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Makale Özeti:
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Postmodern theory regards history as an imaginative
construction of the past, and suggests that historiography undergoes the
same process as fiction writing. The historian, just like a novelist, selects
some past events in accordance with her/his stated or unstated purpose while omitting others which s/he finds irrelevant to the message that s/he
aims to convey to the reader. S/He interprets these events subjectively by
taking her/his ideological commitment into consideration, and using
her/his imagination constructs a meaningful whole by filling the gaps
between these events. In this sense, history cannot truly reflect past
reality, and therefore cannot claim objectivity. In his novel Chatterton
(1987), Peter Ackroyd employs a working method strikingly similar to
that of a historian. He creates a fictional version of the famous poet
Thomas Chatterton’s life focusing on the gaps in his biography, and
filling these gaps with imaginary events, many of which seem to
contradict the official history regarding the poet. While writing the poet’s
personal history, he also highlights the process of historiography with the
purpose of making his reader aware of the blurring boundary between
history and fiction. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore possible
similarities between historiography and fiction writing within the frame of
Ackroyd’s Chatterton, and to examine the novel in the light of Linda
Hutcheon’s conceptualization of “historiographic metafiction.”
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