In order to confront this you need, first and foremost, to be aware of
the political issues involved. If you decide to cross cultural barriers, the
armory of technical equipment you have acquired while you have been
working with this book should be of assistance. It should help you achieve
the right degree of proximity and distance in relation to your material. For
example, you may need to project a marginalised character through the
eyes of someone who is privileged in that society; rather than assuming
that you can, without any problem, assume that marginalised person’s
perspective.
For Exercise 2d, create a character who has been largely shunned or
marginalised by society. Your person might be a poor person, a prisoner,
a refugee, a disabled person or a woman. You will need to conceive of this
character within their own cultural background, and this may require
detailed research.
F(R)ICTIONAL HISTORIES
Rewriting the past
Another important trend in postmodern fiction has been rethinking the
representation of the past. Postmodern fictions have often revamped
history, but in ways which subvert official accounts. These fictions are
what Linda Hutcheon (1988) calls ‘historiographic metafiction’. They tend
to rub together fact and fiction: their object is not only to research the past,
and then imaginatively reinvent it, but also to question the notion of his-
torical truth. Such fictions often suggest that historical events can be
viewed in very different ways from the official versions of them. They pen-
etrate the vested interests at the origin of historical accounts, and show
how they were designed to suit those who were in political power at the
time. They create friction between the history we have been told, and
the history which might have been.
Postmodern fictions sometimes rewrite history from the perspective of
a person whose point of view has been suppressed in the official docu-
mentation of the event. A rewriting may give voice to someone who has
been silenced or excluded because, for example, they are part of an ethnic
minority, female or disabled. There have been many postcolonial and fem-
inist rewritings of history of this type.
As already mentioned, the fallibility of historical truth is also a central
issue in postmodern/post-structuralist theories. The works of de Certeau,
Hayden White, Foucault and others emphasise that history is discontinu-
ous, non-linear and multilayered. However, historical accounts tend to
homogenise history into a unified and official version which pretends
144 The Writing Experiment