Historiographic Metafiction

Parody and the Intertextuality

of History

LINDA HUTCHEON

Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations qu'a interpreter les

choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre sujet: nous ne
faisons que nous entregloser.
-Montaigne
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the
first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration
and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references
to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a
network.
-Foucault

What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually

characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic
intertextuality. In fiction this means that it is usually metafiction that is
equated with the postmodern. Given the scarcity of precise definitions of
this problematic period designation, such an equation is often accepted
without question. What I would like to argue is that, in the interests of
precision and consistency, we must add something else to this definition:
an equally self-conscious dimension of history. My model here is
postmodern architecture, that resolutely parodic recalling of the history of
architectural forms and functions. The theme of the 1980 Venice
Biennale, which introduced postmodernism to the architectural world,
was "The Presence of the Past." The term postmodernism, when used in
fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at
once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of
the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional
historical fiction, I would like to label it "historiographic metafiction."
The category of novel I am thinking of includes One Hundred Years of
Solitude, Ragtime, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and The Name of the
Rose. All of these are popular and familiar novels whose metafictional
self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their implicit claims to
historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least.

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In the wake of recent assaults by literary and philosophical theory on

modernist formalist closure, postmodern American fiction, in particular,
has sought to open itself up to history, to what Edward Said (The World)
calls the "world." But it seems to have found that it can no longer do so in
any innocent way: the certainty of direct reference of the historical novel
or even the nonfictional novel is gone. So is the certainty of self-reference
implied in the Borgesian claim that both literature and the world are
equally fictive realities. The postmodern relationship between fiction and
history is an even more complex one of interaction and mutual
implication. Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within
historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is
a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of
history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic
reworking of the textual past of both the "world" and literature. The
textual incorporation of these intertextual past(s) as a constitutive
structural element of postmodernist fiction functions as a formal marking
of historicity-both literary and "worldly." At first glance it would appear
that it is only its constant ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of
similarity that distinguishes postmodern parody from medieval and
Renaissance imitation (see Greene 17). For Dante, as for E. L.
Doctorow, the texts of literature and those of history are equally fair
game.
Nevertheless, a distinction should be made: "Traditionally, stories were
stolen, as Chaucer stole his; or they were felt to be the common property
of a culture or community ... These notable happenings, imagined or real,
lay outside language the way history itself is supposed to, in a condition
of pure occurrence" (Gass 147). Today, there is a return to the idea of a
common discursive "property" in the embedding of both literary and
historical texts in fiction, but it is a return made problematic by overtly
metafictional assertions of both history and literature as human
constructs, indeed, as human illusions-necessary, but none the less
illusory for all that. The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction
enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers (see
Canary and Kozicki): it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this
is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces-be they literary
or historical.
Clearly, then, what I want to call postmodernism is a paradoxical
cultural phenomenon, and it is also one that operates across many
traditional disciplines. In contemporary theoretical discourse, for instance,
we find puzzling contradictions: those masterful denials of mastery,
totalizing negations of totalization, continuous attest-
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 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

ings of discontinuity. In the postmodern novel the conventions of both fiction

and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and
subverted, asserted and denied. And the double (literary/historical) nature of
this intertextual parody is one of the major means by which this paradoxical
(and defining) nature of postmodernism is textually inscribed. Perhaps one of
the reasons why there has been such heated debate on the definition of
postmodernism recently is that the implications of the doubleness of this
parodic process have not been fully examined. Novels like The Book
ofDaniel or The Public Burning-whatever their complex intertextual
layering-can certainly not be said to eschew history, any more than they can
be said to ignore either their moorings in social reality (see Graff 209) or a
clear political intent (see Eagleton 61). Historiographic metafiction manages
to satisfy such a desire for "worldly" grounding while at the same time
querying the very basis of the authority of that grounding. As David Lodge
has put it, postmodernism short-circuits the gap between text and world (239-
40 ) .
Discussions of postmodernism seem more prone than most to confusing
self-contradictions, again perhaps because of the paradoxical nature of the
subject itself. Charles Newman, for instance, in his provocative book The
Post-Modern Aura, begins by defining postmodern art as a "commentary on
the aesthetic history of whatever genre it adopts" (44). This would, then, be
art which sees history only in aesthetic terms (57). However, when
postulating an American version of postmodernism, he abandons this
metafictional intertextual definition to call American literature a "literature
without primary influences," "a literature which lacks a known parenthood,"
suffering from the "anxiety of non-influence" (87). As we shall see, an
examination of the novels of Toni Morrison,
E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, and others
casts a reasonable doubt on such pronouncements. On the one hand, Newman
wants to argue that postmodernism at large is resolutely parodic; on the other,
he asserts that the American postmodern deliberately puts "distance between
itself and its literary antecedents, an obligatory if occasionally conscience-
stricken break with the past" (172). Newman is not alone in his viewing of
postmodern parody as a form of ironic rupture with the past (see Thiher 214),
but, as in postmodernist architecture, there is always a paradox at the heart of
that "post": irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the
intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm-textually and
hermeneutically-the connection with the past.
When that past is the literary period we now seem to label as
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 LINDA HUTCHEON

modernism, then what is both instated and then subverted is the notion of
the work of art as a closed, self-sufficient, autonomous object deriving its
unity from the formal interrelations of its parts. In its characteristic
attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the
"world," postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this formalistic
view. But this does not necessitate a return to the world of "ordinary
reality," as some have argued
(Kern 216); the "world" in which the text situates itself is the
"world" of discourse, the "world" of texts and intertexts. This "world" has
direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that
empirical reality. It is a contemporary critical truism that realism is really
a set of conventions, that the representation of the real is not the same as
the real itself. What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any
naive realist concept of representation and any equally naive textualist or
formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world. The
postmodern is selfconsciously art "within the archive" (Foucault 92), and
that archive is both historical and literary.
In the light of the work of writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Salman
Rushdie, D. M. Thomas,John Fowles, Umberto Eco, as well as Robert
Coover, E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Ishmael Reed, and
other American novelists, it is hard to see why critics such as Allen
Thiher, for instance, "can think of no such intertextual foundations today"
as those of Dante in Virgil (189)' Are we really in the midst of a crisis of
faith in the "possibility of historical culture" (189)? Have we ever not
been in such a crisis? To parody

is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and

to question it. And this is the postmodern paradox.

The theoretical exploration of the "vast dialogue" (Calinescu, 169)

between and among literatures and histories that configure
earlyism,postmodernism andreworkingheteroglossia-thehas,of thein
part,Bakhtinianbeenmultiplemadenotionsvoicingspossibleof polyphony,ofby
Juliaa text.Kristeva'sOutdialog-of

these ideas she developed a more strictly formalist theory of the

irreducible plurality of texts within and behind any given text, thereby
deflecting the critical focus away from the notion of the subject (here, the
author) to the idea of textual productivity. Kristeva and her colleagues at
Tel Quel in the late sixties and early seventies mounted a collective attack
on the founding subject (alias: the "romantic" cliche of the author) as the
original and originating source of fixed and fetishized meaning in the
text. And, of course, this also put into question the entire notion of the
"text" as an autonomous entity, with immanent meaning.

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 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

In America a similar formalist impulse had provoked a similar attack

much earlier in the form of the New Critical rejection of the "intentional
fallacy" (Wimsatt). Nevertheless, it would seem that even though we can
no longer talk comfortably of authors (and sources and influences), we
still need a critical language in which to discuss those ironic allusions,
those re-contextualized quotations, those double-edged parodies both of
genre and of specific works that proliferate in modernist and
postmodernist texts. This, of course, is where the concept of
intertextuality has proved so useful. As later defined by Roland Barthes
(Image 160) and Michael Riffaterre (142-43), intertextuality replaces the
challenged authortext relationship with one between reader and text, one
that situates the locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse
itself. A literary work can actually no longer be considered original; if it
were, it could have no meaning for its reader. It is only as part
of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance.
Not surprisingly, this theoretical redefining of aesthetic value has
coincided with a change in the kind of art being produced. Postmodernly
parodic composer George Rochberg, in the liner notes to the Nonesuch
recording of his String Quartet no. 3 articulates this change in these terms:
"I have had to abandon the notion of 'originality,' in which the personal
style of the artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of the
one-idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture which seems to have
dominated the esthetics of art in the aoth century; and the received idea
that it is necessary to divorce oneself from the past." In the visual arts too,
the works of Shusaku Arakawa, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselman, and others
have brought about, through parodic intertextuality (both aesthetic and
historical), a real skewing of any "romantic" notions of subjectivity and
creativity.
As in historiographic metafiction, these other art forms parodically cite
the intertexts of both the "world" and art and, in so doing, contest the
boundaries that many would unquestioningly use to separate the two. In
its most extreme formulation, the result of such contesting would be a
"break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts
in a manner which is absolutely
illimitable" (Derrida 185). While postmodernism, as I am defining it here,
is perhaps somewhat less promiscuously extensive, the notion of parody as
 opening the text up, rather than closing it down, is an important one:
among the many things that postmodern in-
tertextuality challenges are both closure and single, centralized meaning. Its
willed and willful provisionality rests largely upon its acceptance of the
inevitable textual infiltration of prior discursive

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LINDA HUTCHEON

practices. Typically contradictory, intertextuality in postmodern art both

provides and undermines context. In Vincent B. Leitch's terms, it "posits
both an uncentered historical enclosure and an abysmal decentered
foundation for language and textuality; in so doing, it exposes all
contextualizations as limited and limiting, arbitrary and confining, self-
serving and authoritarian, theological and political. However
paradoxically formulated, intertextuality offers a liberating determinism"
(162).
It is perhaps clearer now why it has been claimed that to use the term
intertextuality in criticism is not just to avail oneself of a useful conceptual
tool: it also signals a "prise de position, un champ de référence" (Angenot
122). But its usefulness as a theoreticalframework that is both hermeneutic
and formalist is obvious in dealing with historiographic metafiction that
demands of the reader not only the recognition of textualized traces of the
literary and historical past but also the awareness of what has been done-
through irony-to those traces. The reader is forced to acknowledge not
only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both
the value and the limitation of that inescapably discursive form of
knowledge, situated as it is "between presence and absence" (Barilli).
halo Calvina's Marco Polo in Invisible Cities both is and is not the
historical Marco Polo. How can we, today, "know" the Italian explorer?
We can only do so by way of texts-including his own (Il Milione) , from
which Calvino parodically takes his frame tale, his travel plot, and his
characterization (Musarra 141).
Roland Barthes once defined the intertext as "the impossibility of
living outside the infinite text" (Pleasure 36), thereby making
intertextuality the very condition of textuality. Umberto Eco, writing of
his novel The Name of the Rose, claims: "1 discovered what writers have
always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of
other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told" (20).
8
The stories that The Name of the Rose retells are both those of literature
(by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Thomas Mann,
T. S. Eliot, among others) and those of history (medieval chronicles,
religious testimonies). This is the parodically doubled discourse of
postmodernist
intertextuality. However, this is not just a doubly introverted form of
aestheticism: the theoretical implications of this kind of historiographic
metafiction coincide with recent historiographic theory about the nature
of history writing as narrativization (rather than representation) of the
past and about the nature of the archive as the textualized remains of
history (see White, "The Question").
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

In other words, yes, postmodernism manifests a certain introversion, a

self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing itself; but it is
also much more than that. It does not go so far as to "establish an explicit
literal relation with that real world beyond itself," as some have claimed
(Kirernidjian 238). Its relationship to the "worldly" is still on the level of
discourse, but to claim that is to claim quite a lot. After all, we can only
"know" (as opposed to "experience") the world through our narratives
(past and present) of it, or so postmodernism argues. The present, as well
as the past, is always already irremediably textualized for us (Belsey 46),
and the overt intertextuality of historiographic metafiction serves as one of
the textual signals of this postmodern realization.
Readers of a novel like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five do not
have to proceed very far before picking up these signals. The author is
identified on the title page as "a fourth-generation German-American now
living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who,
as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war,
witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, 'The Florence of the
Elbe,' a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel
somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet
Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace." The character,
Kurt Vonnegut, appears in the novel, trying to erase his memories of the
war and of Dresden, the destruction of which he saw from
"Slaughterhouse-Five," where he worked as a POW. The novel itself
opens with: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are
pretty much true" (7). Counterpointed to this historical context, however,
is the (metafictionally marked) Billy Pilgrim, the optometrist who helps
correct defective vision-including his own, though it takes the planet
Tralfamadore to give him his new perspective. Billy's fantasy life acts as
an allegory of the author's own displacements and postponements (i.e., his
other novels) that prevented him from writing about Dresden before this,
and it is the intratexts
of the novel that signal this allegory: Tralfamadore itself is from
Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, Billy's home in Illium is from Player Piano,
characters appear from Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
The intertexts, however, function in similar ways, and their provenience is
again double: there are actual historical intertexts (documentaries on

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Dresden, etc.), mixed with those of historical fiction (Stephen Crane,

Celine). But there are also structurally and thematically connected
allusions: to Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East and to various works of
science fiction. Popular

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and high-art intertexts mingle: Valley of the Dolls meets the poems of
William Blake and Theodore Roethke. All are fair game and all get re-
contextualized in order to challenge the imperialistic (cultural and
political) mentalities that bring about the Dresdens of history. Thomas
Pynchon's V. uses double intertexts in a similarly "loaded" fashion to
formally enact the author's related theme of the entropic destructiveness
of humanity. Stencil's dossier, its fragments of the texts of history, is an
amalgam of literary intertexts, as if to remind us that "there is no one
writable 'truth' about history and experience, only a series of versions: it
always comes to us 'stencillized'" (Tanner 172). And it is always multiple,
like V's identity.
Patricia Waugh notes that metafiction such as Slaughterhouse-Five or
The Public Burning "suggests not only that writing history is a fictional
act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-
model, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating
plots which appear to interact independently of human design" (48-49).
Historiographic metafiction is particularly doubled, like this, in its
inscribing of both historical and literary intertexts. Its specific and
general recollections of the forms and contents of history writing work to
familiarize the unfamiliar through (very familiar) narrative structures (as
Hayden White has argued ["The Historical Text," 49-50]), but its
metafictional selfreflexivity works to render problematic any such
familiarization. And the reason for the sameness is that both real and
imagined worlds come to us through their accounts of them, that is,
through their traces, their texts. The ontological line between historical
past and literature is not effaced (see Thiher 190), but underlined. The
past really did exist, but we can only "know" that past today through its
texts, and therein lies its connection to the literary. If the discipline of
history has lost its privileged status as the purveyor of truth, then so much
the better, according to this kind of modern historiographic theory: the
loss of the illusion of transparency in historical writing is a step toward
intellectual self-awareness that is matched by metafiction's challenges to
the presumed transparency of the language of realist texts.
When its critics attack postmodernism for being what they see as
ahistorical (as do Eagleton, Jameson, and Newman), what is being
referred to as "postrnodern'' suddenly becomes unclear, for surely

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historiographic metafiction, like postmodernist architecture and painting,

is overtly and resolutely historical-though, admittedly, in an ironic and
problematic way that acknowledges that history is not the transparent
record of any sure "truth." Instead, such fiction

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corroborates the views of philosophers of history such as Dominick

LaCapra who argue that "the past arrives in the form of texts and
textualized remainders-memories, reports, published writings, archives,
monuments, and so forth" (128) and that these texts interact with one
another in complex ways. This does not in any way deny the value of
history-writing; it merely redefines the conditions of value in somewhat
less imperialistic terms. Lately, the tradition of narrative history with its
concern "for the short time span, for the individual and the event"
(Braudel 27), has been called into question by the Annales School in
France. But this particular model of narrative history was, of course, also
that of the realist novel. Historiographic metafiction, therefore, represents
a challenging of the (related) conventional forms of fiction and history
through its acknowledgment of their inescapable textuality. As Barthes
once remarked, Bouvard and Pecuchet become the ideal precursors of the
postmodernist writer who "can only imitate a gesture that is always
anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the
ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them"
(Irnage 146).
The formal linking of history and fiction through the common
denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a
reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an
expansion of these. Or, if it is seen as a limitation-restricted to the always
already narrated-this tends to be made into the primary value, as it is in
Lyotard's "pagan vision," wherein no one ever manages to be the first to
narrate anything, to be the origin of even her or his own narrative (78).
Lyotard deliberately sets up this "limitation" as the opposite of what he
calls the capitalist position of the writer as original creator, proprietor, and
entrepreneur of her or his story. Much postmodern writing shares this
implied ideological critique of the assumptions underlying "romantic"
concepts of author and text, and it is parodic intertextuality that is the
major vehicle of that critique.
Perhaps because parody itself has potentially contradictory ideological
implications (as "authorized transgression," it can be seen as both
conservative and revolutionary [Hutcheon 69-83]), it is a perfect mode of
criticism for postmodernism, itself paradoxical in its
conservative installing and then radical contesting of conventions.

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Historiographic metafictions, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One

Hundred Years of Solitude, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drurn, or Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children (which uses both of the former as
intertexts), employ parody not only to restore history and memory in the
face of the distortions of the "history of forgetting" (Thiher 202), but also,
at the same time, to put into question the authority of any act of writing by
locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-
expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single
origin or simple causality.
When linked with satire, as in the work of Vonnegut, V. Vampilov,
Christa Wolf, or Coover, parody can certainly take on more precisely
ideological dimensions. Here, too, however, there is no direct intervention
in the world: this is writing working through other writing, other
textualizations of experience (Said Beginnings 237). In many cases
intertextuality may well be too limited a term to describe this process;
interdiscursivity would perhaps be a more accurate term for the collective
modes of discourse from which the postmodern parodically draws:
literature, visual arts, history, biography, theory, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, sociology, and the list could go on. One of the effects of
this discursive pluralizing is that the (perhaps illusory but once firm and
single) center of both historical and fictive narrative is dispersed. Margins
and edges gain new value. The "ex-centric"-as both off-center and de-
centeredgets attention. That which is "different" is valorized in opposition
both to elitist, alienated "otherness" and also to the uniformizing impulse
of mass culture. And in American postmodernism, the "different" comes
to be defined in particularizing terms such as those of nationality,
ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Intertextual parody of
canonical classics is one mode of reappropriating and reformulating-with
significant changes-the dominant white, male, middle-class, European
culture. It does not reject it, for it cannot. It signals its dependence by its
use of the canon, but asserts its rebellion through ironic abuse of it. As
Edward Said has been arguing recently ("Culture"), there is a relationship
of mutual interdependence between the histories of the dominators and
the dominated.
American fiction since the sixties has been, as described by Malcolm
Bradbury (186), particularly obsessed with its own pastliterary, social, and

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historical. Perhaps this preoccupation is (or was) tied in part to a need to

fmd a particularly American voice within a culturally dominant
Eurocentric tradition (D'haen 216). The United States (like the rest of
North and South America) is a land of immigration. In E. L. Doctorow's
words, "We derive enormously, of course, from Europe, and that's part of
what Ragtime is about: the means by which we began literally, physically
to lift European art and architecture and bring it over here" (in Trenner
58). This is also part of what American historiographic metafiction in
general is "about." Critics have discussed at length the parodic intertexts
of the work of Thomas Pynchon, including Conrad's Heart ofDarkness
(McHale 88) and Proust's first-person confessional form (Patteson 37-38)
in V. In particular, The Crying of Lot 49 has been seen as directly linking
the literary parody ofJacobean drama with the selectivity and subjectivity
of what we deem historical "fact" (Bennett). Here the postmodern parody
operates in much the same way as it did in the literature of the
seventeenth century, and in both Pynchon's novel and the plays he
parodies (John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, John Webster's The White
Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's
Tragedy, among others), the intertextual "received discourse" is firmly
embedded in a social commentary about the loss of relevance of
traditional values in contemporary life (Bennett).
Just as powerful and even more outrageous, perhaps, is the parody of
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in Ishmael Reed's The Terrible Twos,
where political satire and parody meet to attack white
Euro-centered ideologies of domination. Its structure of "A Past
Christmas" and "A Future Christmas" prepares us for its initial
Dickensian invocations-first through metaphor ("Money is as tight as
Scrooge" [4]) and then directly: "Ebenezer Scrooge towers above the
Washington skyline, rubbing his hands and greedily peering over his
spectacles" (4). Scrooge is not a character, but a guiding spirit of 1980
America, one that attends the inauguration of the president that year. The
novel proceeds to update Dickens' tale. However, the rich are still cozy
and comfortable ("Regardless of how high inflation remains, the wealthy
will have any kind of Christmas they desire, a spokesman for Neiman-
Marcus announces"

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[5]); the poor are not. This is the 1980 replay of "Scrooge's winter, 'as
mean as ajunkyard dog" (32).
The "Future Christmas" takes place after monopoly capitalism has
literally captured Christmas following a court decision which has granted
exclusive rights to Santa Claus to one person and one company. One
strand of the complex plot continues the Dickensian intertext: the
American president-a vacuous, alcoholic, ex-(male) model-is reformed by
a visit from St. Nicholas, who takes him on a trip through hell, playing
Virgil to his Dante. There he meets past presidents and other politicians,
whose punishments (as in the Inferno) conform to their crimes. Made a
new man from this experience, the president spends Christmas Day with
his black butler,
John, and John'S crippled grandson. Though unnamed, this Tiny Tim
ironically outsentimentalizes Dickens': he has a leg amputated; he is
black; his parents died in a car accident.
In an attempt to save the nation, the president goes on televi-
sian to announce: "The problems of American society will not go away ... by
invoking Scroogelike attitudes against the poor or saying humbug to the old
and to the underprivileged" (158). But the final echoes of the Dickens
intertext are ultimately ironic: the president is declared unfit to serve (because
of his televised message) and is hospitalized by the business interests which
really run the government. None of Dickens' optimism remains in this bleak
satiric vision of the future. Similarly, in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,
Reed parodically inverts Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" in order to subvert
the authority of social, moral, and literary order. No work of the Western
humanist tradition seems safe from postmodern intertextual citation and
contestation today: in Heller's God Knows even the sacred texts of the Bible
are subject to both validation and demystification.
It is significant that the intertexts ofJohn Barth's LETTERS include not only
the British eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Don Quixote, and other
European works by H. G. Wells, Mann, and Joyce, but also texts by Henry
David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and
James Fenimore Cooper. The specifically American past is as much a part of
defining "difference" for contemporary American postmodernism as is the
European past. The same parodic mix of authority and transgression, use and
abuse characterizes intra-American intertextuality. For instance, Pynchon's V.
and Morrison's Song of Solomon, in different ways, parody both the structures

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 LINDA HUTCHEON

and theme of the recoverability of history in William Faulkner's Absalom,

Absalom!. Similarly, Doctorow's Lives of the Poets (1984) both installs and
subverts Philip Roth's My Life as a Man and Saul Bellow's Herzog (Levine
80).
The parodic references to the earlier, nineteenth-century or classic
American literature are perhaps even more complex, however, since there is a
long (and related) tradition of the interaction of fiction and history in, for
example, Hawthorne's use of the conventions of romance to connect the
historical past and the writing present. And indeed Hawthorne's fiction is a
familiar postmodern intertext: The Blithedale Romance and Barth's The
Floating Opera share the same moral preoccupation with the consequences of
writers taking aesthetic distance from life, but it is the difference in their
structural forms (Barth's novel is more self-consciously metafictional
[Christensen 12]) that points the reader to the real irony of the conjunction of
the ethical issue.
The canonical texts of the American tradition are both undermined and yet
drawn upon, for parody is the paradoxical postmodern way of coming to
terms with the past. Given this, it is not sur-

18
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

prising that contemporary American literature should abound in parodic

echoes of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the great novel of naming and
knowing-concerns that postmodernism obviously shares: Roth's "Call me
Smitty" (The Great American Novel), Vonnegut's "Call me Jonah" (Cot's
Cradle), or Barth's less direct, but more postmodernly provisional, "In a
sense, I am Jacob Horner" (The End of the Road). Novels that deal with
historical and technological fact and/or that recount the pursuit of
seemingly unconquerable Nature are also bound to recall Melville's text.
For instance, in Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon the moon/whale
sought after by Aquarius/Ishmael comes alive in a familiar (but here,
ironic) language that mixes technical concreteness with transcendent
mystery (Sisk).
Somewhat by way of parenthesis, it is worth noting here that, like
historiographic metafiction, the nonfictional novel-whatever its claims to
factual veracity of historical reporting-overtly structures its report on
fictive intertexts: Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test parodies
Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom," and
works by Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Arthur C. Clarke (see
Hellmann 110-13); Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
recalls Moby-Dick, American romances, and the picaresque genre
(Hellmann 82-87); another of the intertexts of Mailer's Of a Fire on the
Moon is The Education of
Henry Adams (Taylor); John Hersey's The Algiers Motel Incident and
Mailer's The Armies ofthe Night both parody John Dos Passos's USA. Of
course a good case might be made for Dos Passos's trilogy itself being an
earlier form of historiographic metafiction in its use and abuse of the
conventions of history, fiction, biography, autobiography, and journalism
(Malmgren 132-42). The fragmented form and the constant play with
reader expectations do indeed begin to subvert the authority of those
conventions, but perhaps in the end there is more resolution of formal and
hermeneutic tensions than would characterize the more open and
contradictory fiction of postmodernism.
Historiographic metafiction, like the nonfictional novel, however, does
turn to the intertexts of history as well as literature. Barth's The Sot-Weed
Factor manages both to debunk and to create the history of Maryland for
its reader through not only the real Ebenezer Cooke's 1708 poem (of the

19
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

same name as the novel) but also the raw historical record of the Archives
of Maryland. From these intertexts, Barth rewrites history, taking
considerable libertysometimes inventing characters and events,
sometimes parodically inverting the tone and mode of his intertexts,
sometimes offering

20
 LINDA HUTCHEON

connections where gaps occur in the historical record (see Holder 598-
99). Thomas Berger's Little Big Man recounts all the major historical
events on the American plains at the end of the nineteenth century (from
the killing of the buffalo and the building of the railway to Custer's last
stand), but the recounting is done by a fictive, 111-year-old character who
both inflates and deflates the historical heroes of the West and the literary
cliches of the Western genre alike-since history and literature share a
tendency to exaggerate in narrating the past.
Berger makes no attempt to hide his intertexts, be they fictional or
historical. The mythic stature of Old Lodge Skins is meant to recall that of
Natty Bumppo-and to parody it (Wylder); the account of his death is taken
almost word for word from John G.
Neilhardt's report of Black Elk's, and Custer's final mad talk is lifted
directly from his My Life on the Plains (Schulz 74-75). Even the fictional
Jack Crabb is defined by his intertexts: the historical Jack Cleybourne and
the fictive John Clayton from Will Henry's No Survivors, both of them
temporally and geographically coextensive with Crabb.
It is not just literature and history, however, that form the discourses of
postmodernism. Everything from comic books and fairy tales to almanacs
and newspapers provide historiographic metafiction with culturally
significant intertexts. In Coover's The Public Burning the history of the
Rosenbergs' execution is mediated by many different textualized forms.
One major form is that of the various media, through which the concept of
the disparity between
"news" and "reality" or "truth" is foregrounded. The New York Times is
shown to constitute the sacred texts of America, the texts that offer
"orderly and reasonable" versions of experience, but whose apparent
objectivity conceals a Hegelian "idealism which mistakes its own
language for reality" (Mazurek 34). And one of the central intertexts for
the portrayal of Richard Nixon in the novel is his famous televised
Checkers speech, the tone, metaphors, and ideology of which provide
Coover with the rhetoric and character of his fictionalized Nixon.
Historiographic metafiction appears willing to draw upon any
signifying practices it can find operative in a society. It wants to challenge
those discourses and yet to milk them for all they are worth. In Pynchon's
fiction, for instance, this kind of contradictory subversive inscribing is

21
 LINDA HUTCHEON

often carried to an extreme: "Documentation, obsessional systems, the

languages of popular culture, of advertising: hundreds of systems compete
with each other, resisting assimilation to anyone received paradigm"
(Waugh 39). Perhaps.

22
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

But Pynchon's intertextually overdetermined, discursively overloaded

fictions both parody and enact the tendency of all discourses to create
systems and structures. The plots of such narratives become other kinds
of plots, that is, conspiracies that invoke terror in those subject (as we all
are) to the power of pattern. Many have commented upon this paranoia in
the works of contemporary American writers, but few have noted the
paradoxical nature of this particularly postmodern fear and loathing: the
terror of totalizing plotting is inscribed within texts characterized by
nothing if not by overplotting and overdetermined intertextual self-
reference. The text itself becomes the ultimately closed, self-referring
system.
Perhaps this contradictory attractionlrepulsion to structure and pattern
explains the predominance of the parodic use of certain familiar and
overtly conventionally plotted forms in American fiction, for instance,
that of the Western: Little Big Man, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The
Sot-Weed Factor, Welcome to Hard Times, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It
has also been suggested that "the one thing the Western is always about is
America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past" (French 24). The
ironic intertextual use of the Western is not, as some have claimed, a form
of "Temporal Escape"
(Steinberg I 27), but rather a coming to terms with the existing traditions
of earlier historical and literary articulations of Americanness. As such,
obviously, parody can be used to satiric ends. Doctorow's Welcome to
Hard Times recalls Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" in its portrayal of
the power of money, greed, and force on the frontier: through
intertextuality it is suggested that some noble myths have capitalistic
exploitation at their core (Gross 133). In parodically inverting the
conventions of the Western, Doctorow here presents a nature that is not a
redemptive wilderness and pioneers who are less hardworking survivors
than petty entrepreneurs. He forces us to rethink and perhaps reinterpret
history, and he does so mainly through his narrator, Blue, who is caught
in the dilemma of whether we make history or history makes us. To
underline the intertextual intertwining of discourses, he writes his story in
the ledger book where the town records are also kept (see
Levine 27-30).
Ishmael Reed's parody of the Western in YellowBack Radio Broke-

23
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

Down is even more ideologically "loaded." Loop Garoo Kid is both the
ironically black cowboy hero and a parody of the Haitian Congo spirit
Bacca Loupgerow (Byerman 222). The genre's traditional assumptions of
the long (good) hero fighting lawless evil and corruption are here inverted
as the demonic, anarchic cowboy must combat the repression and
corruption of the very forces of

24
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

law and order. Reed uses other generic parodies to similar critical effect.
In The Free-Lance Pallbearers he transcodes the American success-story
(Horatio Alger) plot into scatalogical terms to underline his theme of
human waste. In Mumbo Jumbo, Papa LaBas parodies the American
detective in his climactic unveiling of the history of the motives behind
the crime-but here the crime is aboriginal and the motives go back to
prehistory and myth. The detective tale's plotting, with its reliance on
rationality, becomes another plot, another oppressive, ordering pattern.
Reed's fiction clearly asserts not just a critical American "difference"
but also a racial one. His parodic mixing of levels and kinds of discourse
challenges any notion of the "different" as either coherent and monolithic
or original. It draws on both the black and white literary and historical
narrative traditions, rewriting Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and
Ralph Ellison as easily as Plato or T. S. Eliot (see McConnell 145; Gates
314), while also drawing on the multiple possibilities opened up by the
folk tradition. Implicitly opposing community and heterogeneous voicings
to single, fixed, homogenizing identity, these folk materials are
"historical, changing, disreputable, and performative" (Byerman 4)-a
perfect postmodernist vehicle for a challenge to the universal, eternal,
ahistorical "natural."
Reed's Flight to Canada "signifies upon" or parodies the historical and
literary versions of the slave narrative-as written by both blacks and
whites (i.e., Uncle Tom's Cabin). As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has shown at
great length, Mumbo Jumbo is an extended and multiple parodic polemic,
and one of its major intertexts comes from a poem by Reed, itself a
parodic response to the epilogue to Ellison's Invisible Man, which asserts
that men [sic] are different, that "all life is divided," and that such division
is healthy. Reed replies in "Dualism: in ralph ellison's invisible man"
(Conjure 50):

i am outside of history,
i wish i had some
peanuts, it looks
hungry there in its
cage.
i am inside of

25
 LINDA HUTCHEON

history. its
hungrier than i that.

Here Reed is obviously serious, as he always is, beneath his parodic play.
It is this seriousness that critics have frequently been blind to when they
accuse postmodernism of being ironic-and therefore trivial. The
assumption seems to be that authenticity of experience and expression are
somehow incompatible with double-voicing and/or humor. This view
seems to be shared, not only by Marxist critics (Jameson; Eagleton), but
by some feminist critics: Elaine Showalter seems to see Virginia Woolf's
parody in A Room of One's Own as "teasing, sly, elusive" (284). And yet it
is feminist writers, along with blacks, who have used ironic intertextuality
to such powerful ends-both ideologically and aesthetically (if the two
could, in fact, be so easily separated). Parody for them is more than just a
key strategy through which "feminine duplicity" is revealed (Gilbert and
Gubar 80), though it is one of the major ways in which women both use
and abuse, set up and then challenge male traditions in art. The link
between gender and genre is clear in Orlando's parodic play with
biographical conventions, and Monique Wittig has re-en-gendered the
male epic (Les Guerilleresi and the patriarchal! filiative Bildungsroman (in
L'Opoponax).
In fact, the Bildungsroman has been a most obvious and popular parodic
model. Marge Piercy's Small Changes inverts the male narrative pattern of
education and adventure to offer a radical feminist escape from (rather
than integration into) the patriarchal state (see Hansen 215-16). Toni
Morrison's Song of Solomon uses a traditional male protagonist but
parodically inverts the usual focus on the individual in the world to make
us consider the community and the family in a new light (Wagner 200-1).
In a similar way, Alice Walker calls upon ironic versions of familiar fairy
tales in The Color Purple: Snow White, the Ugly Duckling, and Sleeping
Beauty. But the significance of the parodies is not clear until the reader
notices the gender and race reversal effected by her irony: the world in
which she lives happily ever after is a female and black one (see Byerman
161).
The ex-centric in America is not just a matter of gender or race or
nationality, but also one of class, for the fifty United States do not really
constitute an economic and social monolith. Even within black feminist
novels, for instance, the issue of class enters. With intertextual echoes of

26
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

Ike McCaslin in Faulkner's "The Bear," Milkman in Song of Solomon must

be stripped of the physical symbols of the dominant white culture and
submit to a trial by endurance in order to be accepted. The reason? The
blacks in Shalimar perceive the class issue beneath the racial one. They
know that "he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up
in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers" (269). And
in the same novel, the petit bourgeois Ruth, the doctor's daughter, scorns

27
 LINDA HUTCHEON

her nouveau-riche husband. In Doctorow's Ragtime the issues of ethnicity

(Tateh) and race (Coalhouse) both merge with that of class. In Loon Lake
art itself is brought into the equation. Joe feels that it is his social
background that prevents his full appreciation of Warren Penfield's
poetry: "How could I have been listening with the attention such beautiful
words demanded, people from my world didn't talk with such
embellishment such scrollwork" (85). Readers may be tempted to equate
grammar with class until they notice that Penfield's poetry often lacks
punctuation.
Doctorow's fiction, like Reed's, reveals the kind of powerful impact, on
both a formal and an ideological level, that parodic intertextuality can
have. Under enemy fire in 1918, Loon Lake's Warren Penfield, a signaler
in the signal corps, sends-not the message desired by his commander, but-
the first few lines of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood." The ironic appropriateness of its
themes of past glory and present reality makes Doctorow's point about
war better than any didactic statement could have. This novel presents us
with all the kinds of intertextual parody that we have seen in American
fiction in general: of genre, of the European tradition, of American
canonical works (classic and modern), of the texts of popular culture and
of history. On the level of genre, Joe is and is not the picaresque hero,
both in his adventures on the road and in his narration of them: he usually
narrates in the third person when recounting his past life, but often the
first-person voice interferes.
Specifically British intertexts abound in the novel, from the
Wordsworthian signal message to a parody of D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers: like Paul Morel, Warren Penfield grows up in a coal-
mining community with a mother who feels he is special, "a rare soul, a
finer being" (38). Doctorow demystifies and ironizes Lawrence's serious
idealization by making his poet a clumsy, awkward man. And, as with
Morel, at the end of the novel it is not clear whether he is, in fact, a real
artist or not. The opening of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man is recalled in Loon Lake's early passages about the infant's relations
both to his body and to language. But the parodic element enters when we
acknowledge differences: unlike Stephen Dedalus, this child recalls no
names and is alone. He cannot place himself in his family, much less his

28
 LINDA HUTCHEON

universe. Yet both boys will end up as poets. Or will they? No intertext
used by Doctorow is without its cutting edge. His loon may indeed recall
Keats's nightingale, but the cliche of "crazy as a loon" is never far in the
background.

29
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

One of the protagonists, Joseph Korzeniowski, gives up his name to

become the nominal son of F. W. Bennett. The use of Joseph Conrad's
original name here is, of course, hardly accidental in a novel about
identity and writing. But Joe hails from Paterson, New
Jersey, a place that has other literary associations for Americans. Places, in
fact, resound with intertextual echoes in Loon Lake. In American literature
lakes tend to be symbols of the purity of nature: Cooper's Lake
Glimmerglass, Thoreau's Walden (Levine 66), but here they stand for
corruption and, above all, economic commodity. Fittingly, this
interpretation is prompted by another intertext: the Bennett estate
unavoidably suggests Gatsby's, just as the young, indigentJoe with his
dream of a woman follows the trail of the same self-made, self-named
American literary hero.
But it is not only the literary canon that is drawn upon in this novel. In
fact, the entire portrait of 1930S America is developed
from the popular culture of the period: Frank Capra comedies, gangster
films, strike novels, James M. Cain's melodramas (see Levine 67). The
significance of this is both literary and historical: the novel actually enacts
the realization that what we "know" of the past derives from the
discourses of that past. This is not documentary realism (if that were even
possible); it is a novel about our understanding or our picture of the past,
our discourse about the thirties. I think this is what Doctorow meant when
he said, in an interview, about Ragtime, that he could not "accept the
distinction between reality and books" (in Trenner 42). For him there is no
neat dividing line between the texts of history and literature, and so he
feels free to draw on both. The question of originality obviously has a
different meaning within this postmodern theory of writing.
The focus of that novel, Ragtime, is America in 1902: Teddy
Roosevelt's presidency, Winslow Homer's painting, Houdini's fame,

J. P. Morgan's money, news of cubism in Paris. But the intertexts of

history double up with those of literature, especially Heinrich von Kleist's
"Michael Kohlhaas" and Dos Passos's USA. Doctorow himself has pointed
critics to the Kleist text (in Trenner 39) and much work has been done
already linking the two (Levine 56; Foley 166, 176-77n; Ditsky). Briefly,
the story of Coalhouse Walker has many parallels with that of Michael
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

Kohl haas (beginning with the naming of the protagonist). In Kleist's tale,
Kohlhaas is a medieval horse dealer who refuses to pay an unjust fine to
Wenzel von Tronka's servant and so loses his beautiful horses. Doctorow's
Coalhouse faces similar injustices at the hands of Willie Conklin, but the

21
 LINDA HUTCHEON

horses have been replaced by his new model T. Failing to obtain legal redress
from the Elector of Saxony, Kohlhaas's wife-like Coalhouse's-attempts to
intervene and is killed in a manner which
Doctorow again updates but basically retains. The strongly implied
similarities between the corrupt feudal society and the equally corrupt and
unstable modern one are not lost on the reader. In the German novella the
hero leads a rebel army and, though his horses are returned, he is executed.
Doctorow's novel ironically transcodes this plot into American turn-of-the-
century terms, complementing it with echoes of the climax of another
intertext, George Milburn's Catalogue. In all, we are dealing with people who
cannot find justice in a society that pretends to be just. In both "Michael
Kohlhaas" and Ragtime historical characters mix with fictional ones: the hero
meets Martin Luther in the one and Booker T. Washington in the other. But in
neither, I would argue, does this imply any overvaluing of the fictional (see
Foley 166). It is the narrativity and the textuality of our knowledge of the past
that are being stressed; it is not a question of privileging the fictive or the
historical.
Again, many critics have teased out the connections between
Ragtime and Dos Passos's USA (Foley; Seelye; Levine). The echoes are
thematic (the Lawrence textile strike, the San Diego free speech fight,
portraits of events and personages such as the Mexican Revolution and Red
Emma), formal (fiction mixing with history; Boy! Camera Eye naively
recording events), and ideological (a critique of American capitalism of the
same period). But the same critics have been careful to acknowledge serious
differences, ones that, I
would argue, the very intertextual echoes themselves force us to consider.
Doctorow does not share his predecessor's trust in the objective presentation
of history, and it is his ironic intermingling of the factual and the fictive and
his deliberate anachronisms that underline this mistrust. As Barbara Foley
notes, USA implies that historical reality is "knowable, coherent, significant,
and inherently moving" (171). Doctorow, however, appears to feel, on the one
hand, that fiction is as well, and, on the other, that both need questioning in
regard to these assumptions. Narrativized history, like fiction, reshapes any
material (in this case, the past) in the light of present issues, and this
interpretive process is precisely what this kind of historiographic metafiction
calls to our attention: "Walker's meeting with Booker T. Washington, for
instance, echoes the contemporary debate between integrationists and black

32
 LINDA HUTCHEON

separatists. Similarly, Henry Ford is described as the father of mass society

and Evelyn Nesbit is depicted as the first goddess of mass culture" (Levine
55).

33
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

The ideological as well as epistemological implications of intertextuality

are even clearer in Doctorow's earlier novel, The Book of Daniel. Here, too, we
find the same range of kinds of parodic intertexts. The title cannot avoid
pointing us to its biblical namesake: the alienation of modern Jews
recapitulates their ancestor's fate (see Stark). The first epigraph is from Daniel
3: 4 and concerns the king's call for all to worship the "golden image" or be
cast in the "burning and fiery furnace." This sets up the fate of those who
challenge the new golden image of modern capitalism, and the Jews in this
tale will not survive in the cold war climate of anti-
Semitic and anticommunist suspicion. The king who sentenced the biblical
Daniel's brothers to that furnace has become here the more impersonal state,
which sentences this Daniel's parents to the electric chair. The Babylonian
furnace image is also picked up in the Isaacsons' apartment building's furnace
and its outcast black attendant. (The Nazi ovens-which do not have to be
mentioned
directly-are clearly part of the historical intertext.)
But the intertextual uses of the biblical Book of Daniel are not without
their ironies, too. Doctorow's Daniel calls his namesake "a Beacon of Faith in
a Time of Persecution" (15). The irony is twofold: the present-day Daniel both
persecutes his own wife and child and seeks for faith-desperately. The biblical
Daniel is also a marginalized personage, a "minor if not totally apocryphal
figure" (21), a Jew in difficult times. He is not an actor in history so much as
an interpreter (with God's help) of the dreams of others who remains confused
about his own. Such is the model of the writer for Doctorow's Daniel, who
also tries to list "mysteries" and then examine them (zfiff.) and who, as a
survivor, is haunted by nightmares he cannot interpret. The result of the two
Daniels' writing is also ironically similar. The modern writer calls the biblical
text one "full of enigmas," a mixture of familiar stories and "weird dreams
and visions" (15), a disordered text with none of the closure of revelation or
truth. So, too, is Doctorow's Book ofDaniel, in its generic mixing of journal
form, history, thesis, and fiction. Both are works about the act of interpreting-
and then judging. The narrative voices in both move from impersonally
omniscient third person to personally provisional first person, but the
customary authority of the biblical omniscience is ironized into the modern
Daniel's futile attempts at distance and self-mastery.
When their parents were first arrested the Isaacson children were informed
of their fate by Williams, that demonic black tender of the furnace in the

34
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

basement. The text then cites a Paul Robeson song: "Didn't my Lord deliver
Daniel?" (143). But the rhetorical

35
 LINDA HUTCHEON

question of the song is rendered ironic by its immediate context and our
knowledge of the ultimate destiny of the parents. Robeson's rally, of
course, had offered the young Daniel an important insight into his own
father's (Paul's) beliefs and principles. The multiple and complex echoing
points to the different possible functions of intertextuality in
historiographic metafiction, for it can both thematically and formally
reinforce the text's message, or it can ironically undercut any pretensions
to borrowed authority, certainty, or legitimacy. "Daniel's Book" (318)
actually ends as it began, self-conscious about being "written in the book"
(319). Its final words are of closure sous rature in a way, because they are
not its own, but those of its biblical namesake: "for the words are closed up
and sealed till the time of the end" (319). The two songs of lamentation and
prophecy (Levine 49) come to an end, as their words are opened up by
our act of reading.
In a similar sense, the Isaacsons' fate "opens up" the Rosenbergs' case
once again. Here the intertexts, for the reader, are the many books written
(before and after the novel) on that incident of recent American history,
including the one by the Rosenberg children. Time has not resolved the
doubts and questions that surround this case even today. Analysts of all
ideological persuasions line up to "prove" every possible interpretation.
These range from the view that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of a
specific (or general) anti-Semitic (or even Jewish) plot to the view that
Julius Rosenberg can only be done proper justice by history if we do
accept his identity as a conscientious Soviet spy, with his wife's devotion
and support. What many seem to see in the trial and its outcome are the
social and ideological determinations of so-called universal, objective
justice. It is this that Doctorow enacts in his Daniel's tortured
investigation of his "family truth." In Althusserian terms, both the
Repressive and the Ideological State Apparatuses conspire to condemn the
Isaacsons, and, by implication, perhaps, the Rosenbergs. The intertextual
voices of official historical texts and Karl Marx's writings playoff against
each other in this novel with ironic and doubly undercutting force.
Doctorow himself compared the Isaacson/Rosenberg paralleling to that
of Crusoe/Selkirk in Defoe (in Trenner 46), and critics have also noted the
intertextual parallels between this novel and Hamlet (and through it to
Freud): the analytic intellectual trying to deal with emotional and political

36
 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

realities connected to the murder of a parent; the pressure of the past upon
the present; the textual selfreflexivity (Knapp). Significantly, Doctorow's
version is a postrnodern, parodic one because the villain is not one known
individual but the u.s. government and judiciary, perhaps even all of
American society. And it is the presence of a major cultural intertext that
underlines this difference within the novel: Disneyland becomes the
incarnation of a debased intertextuality, one that denies the historicity of
the past. Disneyland is offered as a manipulative, consumerist
transgression of the boundaries of art and life, of past and present. But, in
itself, it is not a critical and parodic transgression that might provoke
thought; it is intended for instant consumption as a spectacle void of
historical and aesthetic significance.It tames the past into the present. And
it is the past of both literature and history that is being trivialized and
recuperated: "The life and lifestyle of slave-trading America on the
Mississippi River in the i qth century is compressed into a technologically
faithful steamboat ride of five or ten minutes on an HO-scale river. The
intermediary between us and this actual historical experience, the writer
Mark Twain, author of Life on the Mississippi, is now no more than the
name of the boat" (304). Disneyland's ideological reduction comes at the
expense of the complexity and diversity of American society: Daniel
notices that there are no hippies, no Hispanics, and certainly no blacks in
this fantasy America.
Doctorow, of course, is by no means the only American writer to use
intertextuality so powerfully. In The Sot-Weed Factor Barth both uses and
subverts the conventions and implications of the eighteenth-century
novel, with its ordered, coherent world vision, and in so doing sets up a
parodic inversion of other intertexts-the cultural cliche, for instance, of
the virginal wilderness, which instead becomes a place of vice, treachery,
and the pox. Here innocence begins to look more like ignorance as
Jefferson's America reveals its hidden connections with Eisenhower's.
Such a critique goes beyond an urge to "mythopoetize" experience in the
face of the loss of traditional values (see Schulz 88-89). Far from being
just another form of aesthetic introversion, parodic intertextuality works
to force us to look again at the connections between art and the "world."
Any simple mimesis is replaced by a problematized and complex set of

37
 LINDA HUTCHEON

interrelations at the level of discourse-that is, at the level of the way we

talk about experience, literary or histori-
cal, present or past. The fact is that, in practice, intertexts unavoidably
call up contexts: social and political, among others. The "double
contextualizability" (Schmidt) of intertexts forces us not only to double
our vision, but to look beyond the centers to the margins, the edges, the
ex-centric.
This gaze reveals intertextual parody crossing genre boundaries without
reserve: Milan Kundera's play Jacques and His Master is sub-

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titled An Homage to Diderot in Three Acts and represents what the author
calls "an encounter of two writers but also of two centuries. And of the
novel and the theater" (10). American writer Susan
Daitch's recent novel L.C. offers an even more complex generic
interaction that is directly tied to its dense intertextuality. The core of the
novel's narrative is the journal of a (fictive) woman, Lucienne Crozier,
witness to the (real) 1848 revolution in Paris. The first of two modern
frames for this journal is by Willa Rehnfield, its first translator. Her
"Introduction" reminds us of the contradiction of the year 1848 in terms of
two symbolic intertexts: Wuthering Heights and the Communist
Manifesto, both published that year. And these are indeed the
contradictions of the journal (at least as translated by Rehnfield):
Lucienne has strong socialist politics but is rendered ineffective by her
marginalization (by the Left) and her melodramatic dying of tuberculosis,
all but abandoned by her lover in Algiers. Rehnfield sees Lucienne as
formed by "Marxism and fluff" (2)-that is, the feuilletons of the day. But,
in fact, the journal reveals her critique of that popular literary form as
being unfaithful to the social and economic realities of real life, despite its
surface realism of language (136-37). Is this a radicalized Emma Bovary?
In fact, this question is raised by the text itself: "Madame Lucienne
Crozier was doomed from the day she married" (207). So, of course, was
Madame Bovary, as the title of the novel constantly reminds us. But
Lucienne is a parodic inversion of Emma. Though they share a hatred for
the provinces, their extramarital affairs and their reading, mutually
motivated in both cases, lead them in opposite directions: Emma into
fantasy and rejection of responsibility, and Lucienne into political action.
In the text there is also an editorial attempt-by means of one word of
slang-to link Madame Bovary to Marx, through his daughter Eleanor's
translation of the novel (124). The clearest political connection, however,
is to the journal's second editor and translator, who has taken the
pseudonym Jane Amme. This surname is obviously Emma backwards, but
this is where the intertextual echoes begin to proliferate: Emma Bovary is
joined by Emma Goldman and Jane Austen's Emma. Jane
Eyre is also not far in the background when a footnote refers (with
deliberate modern critical echoes, too) to "the mad woman in the attic, real
or theoretical" (lg8n). This frame figure defines herself as "the sort Jane

39
 LINDA HUTCHEON

Austen's characters would have called 'a most agreeable and obliging
young lady'" (246), at least until her feminist radicalization at the hands of
both the sexist male New Left at Berkeley in 1968 and the rapist who
attacks her. Rejecting (as Lucienne does as well-at least in Amme's
translation) the "mute role of an automatic participant" (246), she bombs
the home of the capitalist "global rapist" who was also her sexual attacker.
She writes her story, rejecting muteness for herself and for the other
women writers whose intertexts are woven into the fabric of her text.
Lucienne's own journal uses visual art in much the same way. Daumier's
satiric works against women enrage her, as does the stand of Delacroix,
her lover, against the political reality outside his window: he prefers to
paint flowers and compliant women-with his back to that window.
Contemporary Latin American fiction has also turned to art forms other
than literature or history and has thereby forced us to broaden what we
must consider as intertexts. The various "films" described by Molina in
Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman are, on one level, only more
verbal narratives; on another level, they are parodic plays with cinematic
genres (horror movie, war propaganda, romantic melodrama) that
politicize the apolitical (or repoliticize the propagandistic) in terms of
gender, sexual preference, and ideology. The English (only) title of Alejo
Carpentier's novel Explosion in a Cathedral refers to a real painting within
the noveland in reality (by Monsu Desiderio). As Gabriel Saad has shown,
the descriptions of Madrid at the end of the novel are, in fact, quite
literally descriptions of specific works by Coya, the ones of the second
and third of May 1808 and the "Disasters of War" series. Carpentier uses a
double intertext here, and the historical one is activated through the
aesthetic one: those works represent the Madrid uprising which went on to
spark the Spanish and Latin American wars of independence. In other
words, there is an external historical dimension as well as an internal
novelistic one to the intertextual reference.
But we do not have to go this far from home to be confronted with
intertextual echoing. Many rock videos have tried to recall a filmic or
television tradition in their form (Queen's "Radio Gaga" cites Fritz Lang's
Metropolis) and settings (Manhattan Transfer uses the I Love Lucy living-
room set in their videos), but the parodic edge that might provoke some
critical perspective seems generally to be missing here. In art galleries,

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 HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

though, we can find works such as Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus ofRags

and Orchestra ofRags, which do suggest ironic critique. Pistoletto uses real
rags, the end product of consumption: art represents the detritus of culture
within the consumer ethic. His mica reproduction of a classical Venus
may parodically represent the static, "universal" principle of aesthetic
beauty, but here it faces (and is blocked by) a large pile of those rags.
While many have argued that all paintings are intertextually

41
 LINDA HUTCHEON

connected to other paintings (see Steiner), postmodern ones seem more

tendentiously ironic in their interrelations. Even music, considered by most to
be the least representational of the arts, is being interpreted these days in
terms of the intertextual linking of the past to the present, as an analogue of
the necessary linking of artistic form and human memory (Morgan 51).
Postmodernism is less a period than a poetics or an ideology. It clearly
attempts to combat what has come to be seen as modernism's hermetic, elitist
isolationism that separated art from the "world," literature from history. But it
often does so by using the very techniques of modernist aestheticism against
themselves. The autonomy of art is maintained; metafictional self-reflexivity
even underlines it. But within this seemingly introverted intertextuality
another dimension is added through the ironic inversions of parody: art's
critical relation to the "world" of discourseand beyond that to society and
politics. History and literature provide the intertexts in the novels examined
here, but there is no question of a hierarchy, implied or otherwise. They are
both part of the signifying systems of our culture. They both make and make
sense of our world. This is one of the lessons of that most didactic of
postmodern forms: historiographic metafiction.

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