives about those people whom history has forgotten? As writers, how can we use fiction to tell the lives of those people whose stories have effectively been lost, silenced or omitted from public archive and personal recollection? And, more personally, how can we write stories about people in our own past if we have been prohibited from telling them? This paper examines ways in which fiction can illuminate the presence of loss in ways which historical discourse cannot. Drawing on the creative componentof my PhD, as well as from the work of novelist Carol Shields and theorist Nicola King, I will suggest that we can write about the past in ways which prompt readers to reflect upon why certain traumatic or shameful details might be withheld within a fictional text. In my own creative work, ‘The Other Side ofSilence’ (Kon-yu 2009) my protagonists’ refusal to remember the past in a complete or coherent manner suggests that while some suppressed histories cannot ever be told, the effect that they have on the characters can still be clearly shown within the text.