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Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. 308 pages. Paper, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-627-9.
What does a postmodernist history look like? In genre? In content? In argument? Is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian a postmodernist history? In Timothy Parrish's From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction, Parrish contends that "postmodernist histories have already been written and are being written by novelists" (17). Parrish's thesis is based on a number of sub-claims, heretofore argued and not. First, he contends that history is a narrative art, and that the "history" of the United States is not a unified history, as told by the historians who present ad nauseum the Founding Father type of popular histories that fill the best-seller lists. While these sub-claims are not new, what is new is Parrish's claim that American History, as a literary genre, has failed to evolve narratively since the Linguistic, Interpretive, and Rhetorical Turn(s) of Saussure, Semiotics, and Structuralism, and then, of Derrida and Poststructuralism. With Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Parrish notes, "academic readers [in the Humanities, excluding History] came to understand works of literature as exercises in writing that communicated an endless play of potential-but never fixed-meanings" (9). Further, he points out that the "realistic narrative model has been a museum piece since James Joyce" (19). Finally, per accepted postmodern theory, Parrish adds that history grand or finite can never be told objectively or non-ideologically (17). As such, "objective," chronologically-told histories of the popular sort are merely proto-modern realist narratives-fictions yet-that have failed to truth-tell or to evolve narratively, structurally, theoretically, or ideologically since the middle of the nineteenth century. The result is that the linear realistic narrative histories of the modern and postmodern eras exist as no more than anachronistic, out-of-genre, inaccurate, incomplete, and passé attempts at truth-telling; as Parrish argues, "contemporary popular historians have been working over the genre of nineteenth-century realist fiction and marketing it as history" (16). However, postmodern novelists have used-and are using-the construct of the postmodern novel as the optic through which history can be known and worthily preserved. Therefore, per Parrish's defining characteristics, Blood Meridian is indeed a postmodernist history, a novel-history.
Parrish argues that the proper...