History and Broken Ground

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.