NARRATING THE WOUND:POSTMODERN FORMAL STRATEGIES AS POSTCOLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGY IN NADEEM ASLAM'S THE BLIND MAN'S GARDEN:A HUTCHEONIAN ANALYSIS OF HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION

Abstract

The article focuses on Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden (2013) and the theoretical approach of historiographic metafiction, and as elaborated in a prominent way in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) by Linda Hutcheon. Hutcheon sees historiographic metafiction in postmodern novels that were highly self-reflexive, but simultaneously claimed past events to question the nature of all historical knowledge. This article argues that this is an interesting and sustained example of Hutcheon's paradigm the concept of multiple modes of narration, temporal distance, meta-fictional reflexivity, and intertextual architecture which collectively attempts to “problematicise” the notion of history into 'the postmodern problematic of history' through the very formal strains of the novel genre that is novel. Based on careful textual analysis that attends to passages and page-by-page mapping, the article shows each Hutcheonian formal device operating as an independent epistemological device, providing a way to know the post-colonial trauma that linear realist narration does not. Finally, it suggests that The Blind Man's Garden is one of the most thoroughly realized South Asian anglophone South-east Asian fantasies of modern-day “Hutcheonian” historiographic metafiction.