Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)
Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: Histories, Truths, Fictions. Interdisciplinary Relations of Historiography and Philosophy in the Context of Recent Western Canadian Fiction
acknowledge the role of contextual forces in shaping the literary texts. The mistrust of grand narratives is expressed and accomplished in these novels by certain anti-closure strategies, a general tendency working actively in the texts challenging the traditional beliefs in unity, totalization, origins and endings, consciousness and human nature, ideas of progress and fate, truth and representation, causality, linearity and temporal homogeneity of historical knowledge, following Hutcheon's list in her seminal essay entitled "Historicizing the Postmodern: The Problematizing of History" (Poetics 87-104). The term anti-closure strategies denotes fictional means like untelling, un-naming, de-mythifying what previously was interpreted as the only possible version of the past, History as such; and these strategies tend to include the descendant narrator's rejection to follow the chronological and univocal presentation of past events, too. Williams claims: "Freed into speech, narrative can now avoid the tyranny of temporal progression (story as history) and the rigid control of myth (story as universal pattern). It offers only itself in the act of telling, free of any other inheritance, resisting both determination and interpretation" ("After" 264-5). However, the creation of alternative narrative versions of the past human experience, i.e., alternative histories, also questions the validity of grand narratives. The latter relies on the fact that since the "past is provisional, discoursive, historicized" (Hutcheon, Poetics 149), history, a narrated version of past events accepted as facts, is subject to textualization. As Julia Kristeva explains: "what this narrative fiction constructs as material truth, or as a deformation of 'historical truth', is the plausible evolution , not of an event of historical reality, but of a process that creates the ('historical') advent of logic: the process of separation" (Moi 223). The synchrony of equally valid textual traces of the past appears both in certain trends of contemporary history- and fiction writing. The closely related job of the novelist and the historian is based on their shared emplotting strategies, i.e. the selection of events being raised to the status of facts, exclusion, subordination and emplotting —techniques analyzed in detail by historians like White, Ricouer or by critics like Hutcheon. These strategies lead to the creation of histories, truths and fictions, all 33
