Ritið : tímarit Hugvísindastofnunar - 01.05.2019, Side 274

„ÞANNIG ER SAGA OKKAR“
273
A B S T R A C T
„So is our (hi)story“
On historiographic metafiction
and Einar Már Guðmundsson’s Hundadagar
The ambiguity between reality and fiction haunts Einar Már Guðmundsson’s novel
Hundadagar (Dog Days, 2015), as it is a fictional narrative about factual, historical
figures and events, such as Jörgen Jörgensen, Rev. Jón Steingrímsson, Finnur Mag-
nússon and Guðrún Johnsen, while the same can be said about many other novels
labeled as postmodernism. Canadian literary scholar Linda Hutcheon coined the
concept of historiographic metafiction to describe fictions as such, which are “intensely
self-reflexive”, while “paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages”.
Hutcheon suggests that historiographic metafictions fully illuminate the very way in
which postmodernism entangles itself with both the epistemological and ontologi-
cal status of history. This paper begins with an introduction to Hutcheon’s theoreti-
cal contributions on postmodernism, postmodern literature and the relationship be-
tween history and fiction, followed by a reading of Hundadagar as a historiographic
metafiction. The narrator’s strategies—such as parataxis, metanarrative comments,
we-narrative discourse and documentary intertext—largely indicate an imitation, a
revelation, or say, a parody of the process of historian’s writings. The paper further
suggests that it is the Icelandic financial crisis in 2008 that prompts the narrator to
revisit the 18. and 19. century, since the financial crisis takes the role of a rupture
of the Enlightenment ideals, leading to disorder and chaos. Moreover, the narrator
finds an uncanny similarity between the past and the present, as if the history has
been repeating itself. The spectre of history keeps (re)appearing in a deferred tem-
porality. While revisiting the past, the narrator also (re)visits the present in an alle-
gorical way. In a word, as a historiographic metafiction, Einar Már Guðmundsson’s
Hundadagar is “fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably
political”, just as Hutcheon’s perception of postmodernism.
Keywords: Postmodernism, postmodern literature, historiographic metafiction, Ein-
ar Már Guðmundsson, Hundadagar, the Icelandic financial crisis, history and fiction
Xinyu Zhang
Meistaranemi í íslenskum bókmenntum
Íslensku- og menningardeild
Hugvísindasviði Háskóla Íslands
Sæmundargötu 2
IS-101 Reykjavík, Ísland
xiz3@hi.is