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Past Irony: Trauma and the Historical Turn in Fragments and the Swimming-Pool Library

After reaching a zenith in the metafiction and poststructuralism of the 1970s, the ironic spirit that so informed modernism has been renounced by many of its former devotees in the name of history. Metafiction has given way to the renaissance of the historical novel, the most significant literary form of the past two decades, and deconstruction has given way to trauma theory, which emerged in the early 1990s and has become an influential branch of theory. Novelists and critics in large numbers have moved, it would seem, past irony and done so by looking to the past, but not to just any past. History today is very often conceived as catastrophe and historiography as a form of mourning. Frederic Jameson’s famous sentence from The Political Unconscious – ‘History is what hurts’ – has become the touchstone of much contemporary historically-minded criticism. Why this view would suddenly seem so true might be obvious if we consider how much of post-World War II history has hurt. We live in an age in which technological innovation, political rivalries, and media exposure have made catastrophes on a massive scale possible and perceptible by large audiences. The turn to history in the light of the often seemingly endless flood of catastrophes seems inevitable, and it is just this claim of inevitability that trauma theory makes. Strong as this claim might be, however, the turn from irony to history has created as many problems as it has resolved. It has had deleterious effects on the consideration of both fact and fiction, as I will attempt to show through a discussion of a work of nonfiction (or, a work that claimed to be non-fiction), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and a discussion of a novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The SwimmingPool Library. Before taking up these books, however, it will be necessary to Past Irony: Trauma and the Historical Turn in Fragments and The Swimming-Pool Library