NOVEL
Novels
My
article ‘Winging Historical Writing’ came in the wake of announcement of
Eleanor Catton having won the Booker last year for her historical novel ‘The
Luminaries’. Before that, we recounted
the success of Hilary Mantel winning the title for same genre of writing. What
is it about historical novels that the literary world is churning out so many
in different parts of the world? Myriad writers are revisiting or recreating many
periods of history. Epics and Classics from
antiquity are a favorite segment of the reconceptualization process. ‘Linda
Hutcheon’s ‘Poetics of Postmodernism’ studies this very current cultural phenomenon in postmodern
writing that exists; is attracting much public
debate, and so deserves critical attention. She illuminates the paradoxes which
come into play when a writer sets out to juxtapose his aesthetic autonomy, and
self-reflexivity with the historical, social and political world. This study is an attempt to see what happens
when culture is challenged from within: challenged or questioned or contested,
but not imploded. Privileging the novel
genre, and one form in particular, a form that she calls “historiographic
metafiction ”. Those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely
self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and
personages:’ Grass’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude, Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children, Gregory’s Plantegenet
series, Atwood’s Penelopiad…..
Phillipa Gregory’s Plantegenet
series is five books strong and followed by ten million readers, who are
completely hooked after the enrapturing ten-episode BBC drama series on her
first book ‘The White Queen.’ She has
infused passionate and independent lives into women characters of the
Plantegenet dynasty, marked in history by ‘War of the Roses’. A time in English
history before the Tudor’s, also known as the three decade long Cousin’s War
between the two houses of the Plantegenet dynasty, the House of York and the
House of Lancaster. Women who just appeared as names on family trees, or
footnotes to the reigns of powerful kings have been portrayed as strong women
unto themselves, who pursued alliances, created rebellions, joined battles, and
became Queens of England or ambitious mothers who made the impossible possible
and with a killer instinct in the pursuit of power and swerving loyalties to
the crown, got their sons to become kings. Powerful women
whom chroniclers of history may have
projected as brood mares, or diplomatic currencies , sworn to their saintly
vows of being good model wives and self sacrificing mothers. But Gregory
enumerates character sketches of women personalities made of
sterner stuff which propelled them to rule, that which could not be
achieved aboveboard could then be possessed
using dastardly means, and scheming manipulations. Elizabeth Woodville a
commoner who marries King Edward IV against all norms, bears him a dozen
children, acquires estates, marriages and titles for her ten siblings. Inspite of the imprisonment of her sons ‘The
Princes in the Tower’, she makes sure her daughter, Elizabeth of York becomes
the Queen of England. Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, grandmother
of Henry VIII (the legendery Tudor King who went against the church to
legitimize his six marriages), plotted
the Buckingham Rebellion, then known as the Beaufort Rebellion, which was the
first step towards the ultimate defeat of Richard III, and the crowning of her
son Henry VII.
Margaret
Atwood in ‘The Penelopiad’ reworks the Odyssey and gives space and
voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and
circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing. Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married
to the eldest Pandava brother only. She
questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of
women. Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man
Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain
episodes in the life of her son, shorn
of celestial powers that myth has empowered her
with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband
and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God.’
She is a pained mother reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune
that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of
mankind. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked
myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. Others have questioned and rebelled
against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice
of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic Ramayana.
“Historiographic metafiction has often
been noticed by critics and is a major debatable topic at literary festivals in
India and abroad. It is not just
metafictional, nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the
non-fictional novel. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is
metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to us powerfully about real
political and historical realities: “It has thus become a kind of model for the
contemporary writer, being self-conscious about its literary heritage and about
the limits of mimesis...but yet managing to reconnect its readers to the world
outside the page. Modern history and
modern literature [postmodern in both cases] have both rejected the ideal of
representation that dominated them for so long. Both now conceive of their work
as exploration, testing, creation of new meanings, rather than
as disclosure or revelation of meanings already in some sense “there,” but not
immediately perceptible.”
Historiographic metafiction has a
liberating quality that has been seized by feminist and postcolonial writers to
enable plural voices in the corridors of history to be verbalized and
previewed.
Novel Novels indeed!
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