Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo as Examples of Historiographic Metafiction

This paper was originally submitted as a final requirement for the author’s compliance in the course LIT 606: Seminar in American Literature (2017).

 

I. Introduction

 

When we hear the phrase “historical fiction,” there’s a general tendency to assume that this genre has fixed, clearly defined conventions that are as unalterable as the past itself. Celadon Books, for example, the primary search result on Google that appears after one looks up “historical fiction,” defines the genre as such:

 

Historical Fiction is set in a real place, during a culturally recognizable time. The details and the action in the story can be a mix of actual events and ones from the author’s imagination as they fill in the gaps. Characters can be pure fiction or based on real people (often, it’s both).

 

MasterClass, meanwhile, describes historical fiction in this manner:

 

Historical fiction is a literary genre where the story takes place in the past. Historical novels capture the details of the time period as accurately as possible for authenticity, including social norms, manners, customs, and traditions. Many novels in this genre tell fictional stories that involve actual historical figures or historical events.

 

The process in writing a work of this form, then, appears pretty straightforward: after conducting much research, a present-day fictionist recreates a historically recognizable time and place, populates it with their characters (who may be wholly or partially fictitious), and whose actions and decisions are influenced by or influence momentous events in history. Contemporary authors who specialize in this genre include Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl), Ken Follett (The Pillars of the Earth), and Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall).

 

Perhaps one of the more interesting offshoots of historical fiction (for reasons to be elaborated shortly) that more recent writers have begun to dabble with is what theorist Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction.” She articulates the characteristics of this distinct brand of metafiction in the fourth chapter of her book The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction, even citing some novels as examples.

 

Where typically there is a passive experience involving the reader having to suspend their disbelief as they immerse themselves in the work of a writer, historiographic metafiction allows for an interaction between both parties. As befitting of its meta nature, historiographic metafiction “thematizes its own interaction with the historically conditioned expectations of its readers” (Hutcheon 65)—meaning the reader enters the historical fiction novel with certain preconceived notions about the period the text covers, but because interplay is enabled, the reader is not merely a spectator to the events that unfold but a participant in the action. The historiographic metafiction text, therefore, does not or cannot exist without the reader becoming the “actual and actualizing links” between both history and fiction, as well as between past and present.

 

Such qualities are observable in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. In this novel, Lightman enables an interaction with the historical past (in the form of the historical, albeit fictionalized, personas of Albert Einstein and other characters in the text) and in the historically conditioned expectations of its readers, who are presumably aware of the title character’s uncanny ability to vividly picture out alternative physical scenarios in his mind. By setting the novel in 1905, considered by many in the scientific community to be Einstein’s “miracle year,” Lightman demonstrates how he as a writer—and perhaps even an unintentional historiographic metafictionist—can “make” history by “narrativizing” a series of incoherent and otherwise fictional dreams, translating these into a source of inspiration for a patent clerk (Einstein’s occupation at the time) with unparalleled imagination and erudition but with limited access to scientific tools. Incidentally, the last of the entries in what Lightman renders as a sort of dream journal by Einstein is dated June 28, two days before the soon-to-be-famous physicist submitted his paper on special relativity. True to Hutcheon’s conception of what historiographic metafiction entails, Lightman is constrained by both historical reality, in his careful adherence to dates (which must coincide with key events in Einstein’s life), and by the demands of narrative fiction. Entries beginning with lines such as “Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself” (Lightman 6) also make plain that these dream vignettes rely on the reader’s presence and own conception and understanding of time to be fully realized. It is in this way that Einstein’s Dreams becomes “actualized” by the reader, who in turn links history with fiction.

 

Another notable trait of historiographic metafiction is its seemingly fragmented nature (say, in the form of multiple points of view), which the writer must be deft enough to formulate into a cohesive narrative in the reader’s mind. As Hutcheon mentions, “the collective often balances the individual just as the portrayal of reading balances that of writing” (64). She cites Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear as an example, which employs “various and fragmentary points of view” (in the form of government records, legal debates, and newspapers) so that readers may pool these multiple sources together to arrive at their own conclusions, just like the jury at the end of the novel (65).

 

For this paper, I shall examine two American novels that, at first glance, may be easily categorizable as historical fiction narratives—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo—but which also, at the very least, exhibit qualities of historiographic metafiction. Not only did both texts garner critical acclaim upon their release (with The Underground Railroad winning the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Lincoln in the Bardo taking home the Man Booker Prize for the same year), but they are also set in a similar time period in United States history: the early to mid-nineteenth century. It also goes without saying that the themes they delve into ring especially resonant in our day and age.

 

 

II. The Underground Railroad

 

The Underground Railroad chronicles the orphan Cora’s flight from slavery in the Deep South to the free (supposedly more tolerant) states of the north, only for her to experience varying degrees of racism and prejudice. Each state she travels to—which Whitehead likens to Gulliver’s Travels in the sense that the book “reboots” every time a new location is explored (Fields)—is a stop along the titular Underground Railroad, which, in this treatment of history, is a literal railroad built underground, accessible only through trapdoors built in the floors of abolitionists’ homes. A stairwell leads entrants into a “gigantic tunnel” about twenty feet tall, with “walls lined with dark and light colored stones in an alternating pattern” (Whitehead 67). A small platform overlooks two steel rails that run along the length of the tunnel. Each rail is “pinned into the dirt by wooden cross-ties” and presumably runs south and north, “springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus” (67).

 

This detailed description of a pre–Civil War subterranean railway system is a stark contrast to the Underground Railroad of our own timeline, which was really just a “secret network of passageways and safe houses” (Vasquez) but still served the same function of allowing slaves, with the assistance of abolitionist allies and freedmen, to escape to either the northern states or Canada.

 

The Underground Railroad then is a contemporary example of alternative historical fiction, a sub-genre that blends the historical and the speculative. The fictitiousness and grandiosity of the novel’s “central conceit,” however, does nothing to rob it of its historicity.

 

Whitehead retells a dark chapter of American history from a very intimate and oft-neglected perspective—that of the slaves, whose voices are continually marginalized (even silenced) in many present-day discussions of slavery and the Civil War. He therefore humanizes them, in the vein of a growing body of narratives dedicated to giving voice to African Americans: 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, Moonlight, just to name a few.

 

Whitehead writes of how Cora and her kin are reminded they are human beings for only “a tiny moment across the eternity of servitude” (29) as they briefly enjoy a reverie, only to be called back to work by the overseer. Items in so-called “colored emporiums” in supposedly more liberal states are also more expensive (“two or three times” more) than they are in white stores within the same locality, lending the latter a greater economic advantage—and thus hinting at a lingering low-key racism—even in the North.

 

Just as Lightman does with Einstein’s Dreams, Whitehead enables readers of his novel to interact with the historical past through these characters, who—although they are fictional—are the product of meticulous and dedicated research. According to Emma Brockes, writing for The Guardian, the Pulitzer winner “ploughed through” oral history archives, particularly the 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery collated by the Federal Writers’ Project back in the 1930s, when the last surviving slaves were in their nineties. Whitehead found education on slavery “pitifully inadequate,” with much of that brutal history being downplayed or whitewashed, as evinced by the greater emphasis afforded to charismatic figures like President Lincoln, or the preferential treatment for white abolitionists. It is through his retelling of these long-forgotten narratives that Whitehead both “makes” history while at the same time remaining constrained by it. Still, as a storyteller, he does not eschew the demands of narrative fiction, injecting his novel with the usual suspense and action, as well as literary devices like flashbacks and foreshadowing, that serve to keep the reader engaged.

 

Another interesting element of The Underground Railroad is Whitehead’s insertion, in certain divisions of the novel, of slave bulletins calling for the recapture of escaped slaves. Each bulletin merely mentions the name of each runaway slave, coupled with their monikers and a brief description of their physical appearance. This serves to remind the reader of just how denigrated slaves were, having been reduced to the status of animals or even merchandise. The one exception is the final bulletin, which calls for Cora’s repatriation. It bears the most optimistic, declaratory tone, concluding with the words

 

She has stopped running.

 

Reward remains unclaimed.

 

SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY. (298)

 

In doing so, Whitehead reappropriates an otherwise dehumanizing form of the public-service announcement, turning it into a proud declaration of freedom for Cora. His contrasting of the typical, succinct bulletin language at the beginning with the more hopeful tone at the end (which may well have been a fantasy or an elusive dream to slaves at the time) bridges the historical and the fictional, the brutal past and the reckoning present.

 

 

III. Lincoln in the Bardo

 

Between the two novels under analysis in this paper, George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel is undoubtedly the more experimental. Where The Underground Railroad is rendered in (largely) conventionally arranged prose, being divided along paragraphs and chapters, Lincoln in the Bardo has a more distinct style—one that almost resembles a screenplay, albeit one in which the actors take turns completing each other’s lines, with the occasional paragraph worked in. Additionally, there are entire chapters where Saunders, instead of synthesizing or paraphrasing his research, simply outright cuts and pastes snippets from archival sources to detail a historical event that occurs alongside the novel’s plot:

 

            Young Willie Lincoln was laid to rest on the day that the casualty lists from the Union victory at Fort Donelson were publicly posted, an event that caused a great shock among the public at that time, the cost of life being unprecedented thus far in the war.

 

In “Setting the Record Straight: Memoir,

Error, and Erasure,” by Jason Tumm,

“Journal of American History.”

 

The details of the losses were communicated to the President even as young Willie lay under embalmment.

 

Iverness, op. cit.

 

The dead at Donelson, sweet Jesus. Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two on top of three. I walked through it after with a bad feeling. Lord it was me done that, I thought.

 

In “These Battle Memories,”

By First Lieutenant Daniel Brewer.

 

(Saunders 152)

 

 

It is in these snippets where Bardo’s qualities as a historiographic-metafictional text are best exemplified. Just as Rudy Wiebe, cited by Hutcheon, infuses her narrative of The Temptations of Big Bear with “fragmentary points of view” that the reader has to pull together (65), Saunders compiles fragmented excerpts from a vast array of references that, once read together, form a cohesive plot in the reader’s mind. Hence, what initially appears to be a mere enumeration of disjointed statements becomes “actualized” into a historical story through the reader. A similar technique can be seen at work in the chapters dedicated to the characters of the Bardo, whose seemingly erratic dialogue only actualizes into a sensible, connected whole once the reader processes them. Otherwise, these texts are merely floating in limbo, just like their fictional interlocutors.

 

Also, where Whitehead refrains from incorporating actual historical figures into The Underground Railroad, Saunders crafts his novel around one of the most endearing father-son relationships in history: that between Abraham Lincoln and Willie, the president’s eleven-year-old son who dies after falling gravely ill of typhoid fever. The boy’s illness, death, and subsequent burial are also detailed by Saunders in heartbreaking snippets obtained from historical documentation.

 

Whitehead has a little more artistic leeway on account of his use of character amalgamations, but Saunders can be said to be in a more constrained position, considering that he builds his plot around “events already constituted” (Hutcheon 66). In fact, the seed of the idea for the novel came to Saunders when a friend told him of how “newspapers of the time reported that Lincoln had returned to the crypt several times to hold his son’s body” (Mallon). This contrasts with Whitehead’s own inspiration for his novel, which stemmed from his personal speculations of the existence of an actual, physical underground railroad.

 

Saunders concludes his novel by coinciding young Willie’s moving-on to the afterlife with Lincoln’s own renewed determination to pull himself out of his slump and resume his presidential duties, chief of these being the fulfillment of his destiny to become the Great Emancipator. This pivotal paragraph is narrated by one of the characters in the Bardo:

 

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (…), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

 

hans vollman (304)

 

Through this, the historical (Lincoln and Willie) and the fictional (the personas of the Bardo) then become linked. Lincoln’s past actions of realizing his “position in the world” to do good is rationalized, or even justified, by Saunders’ writing.

 

 

IV. Conclusion

 

While a fascinating field in and of itself, history has a penchant for detailing factual events into a linear and straightforward manner—essentially, the result is a text that is rooted in causality and averse to speculation. The beauty of literature, historical fiction in particular, is it possesses that unique ability to “animate life so that man is returned to the center of human existence” (Ty-Casper qtd. in Dalisay online). Historical events, when given the literary treatment, become more humanized experiences. One’s perception of history is altered, from that of a singular thread to a pastiche of multiple perspectives, narratives, and even outcomes.

 

Although historiographic metafiction, given its more experimental and obfuscatory traits, may seem contradictory to this project, this postmodern genre has the distinct advantage of reclaiming a past that may otherwise have been sanitized—or perhaps even deliberately altered—by more hegemonic forces. At present, the United States enjoys an unprecedented position of dominance on the world stage, possessing a distinct privilege to continually propound a positive image of itself onto the wider global population. Like all empires, however, its success and gargantuan influence are built on marginalization and mythologizing.

 

What Lincoln in the Bardo and The Underground Railroad do is tackle deeply entrenched ideas of the United States as a “shining city on a hill” and a beacon of democracy by conveying narratives that reveal disquieting truths about a particular era in American history: the 1800s, when slavery was still legal and the country was on the brink of splitting apart. Strangely enough, this period tends to be romanticized and even glorified in the present day, with the rise of far-right and ultra-conservative movements that tend to paint the United States of two hundred years ago with a rose-colored brush. Saunders shatters modern-day notions of the Great Emancipator as a godlike statesman capable of doing no wrong, turning him into a more relatable, grieving father. Whitehead, meanwhile, brings to the fore the gut-wrenching stories of a class and race whose voices have been sidelined in contemporary discussions—a sidelining that likely contributed to the false nostalgia that pervades today. He thus reclaims the past in the hopes of arriving at a more understanding and enlightened future.

 

Historiographic metafiction illuminates facets of the past that we in the present have overlooked or entirely forgotten. While it may prove to be a challenging genre for the uninitiated—let alone an audience more accustomed to media that requires little focus—this in no way robs it of its relevance, especially in a time where conceptions of the past are being altered for malevolent ends.

 

While browsing through Facebook one time, I encountered a meme that expressly meant to ridicule how our cries of personal feelings being “offended” pale in comparison to the hardships our forbearers endured: two world wars in the previous century, hazardous manufacturing jobs during the Industrial Revolution, plague in the Middle Ages, among others. Said meme, however, glosses over the gains we made through the years to address such problems. The advancements in medicine, labor laws, and peace deals that we benefit from today are a result of society collectively inquiring into the feelings of those affected, and then subsequently taking action. Even more troubling than the meme itself is the number of times it was shared on the social media site. To some extents, historiographic metafiction can aid in lifting the veil of misguided, often romanticized, notions of the past by uncovering uncomfortable truths and brutal narratives. The way forward, then, lies in understanding how those who came before us overcame these by being on the more progressive side of history.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Brockes, Emma. “Colson Whitehead: ‘To Deal with This Subject with the Gravity It Deserved Was Scary.’” The Guardian, 7 July 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/07/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad.

 

Dalisay, Butch. “Martial Law in Three Filipino Novels.” The Philippine Star, 11 Nov. 2013,             www.philstar.com/lifestyle/arts-and-culture/2013/11/11/1254788/martial-law-three-filipino-novels.

 

Fields, Jenn. “Colson Whitehead’s ‘Underground Railroad’ Is A Literal Train To Freedom.” NPR, 8 Aug. 2016, www.denverpost.com/2017/09/22/the-underground-railroad-colson-whitehead/.

 

Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction.” In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. 61–77.

 

Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams. Vintage, 1993.

 

Mallon, Thomas. “George Saunders Gets Inside Lincoln’s Head.” The New Yorker, 13 Feb.   2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/george-saunders-gets-inside-lincolns-head.

 

MasterClass. “What Is Historical Fiction?” MasterClass, 21 Aug. 2021, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-historical-fiction-definition-of-the-historical-fiction-genre-and-tips-for-writing-your-historical-novel. Accessed 7 June 2024.

 

Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Random House, 2017.

 

Vasquez, Juan Gabriel. “In Colson Whitehead’s Latest, the Underground Railroad Is More Than a Metaphor.” The New York Times, 5 Aug. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/books/review/colson-whitehead-underground railroad.html.  

 

“What Is Historical Fiction?” Celadon Books, n.d. https://celadonbooks.com/what-is-historical-fiction/#:~:text=Historical%20Fiction%20is%20set%20in,(often%2C%20it's%20both). Accessed 7 June 2024.

 

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Anchor, 2016.