Fiction vs History?

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Review of Amy J. Elias, _Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction_,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Amy Elias's _Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction_ proves to be a
solid contribution to contemporary scholarly investigations of the rich
intersections between late-twentieth-century reconceptualizations of history
and the fiction of the time. Elias's study participates in this larger
project by more specifically examining a genre of post-1960s fiction that
she terms "Metahistorical Romance" and that she positions simultaneously as
(altered) heir to the classic historical romances of Walter Scott and as a
response and contribution to the antifoundationalist impulses of
contemporary historiography. While metahistorical romances acknowledge the
impossibility of accessing history, according to Elias, they nevertheless
express a "desire for History" (xviii). These texts redefine history as
"sublime" - as that which is desired but remains "unknowable and
unrepresentable in discourse," as "the space of the chaotic, and hence to
rational beings, the terrifying, past" and, yet, as necessarily still linked
to the political in that it is "also the realm of potential revelation" (42,
55). Moreover, Elias insists that these novels' desire for a historical
sublime remains balanced by a focus on material events, on "the history that
hurts" (67). To that end, these texts experiment with new ways of engaging
history.

To develop its thesis, the book's first chapter provides helpful, cogent
discussions of complex terms and theoretical shifts such as postmodernism,
history, the classic historical romance, the metahistorical novel and its
connections to the romance and to historiography, the sublime, and the
historical sublime. These discussions offer not only a clear synthesis of
the various ways in which critical thought has approached these ideas, but
also provide fresh insights that contribute to ongoing contemporary critical
conversations. For example, Elias's case for the desire for a historical
sublime in the novels she examines derives from her careful exploration of
how postmodern notions of the sublime intersect with recent
antifoundationalist notions of history and a posttraumatic cultural
consciousness following the horrific events that characterized World War II.
Chapter 2 carries the theoretical discussions of the preceding chapter into
the terrain of literature as a means of elaborating the relationship between
contemporary metahistorical romances and the historical novel tradition - a
relationship based on both continuities and radical disruptions, the latter
linked to contemporary notions of history and to postmodern and
poststructuralist theories. The following two chapters focus more
specifically on the ways in which contemporary metahistorical romances tend
to spatialize history as a means of exploring the textualization of history
(chapter 3) and to both explore and subvert the Enlightenment ideas to which
they are heir (chapter 4), using a plethora of recent English and American
novels to exemplify these points.

With chapter 5, Elias turns to an examination of the differences between
Western and postcolonial metahistorical romances (the latter category
stretched to include first world texts written from the perspective of the
other), emphasizing how adopting the position of the other leads to
different ways of reconceiving Western history. Because this is a huge
topic, the chapter manages to frame and begin the discussion but clearly
leaves much to be explored. Nevertheless, Elias's observation that novels
engaging history from positions other than those privileged by the West tend
to offer not only critique but also alternatives to Western models of
history opens the door for much future scholarly work by this author, as
well as others. Indeed, while one of the strengths of this study is the
amazing number of novels it examines, the great majority of the texts
analyzed in any depth are written by white, first world men. Given this
book's 2001 date of publication, which means that much of it was actually
written a few years earlier, it is not surprising that it can only begin to
address the great proliferation of outstanding novels produced in the past
few years by women, nonwhites in the West, and non-Westerners. This may
explain why, instead of dealing with one of these novels (which would follow
logically from her discussion in chapter 5) to show how the "search for a
new approach to Western history grows in force as the millennium
approaches," in the concluding sixth chapter (222), she chooses to examine
Pynchon's _Mason & Dixon_. Overall, Elias's study has much to offer and
should be high on the reading lists of all scholars interested in how
contemporary fiction engages issues of history and contributes to the
ongoing process of reconceptualizing history.

Reviewed by Magali Cornier Michael,
_Modern Fiction Studies_ 50.2. West Lafayette: Summer 2004, p. 524.

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