Chapter I - RDU - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

25victimized: women, native peoples, gays, etc. and they knowingly disrupt chronology,introduce supernatural occurrences and obviously historically inaccurate elements toremind the reader that history is a relative construct, riddled with subjectivity. Somemore wild-eyed postmodernists refuse to admit any real separation between fiction andhistory since both, in their view, are human-made “ways of world-making.” (cf.Vanderhaeghe Vol. 1 nos. 1-2)Regarding characters, Hutcheon compares the postulates that pertain to theclassical or traditional historical novel and confronts them with the situation inhistoriographic metafiction and she concludes that in this last case, characters are“anything but proper types: they are the ex-centric, the marginalized, the peripheralfigures of fictional history” for example Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children byRushdie. (Poetics of Postmodernism 114) Even real characters of history take on“different, particularized and ultimately ex-centric status” for example Richard Nixon inThe Public Burning by Coover. (Poetics of Postmodernism 114) In historiographicmetafiction Lukács’ ‘type’ has little function. This fiction sometimes falsifies knownhistorical details “in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recordedhistory and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error.” (Poetics ofPostmodernism 114) Here, historical characters are rarely relegated to secondary roles,and the subterfuge of trying to hide the joins between history and fiction is not pursued,on the contrary, these novels pose that “ontological join as a problem: How do weknow the past? What do (what can) we know of it now?” (Poetics of Postmodernism115)There is a third possiblity put forward by Seymour Menton, a specialist in Latin-American historical novels. He uses the expression “new historical novel” to make adistinction between the traditional historical novels and the novels that narrate eventsfrom the past using postmodern techniques while also defying the majority of theassumptions inherited from modernism. (cf. Martini 98)The techniques and aspects that Menton identifies as pertaining to this kind ofnovels are: a) the subordination of the mimetic reproduction of a given historical periodto the introduction of philosophical ideas such as the impossibility of really knowing thetruth of history and its cyclical and unpredictable characteristics, b) history is distortedthrough omissions and / or exaggerations, c) historical characters are fictionalised bywriters who enjoy creating sui generis versions of them, d) the use of intertextuality, e)the writer or narrator allows himself to make comments about or to reflect upon the