Flaws in the Telegraphic Worldview
In the first few weeks of this class, when we were reading essays about postmodernism and trying to wrap our heads around what a postmodernist history would look like, I had a vague vision of the Postmodernist Historical Novel taken to its limit that I thought would be impossible to write. In this novel, the author tries to distance themself from all metanarrative. They stick to only verifiable facts about the past, garnered from primary sources. They can’t try to tell a story about a time period, because the act of telling stories shapes the past in a way that postmodernists were aware of and uncomfortable with. The “novel” ends up just being a series of descriptions of primary sources, completely unintelligible and completely unread. Even if it could be deciphered, it would be useless because people automatically construct stories when presented with series of events. Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim and his fictional race of Tralfamadorians view the world like th...