translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Thus Conchis’s story juxtaposes ‘real’ historical events (such as the
battle of Neuve Chapelle) along with unknown happenings from the
fictional narrative (his desertion and his coming home as well as the
fictionalised presentation of the battle to his parents). This juxtaposition of
the fiction against historical events (considered as real facts) reasserts the
idea that the novel is a work of fiction. Conchis interweaves in his stories
‘real’ events from the past with representations and interpretations of a
‘personal’ past not objectively, but highly subjectively rendered. He wants to
shed light on those things most often hidden within the mimetic worlds of
traditional historical fiction. Traditional accounts of war speak about the
courage and the heroism of the combatants on the battlefield, but Conchis
sees the horrors of a war he describes as a huge slaughter where courage and
heroism are replaced by a mere instinct of survival.
[…] ‘Five or six machine guns scythed us like grass. Montague spun
round and fell at my feet. He lay on his back, staring up at me, one eye
gone. I collapsed beside him. The air was nothing but bullets. […] The
back of Montague’s head had been blown away, but his face still wore
an idiot’s grin, as if he were laughing in his sleep, mouth wide open.
A face I have never forgotten. The last smile of a stage of evolution.
‘The firing stopped. Then, like a flock of frightened sheep, everyone
who survived began to run back towards the village. I as well. I had
lost even the will to be a coward.’ […]
‘A wounded lieutenant was now in command. He crouched beside
me, with a great gash across his cheek. His eyes burned dully. He was
no longer a nice upright young Englishman, but a Neolithic beast.
Cornered, uncomprehending, in a sullen rage. Perhaps we all look like
that. The longer one survived the more unreal it was. (128)
Conchis’s narrative reinforces the idea that (our) past and (our) present
alike may be seen as ‘constructed’ of a variety of points of view, “not all of
which conform to the ‘correct’ view created by the political, social and
economic ‘factors’ dominant at the time those events happen. In fact there is
no unique ‘correct’ reading of the past which gains in supremacy over any
other.” (Lowes, 2005: 2-3) In this way the novel plays with the idea of
historical ‘fact’ and historical ‘fiction’ and blurs their boundaries
“questioning truthfulness or degree of reliability of past textual ‘facts’.”
(Lowes, 2005: 2) Collective history is replaced by personal history or ‘hisstory’
and, in so doing, Fowles illustrates the postmodernist credo according
to which “much of the knowledge about the past is of a narrated nature since
all past events are potential historical facts, actual facts remaining those
which have been chosen to be narrated.” (Praisler, 2005: 115)
Another marker of self-reflexivity is the presence in the story of a
protagonist whose main preoccupation is with himself. One can easily
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