CONCLUSION

Postmodernism tends to view the past as a vast, inchoate, fragmented,

decontextualized, and synchronic congeries of forms, genres, and ideas.

Postmodernist treatments of the past and history are typically criticized by

historians. For the postmodernists, the past has no reality. History is nothing

but a text: the principal problem of historical representation is that of

narrativization. When it comes to representing the past, there is no important

distinction between fact and fiction. Historical phenomena are best made

sense by narrating rather than by model building and causal analysis of chains

of events. Discussion on the relationship between history and literature go

back to Ranke’s famous criticism of Walter Scott for mixing historical fact

with fiction.

Traditional historical fiction, especially in the Victorian era, tries to

reflect history faithfully, and plays the role of supplementing history and

spreading historical knowledge. It respects verified historical evidence,

depicts historical events and figures as truthfully as possible, and is usually

written in the historically chronological order. Modern historical fiction

explores the nature of historical knowledge, questions the authenticity of

historical truth, and internalizes historical events according to the writer’s

understanding and interpretation of history. It assumes that history, like

fiction, is inevitably subjective to the historian’s personal inclination as well

as to the limitation of historical data. Postmodern historical fiction

fictionalizes and appropriates history, and puts history in a subordinate

position. It subverts established history by inventing other possibilities of

historical development. It retrieves the submerged histories of the historically

suppressed or silenced masses, to reveal the hidden power struggle in the

establishment of historical knowledge.

The works of the American historian Hayden White, and those of

others including Dominick LaCapra, Frank Ankersmit and Patrick Joyce, are

often described as part of a shift or movement called “the linguistic turn” that

explores the textuality of history. The historians who have initiated the

linguistic turn work with ideas from literary theory and argue that, far from

seeing literature as the fictional opposite of a factual history, historians should

acknowledge their intimate relationship as two forms of writing that create,

rather than find, meaning.

Although earlier writers, notably Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes,

explored the relationship between narrative and history, it is the works of

Hayden White that have had a particularly dramatic effect on many

historians’ sense of the role and future of their discipline. White argues that

historians do not find the meaning of the past by examining the facts, they

invent or make meanings through their use of language. They do not

reconstruct or translate lived stories into prose stories, but create meaningful

narratives. In the construction of their historical narratives, historians

inevitably combine known or found parts (facts) with ultimately unknown and

thus imagined/invented wholes.

Emplotment is the literary genre into which the story falls. According

to White, every history, even the most “synchronic” of them, will be

emplotted in some way. Emplotment is the act of giving something a plot, of

putting it within a narrative structure. This is what authors do when they tell

stories. This is also what historians do when they write reports. They do not

just report the facts - they create a narrative, a story in an attempt to give their

data meaning. Creating a plot for something inevitably means leaving some

things out and emphasizing others. Emplotment is mediation of

pre-understanding, event and story. White states that history fails, if its

intention is the objective reconstruction of the past because the process

involved is a literary one of interpretative narrative, rather than objective

empiricism or social theorizing. His concept of history as narrative, as a

literary genre, questions the claims of truth and objectivity in historical work.

Semiotic analysis looks for the cultural and psychological patterns that

underlie language, art and other cultural expressions. Of the two major

traditions in modern semiotic theory, one is grounded in the European

tradition led by the Swiss-French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the

other from the American pragmatic philosophy led by Charles Sanders Peirce.

Saussure explained how all elements of a language are taken as components

of a larger system of language in use. Peirce investigated different categories

of signs and the manner by which we extract meaning from them. Peirce’s

most important contribution is in the area of interpretation. According to him,

the meaning making process is an infinite process of interpretation. This

process of interpretation involves the consideration of the meaning of a sign

in terms of all possible signification possibilities- a sign can be a signal, or an

iconic, indexical or symbolic sign, all at the same time.

Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory focuses on the social phenomena of

signs, specifically photographs. Barthes theory emphasizes how signs

constitute culture and ideologies in particular ways. According to Barthes,

these messages are constituted in two ways: through denotation, the literal

meaning and reference of a sign and connotation, the meanings that are

suggested or implied by the sign. It can be stated that myth appears natural or

universal in its signification, or “myths are connotations which have become

dominant-hegemonic” (Heck 125). There is an already assumed connotative

meaning of the sign that seems natural from a particular context of cultural

consumption. Thus, myth maintains an influential power through a quality of

appearing self-evident. While Barthes’ methods still play an important role in

the development of film theory, it was Christian Metz, one of the giants

of French film theory, who became best known for the use of semiology

as a method to analyze cinema. In Film Language, Metz argued that cinema

is structured like a language. Adopting Saussure’s models, Metz made

the distinction between “langue,” a language system, and “language,” a less

clearly defined system of recognizable conventions. Metz contends that film

cannot be regarded as comprising a ‘langue,’ in the sense of having a strict

grammar and syntax equivalent to that of the written or spoken word. Unlike

the written word, film’s basic unit, which Metz calls the shot, is neither

symbolic nor arbitrary but iconic, it is, therefore, laden with specific meaning.

Metz suggests that film is a language in which each shot used in a sequence

works like a unit in a linguistic statement. In his theoretical model, known as

the “grandesyntagmatique,” Metz argues that individual cinematic texts

construct their own meaning systems rather than share a unified grammar.

Metz’s cinesemiotics leans heavily on linguistic models.

The postmodern novels are distinguished from traditional or classic

historical fictions by their resistance to conventional certainties about what

happened and why. A recognition of the subjectivity, the uncertainty, the

multiplicity of truths inherent in any account of past events, and a disjunctive,

self-conscious narrative, frequently produced by multiple narrating voices

characterize postmodern historical fiction, appropriately called

historiographic metafiction. It is a quintessentially postmodern art form which

relies on textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization. Rather than

viewing history as a transcendent or wholly definable object of inquiry or

representation, historiographic metafiction sees engagements with history as

necessarily discursive, situational, and above all, textual. These (re)visions to

history allow for new perspectives and identities to emerge from culturally
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marginalized positions. While at once being eminently political,

historiographic metafiction problematizes categories of essential unity and

historical representation. Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Enchantress of

Florence, offers interesting versions of different historical events, individuals

and societies. Moreover, the relationship between history and fiction in the

novel is playfully interactive. In The Enchantress of Florence, the narrative

functions in such a way as to expose the implicit claims of narrative to the

“truth of history.” Here the story-telling aspect of narrative is used to

highlight the idea of history as a text among other texts. In the novel, history

merges with fiction, and facts get blurred with fable. Rushdie plays with the

idea of history as a form of story which is always woven out of the fabric of

fables. The novel shows the process of textualisation of history through the

narrator. The narrator usually reminds the reader of the importance of

narrativization.

Every intellectual enterprise is based on a personal commitment and

motivated by personal pleasures that sustain the researcher through the

difficulties of his work. Historians are driven by their immediate context-

intellectual, economic, social, political - and the individual concerns that

move them to select one project over another. Each historian works from a

specific position in relation to the historical object, a bias implicit in his

“angle” of observation that carries with it the risk of ideological prejudice.

Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence

on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the

relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by

film, television, and video attract closer attention from historians, cultural

critics, and filmmakers. Many indeed have already come to terms with the

moving image as an agent of historical knowledge.

The two documentaries, BBC documentary on Gandhi (2009) and

Mahatma: Life of Gandhi, 1869–1948, produced by The Gandhi National

Memorial Fund give details of the life of Mahatma Gandhi. While the BBC

documentary is narrated by an omnipresent narrator who intrudes on the

material, the second documentary is narrated using mostly Gandhi’s own

words. In Mahatma: Life of Gandhi, Gandhi is presented as a man of peace

and goodwill who fought evil and injustice with soul force. His life gives the

message of truth and non-violence, supreme, unlimited love. He is the

Mahatma- the Great Soul- the name given to him by the people of India.

While there was no direct attack, the BBC documentary indirectly blames him

for the many political happenings during the time of freedom struggle and

Partition. Lack of sensitivity is deliberate and with a hidden agenda. It is one

of the most blatant display of colonial audacity where a past colonial power

uses its popular mouth-piece, BBC.

History is often a matter of perspective. It is evident from Clint

Eastwood’s narration of the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and
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the Japanese point of view in The Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo

Jima. It had been done before in ToraToraTora (1970), a combination of two

movies that document the Pearl Harbour event from two perspectives-

Japanese and American.

The Eastwood films focus in particular on how nations compulsively

create heroes when they politically need them (like the soldiers who raised the

flag on Iwo Jima) and forget them later when they do not need them. The film

shows how such stories are manufactured by media and governments to

further the aims of the country, whatever may be the truth or the feelings of

the individual soldiers. Against the constructed nature of public heroism,

Eastwood poses the private real bonds between men, against public memory

he focuses on personal trauma.

Photographs have the ability to alter man’s perception of the world.

“Historiophoty” describes the construction and representation of history in

terms of visual images and filmic discourses. The semiotics of historiography

and historiophoty differ but the principles underlying the process of

signification is the same. Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory focuses on the

social phenomena of signs, specifically photographs. Barthes’s theory

emphasizes how signs constitute culture and ideologies in particular ways.

The cultural and political messages are constituted through denotation where

the literal meaning refers to a sign, and connotation where the meaning is

suggested or implied by the sign. According to him, “the press photograph

is an object that has been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated

according to professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many

factors of connotation” (Image, Music, Text 31). The press photograph is

multifunctional and can be interpreted at different levels.

The Vietnam war was the war that was lost on TV. The media was

allowed to publish all kinds of images. During Vietnam the press was given

remarkable freedom to report the war without any government control.

Vietnam was the most heavily covered war in which reporters were not

subject to extensive censorship. The purpose of war photography has shifted

throughout the years. During earlier wars photos were purely used to inform

the public. Images were sent back to keep the public updated on what their

troops were doing. In contrast, recent war photography, due to censorship and

embedding, has become nothing more than propaganda. Staged and altered

shots are created in order to show the military in a positive light, thereby

limiting the offence they create to the viewing public.

Visual media constructs historical narratives in a similar way print

media constructs the past by producing a representation of reality. It is only

the medium that differs, not the way in which messages are produced. Visual

media uses visual semiotics in the combinatory relationships of visual signs

whereas verbal media applies social semiotics in similar cultural context. Like

the historical novel, the historical film draws attention to the range and nature

of the emplotment that constructs a reality of the past. In the postmodern

understanding, the boundaries between history and film blur and vanish. The

historians have explored the narrative strategies and fictive elements of

novelistic discourses in the writing of history. Filmmakers use the narrative

techniques of films to visualize history on the celluloid. Film theorists are

conscious that the barriers between fiction and documentaries disappear. They

rarely find any distinction between the visualized forms of historical fiction

and documentaries. As visual narratives, films and documentaries carry the

elements of subjectivity that their verbal versions also display. Historiophoty

deals with the simultaneous denotative and connotative functions of

photographs the combination of which emplots a historical narrative. Thus

film, documentary and photograph visually construct the past in identical

ways.