SIGNIFICANT INSIGNIFICANCES: WINSTON SMITH’S DIARY AND OTHER RECLAIMED HISTORIES
SIGNIFICANT INSIGNIFICANCES: WINSTON SMITH’S DIARY AND OTHER RECLAIMED HISTORIES

Summary/Abstract: The construction of counter-narratives which reclaim and rename history by challenging hegemonic discourse cannot simply be a question of replacing one metanarrative with another. Genuine counter-narratives also challenge the category of “the historical” itself, blurring its parameters and making value-claims for what is often regarded as historically insignificant or marginal. In this chapter, I examine works by three authors – George Orwell, Charles Olson and Georgi Gospodinov – who, despite the diversity of their outlook, output and circumstances, exhibit a shared interest in the significance of the seemingly insignificant and in its potentiality as a foundation for ethical challenges to the assumptions and definitions of hegemonic metanarratives. Winston Smith’s diary in Orwell’s 1984, the autobiographical anecdotes, obscure historical documents and local mythology included in Olson’s Maximus Poems and the fragmentary texts of Gospodinov’s Всички нашите тела are discussed in relation to Kierkegaard’s notion of dignity in personal history, Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” and Auerbach’s discussion of modernism in Mimesis, which also serves to illuminate continuities between the different “epochs” of the modernist/post-modernist age as well as identifying a possible need to interrogate the way literary history itself is defined and narrated.

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