narration to date are Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973) and Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving
(1976).
Postmodernist historiographic metafictionsHistoriographic metafiction refers to novels which self-reflexively mix fictive and
historical modes of representation so as to pose questions about the relationships
between fiction, history and reality (Hutcheon 1989:50). Represented historical material
may refer to either actual or fictive events—the texts and documents represented in
Hunt’s Backtrack are almost entirely fictional, whereas those in Crew’s Strange Objects
are a mixture of actual and fictive. It is the physical incorporation of the discursive style
of history writing, rather than their actual historicity, that is characteristic.
Intellectual historians such as White (1987) and LaCapra (1980) have focused on the
relations between representation, in particular narrative representation, and our
capacity to know and understand the past. To the extent that the past is only accessible
via its documents, archives and artefacts, our knowledge of that past is always mediated
and determined by prior textualisations or representations. Potentially the past is,
therefore, only knowable as text, and is thereby always already implicated in problems
of language, discourse and representation. Historiographic metafictions highlight
concerns with interpretation and representation by incorporating ‘historical’ texts and
discursive conventions. For example, Hunt plays with the conventional historicist
assumption that the closer an account of an event is to that event in time, the more
accuracy and credibility it has, by including a transcript of an Inquest Report in which
he steadfastly refuses to disclose information, thereby drawing attention to the
discursive strategies which structure the report. The primary narrative of Backtrack
centres on two characters, Jack and Rill, who attempt to solve a mysterious train crash
which occurred seventy years earlier. The mystery remains unsolved and the lack of
narrative resolution draws attention to the discourses whereby the mystery is
constructed and whereby Jack and Rill attempt to solve it: namely, historical research,
conjecture and reconstruction, and conventionalised generic narrative codes—the
espionage plot, and the crime of passion plot. A subsequent blurring of the status of
these discourses, as fiction and/or history, foregrounds their conventionality and the
extent to which fiction and history are both culturally inscribed categories of discourse
and not always easily distinguishable from each other. The narrative forms for
representing and structuring events are common to both history writing and fiction, and
that these are forms which impart meaning as well as order (Hutcheon 1989:62). The
possibility remains that the act of narration, in either fictive or historical writing, might
construct and thereby construe its object.
ConclusionsAn increasingly noticeable phenomena has been the appropriation of experimental and
metafictive narrative techniques into mainstream children’s literature, an occurrence
which blurs the distinctions between experimental and non-experimental, between the
mainstream and the marginal. However, a key distinction between experimental and
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