• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.301-328
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• 2010

Many recent British novels engage with the construction and deconstruction of history and identity; and in dealing with these historical, or historicised novels it seems to be an untouchable ground that truth is beyond grasp. Even when approached, its authenticity should be examined under the post-modern "incredulity toward metanarrative" discourses. Julian Barnes's 1998 novel England, England may be one of these. Yet, unlike others it achieves a complicated and controversial status as a new kind of historiographic metafiction by providing selfconscious reflections on the invention of innocence and the questionable notion of historical authenticity against the background of current postmodern historical, cultural, and literary explorations. The book, set in a near-future, namely post-post-modern England, starts with a story of a young girl, Martha Cochrane, whose first memory goes back to her early infantile years. Yet, the narrator comments that it is a lie, "her first artfully, innocently arranged lie," since memory, or history, is a product of identity, and vice versa. Her memory of the jigsaw puzzle is both a reminiscent and a significant component of who she is now, both a simulacrum and the original of herself. The correlation between her individual memory and identity parallels that of a region, England, in formation of its history and nationality. "England, England" is the replicated miniature of the former glorious Kingdom as well as a becoming der Ding an sich (the thing itself). In search of the English history and identity, the author satirizes the modern mind's perception of the unreliability and arbitrariness of memory and history, and further explores the alternative to the postmodern discourses by suggesting the probability of inventing innocence glimpsed in children's face "believing while disbelieving." In doing so, the author reconstructs not only the history of Englishness on the ground where nothing seems to be solid, but more importantly also the postmodern theme of relativity in relation to memory, history and identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.