I thought I'd post a little more food for thought... I think it's hard to find historical truth in texts like Broken Ground because the book keeps insisting on pulling the rug out from underneath our feet whenever we think we have figured out what the novel is "all about." It suggests, instead, to me, what Hutcheon said, that historical knowledge is always provisional and indeterminate. This isn't, of course, the same as denying historical knowledge, but it does cause us to constantly question what we know and how we know it. And it addresses the problem of representation.
The story is a way of making sense of the past, but one can always tell what is ostensibly the same story in different ways. The way that Hodgins has structured this novel, with its multiple narrative voices and its disjointed timelines, suggests a refusal of any history that is totalizing. There is also a refusal of nostalgia, and of sentimentality.
The characters in the novel are reporting as particpants in the stories that are expressed. They are not outside the story as a neutral observer (or an omniscient narrator) might be. They are very aware that they are (re)constructing their own history, and the novel itself becomes a self-refelxive commentary on its own constructin as a literary text. As Hutcheon has noted and asked, "The past really did exist. The question is: how can we know that past today - and what can we know of it?" In some ways Hodgins' novel doesn't allow us to ask the question in terms of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction: it suggests, instead, that both history and fiction are discourse. They are signifying systems that gesture towards how we use language to construct meaning.
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I agree with you Blanca. Basically, if these novels didn't keep us on our toes, if they didn't keep us guessing, if they didn't keep "pulling the rug out from underneath our feet," all we would have is a history textbook. And it's interesting how the whole issue of representation is addressed in the novel, with the making of the 'movie' and how Charlie remembers the past. While we as readers are contemplating this, Hodgins' characters are grappling with the same issues. So when Blanca says "that both history and fiction are discourse," it is absolutely true.
By the way, I also believe that history textbooks are not immune from the question of representation.
I absolutely agree with you Anne - history, or history textbooks, just give us another story....
In regards to the question Blanca posted,"How can we know that past today - and what can we know of it"; I find that I often look for visual aid,usually in the form of photographs or documented film or video if possible to help me try and 'feel' what it must have been like. With 'Broken Ground', I found two pictures titled "Clearing land at Sechelt" (Sechelt is just across the Strait and a bit south from the setting for 'Broken Ground' - similair geographics),that give a good idea what the settlers mentioned in the novel must have faced. For myself when I study these images I imagine myself feeling the hopelessness of the idea of clearing the land due to all the stumps and rugged terrain, in that day and age of limited machinery and heavy equipment. This hopelessnes would also have been magnified, I believe, by the feeling of hopelessness faced by the men during the years of the war. I think if this was to happen with people of today (myself included) under the same circumstances, most of us would opt to take the path chosen by the characters Nigel and Lillian Swift, who decided to leave the land as it was and just paint and read. In a way, they were pretending that the impossibility of clearing the land was not really there , just as some people pretended the war was not really happening or choose to pretend it never happened. Anyways, to get get back to the question; I do find that photographs or film help me to get a better understanding of history or writing.
Dear Jim, I agree with you as to how I remember events - by looking back at my photos and videos (mostly my photos). Even though the photo only captures a 'shot of the stage,' that picture triggers a memory of the past which causes a domino effect of remember the whole stage as it appears.
I think Hodgins even used photos to trigger his memory when he describes the house sized stumps, the blown dirt and the multitude of peoples and expressions directed towards the land. Wonderful!
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