The purpose of this paper is first to define historiographic feminine
metafiction and then to examine the signification of Dictée through a genre
approach. Historiographic feminine metafiction is a counter-discourse to provide the
oppressed including women with discursive subjectivity against a hegemonic
patriarchal history. Dictée rewrites history from the view of those who have been
repeatedly deprived of their own voice and right of self-possession while it
establishes female poetics in taking female filial relationship and sexuality into
relief in the textual representation.
Historiographic metafiction is, as Linda Hutcheon formulates, a
self-conscious writing to question the absolute knowability of the past, and to
specify the ideological implications of historical representations by underlying the
problematized relations between history and fiction. The specific issues
historiographic metafiction raises include the nature of subjectivity, the interaction
of historiography and fiction, the question of referentiality, and the ideological
implications of writing. With these issues, Dictée challenges an official imperial
history to erase the hidden, resisting history of the colonized so that it can be
categorized as historiographic metafiction. However, Dictée has other prevailing
features which are scarcely found in typical historiographic metafictions such as
Kogawa's Obasan, Fowles's A Maggot, and Reed's Flight to Canada: fluidity,
polyvocity, and fragmented, rhythmic poetic languages. These features stem from a
disruptive excess of pre-oedipal mother-daughter relations and a feminine imaginary
suppressed by patriarchy, which French feminists assert to render l'ecriture
feminine. Represented in terms of multiple convergence of historiography, fiction,
and feminist writing, Dictée can be seen as a model of historiographic feminine
metafiction, a hypothetical genre.