HUNGARIAN STUDIES 15. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2001]

Sándor Hites: Reluctant Supplements: Historical Novel, Historiography, and Historiographical Metafiction

SÁNDOR HITES toricai data, heterogeneity, support for certain political views) that critics tend to celebrate today in a contemporary novel. It is worth emphasizing that didacticism is a feature of historiographical metafiction (Waugh 11). The genre of the histori­cal novel has never been a self-identical, stable and consistent mode of writing, but rather a discourse about its own definition or a discourse considering the pos­sibility of its own existence. The possibility of a revision develops from the cracks in the unfolding of the traditional narratives, from the presence within this very tradition of something that works against its totalizing claims. The traditional strategies of historical representation have the textual skills to relativize or even dismiss its declared ideological determination. The various achievements of historiographical metafiction that concern themselves with Postmodernism have their roots in the pioneering achievement of the historical novels. The historical novels of the Romantic Era developed a clearly recogniz­able ironic attitude toward their ideological investments. To account for this could help us to, as the Romantics did, go beyond our own declarations. Hayden White argues that historical or factual writing is always prefigured by rhetorics as a system of tropes. Ann Rigney argues that mid-nineteenth-century historiography employed rhetorics as a set of devices to serve a will of persuasion. One might add that the frequently emphasized realistic claims of the historical novel are worth reading in a figurative or dialogic way as well. Of course, one should not leave the achievements of Postmodern fiction out of consideration. The definition of historical fiction has "broadened," but it does not mean that it used to be "narrow." New novels obviously increase or rather alter the possibili­ties of a genre, but "new" devices usually prove to be inherent in the tradition they remake, or at least they retrospectively write themselves back into the tradition. It also needs to be recalled that the discourses of the nineteenth-century are far from being monological. The composing and decomposing strategies of the "histo­riographie metafiction" have remarkable traces in the Romantic corpus. The revi­sion rediscovered its own devices in the very origin it had rewritten. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that straight political "messages," emphasized by Elisabeth Wesseling in her recent book as the Postmodern innova­tion of the historical novel, are hardly recognizable in the Hungarian novels of the 1990s. East-Central Europe is perhaps a special case in this regard, for the vulgar­ized political interpretations the Communist Era imposed on literary works have eventually made writers and scholars reluctant to consider texts as expressions of sociopolitical ideas. The politics of historiography or the historical novel can be hardly characterized as a denotation of an (even textual) referent as much as a figurative activity, a politics of poetics, when the ideology preferred by the narra­tive is determined by the linguistic protocol the narrative follows. In the preceding argument, my concern has not been so much to depreciate the achievement of Postmodernism as to draw attention to the Romantic novel. The

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