1. Back in Nam, I was one of those guys they called the Tunnel Rats — the ones small and thin enough to shinny down the camouflaged holes in the Cu Chi jungle and crawl on their bellies through the marshy-hot burrows twisting in near faultless darkness in a seventy-five-mile-long maze, rattle and pop of automatic fire above them, millipedes skittering over their arms.
   
   One June morning in 1970, I took a deep breath, clicked off the safety on my .45, and dropped down to find smack in front of me this ungodly
   
   No. Wait.
   
   Or was that the History Channel?
   
   
2. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Red Hot Chili Peppers about Californication: Space may be the final frontier/ But it’s made in a Hollywood basement.
   
   
3. What I mean to say is that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, innovative fiction is neither necessarily ahistorical nor dehistoricized. Rather, it continually questions our culture’s suppositions about what constitutes historical knowledge, embracing the counter-intuitive recognition that texts are simultaneously self-conscious linguistic and formal systems shut off from the world and active participants in larger sociopolitical contexts.
   
   
4. Once upon a time, Linda Hutcheon about postmodern fiction: It knows it cannot escape implication in the economic (late capitalist) and ideological (liberal humanist) dominants of the time. There is no outside. All it can do is question from within. It can only problematize what Barthes has called the "given" or "what goes without saying" in our culture. History, the individual self, the relation of language to its referents and of texts to other texts—these are some of the notions which, at various moments, have appeared as "natural" or unproblematically common-sensical. And these are what get interrogated (xiii).
   
   
5. In the good old days, of course, we had heard all this stuff before. That’s no longer the case. Take memoir. Someone somewhere (let us assume it was John Barth) once made or should have made the illuminating distinction between Boring Writing, on the one hand, and Boring Writing, on the other. The first adjective refers to compositions that are unselfconscious, predictable, tiresome, dull, formulaic; the second to compositions that bore: excavate, perturb, trouble, crawl on their bellies through twisting textual and experiential burrows precisely like I didn’t in Vietnam. Much memoir falls within the first class, believing or wanting to appear to believe that the genre is something other than it is—namely, truthful, accurate, insightful, self-aware. But memoir, a form of consoling narcissitic historical writing, finds its being, as do all forms of historical writing, as a subcategory of fiction—a special-case subcategory, yet a subcategory nonetheless. Although there are remarkable exceptions (David Shields, Shelley Jackson, W. G. Sebald), the memoir usually seems to want to demand for itself a privileged status with regard to evidence, personhood, and past. That is to say, it tends to behave as if it were oblivious of the theoretical implications and complications extant in its own genetic construction—how, for example, as Hayden White hypothesized in his examination of nineteenth-century historiography, the version of the past one chooses depends as much if not more so on moral and aesthetic values (and, I should add, the accidents called memory and sociopolitical circumstance) as it does on such notions as "fact" and "truth." That’s why the memoirist often reminds me of the television journalist leaning into blustery rain on a gray beach, hair whipping, jacket a giant mad blue bat flapping around him, Hurricane Katrina bearing down, shouting at the top of his lungs into his microphone: Boy, it sure is windy out here.
   
   
6. David Mitchell about the memoir’s spirit: The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting (286).
   
   
7. I am thinking of the ten stories in Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci’s Bicycle exploring the lives of Erza Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Nixon, among others—all inventors of a sort out of step with their times, all when seen through Davenport’s sensibility more excuses for the flash of stunning language and structural suggestive indirectness than Freudian character and Freytagian plot.
   
   
8. Or R. M. Berry’s Leonardo’s Horse, which engineers a double helix plotline, one about the tag end of the Leonardo’s botched life, and one about R—, an historian stuck in an L.A. traffic jam caused by an AIDS demonstration. R—’s master-project, a study of Leonardo, has, like so many of Leonardo’s undertakings, come to nothing, replaced by the novel he is writing on the subject, the one we are reading, that investigates history as unknowable fiction, fiction as unknowable history, the chronicles we must tell ourselves both as individuals and cultures to keep on keeping on.
   
   
9. Formerly. Previously. Time was. Time out of mind. Earlier. Hitherto. Heretofore. Yesterday. In the days of yore. I was born in 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. Where now? Who now? When now? In the beginning. In the beginning, sometimes I used to leave messages in the street. I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.
   
   
10. Dr. David Mitchell’s magnificent third novel, Cloud Atlas, comprised of eleven novella-length segments. Each of the first five tells a different story that breaks off at a pivotal point (once in mid-sentence). The sixth is self-contained. The first five are then continued and resolved, although in reverse order, so the book concludes inside the tale with which it began. Varying radically in tone, pacing, and content, each segment nonetheless dovetails in surprising ways with the others, revealing numerous harmonies, echoes, variations, metafictional winks. The initial one takes the form of a Melvillean journal by a devout American notary documenting his adventures in the South Pacific in the 1850s. Next comes a collection of letters by a young conniving British composer serving as amanuensis for a curmudgeonly has-been in Belgium in the 1930s. The third is a kitschy thriller about a journalist investigating a murderous conspiracy involving an unsafe nuclear plant in California in the 1970s. The fourth, about a vanity-press publisher locked away in a nursing home against his will in present-day England, is a Nabokovian send-up of pseudo-literary memoirs. The fifth jumps forward into a sterile Orwellian future, adopting the conventions of a slave narrative concerning a Korean clone’s insurgency against the ruling "corpocracy" which, in the final tale, collapses centuries later into an anarchic eco-nightmare described over a campfire by a tribal elder in a patois reminiscent in equal parts of A Clock Orange and Huck Finn. The only constant throughout is a Nietzschean will to power at the individual and cultural strata. In the end, Cloud Atlas thereby becomes a narrative about the willful act of narration, the ability of storytelling to shape our sense of identity and history, about how pastness is composed and decomposed, by whom, and for what purposes.
    
    
11. I am thinking of my new novel, Nietzsche’s Kisses, about Fritz’s last insane night on earth in August 1900, how the book endeavors to find its form in the philosopher’s cleaving consciousness as he endeavors to recollect his history on his deathbed. The novel’s structure mimics a backbroke Zarathustra in that there are four musical movements. Each is made up of three sub-sections: one told in first person, one in second, one in third. The first-person sub-sections mimic Nietzsche’s real-time attempts at thought when thought is no longer possible; the second-person one's his rambling fever dreams; the third-person his flagging stabs at narrativizing a life that has become as much hallucination as information. What drew me to him was Nietzsche’s vigorously contrarian mind, the brutally brilliant way he had of boring into a culture’s suppositions to test them, navigate the tunnels of social assumption to their minotaur moments. While I set out to learn what it felt like as that mind slowly unspooled, I actually discovered how historical fiction is an exercise in connecting imaginary time dots, a re-viewing of what may never have been, a revealing of the narrativity involved in creating the only sort of yesterday any of us can create: a staticky simulation.
    
    
12. What I mean to say is that postmodern historical fiction announces pastness as a story continually being rethought, re-visioned, rewritten.
    
    
13. That one can only write a past that wasn’t the past, much the same way that one can only write fictive presents that are constantly only about their absences.
    
    
14. That the objective of mimetic fiction is failing to write about the present, again and again.
    
    
15. That in as much as science fiction represents a sub-category of the alternate-universe narrative, it represents a subcategory of the alternate-history.
    
    
16. That in SF the future serves, not as future, but as an extended metaphor for the present. The past has much the same function in postmodern historical fiction.
    
    
17. What SF teaches us, not what the future will be like, but how the future will permanently remain unknowable. Historical fiction executes a similar function with respect to history and memory.
    
    
18. That the choices we make as writers among forms of historical representation gesture toward the choices we make as humans among forms of possible futures. That is, historical fiction teaches us how different the world has been and by implication how different the world can be. It serves as a reminding that authoring yesterday rhymes with authoring tomorrow.
19. Both authorings entail a process of exclusion. The line between now and then is an artificial one. All historians, all writers, are historical beings, yet many forget to historicize themselves, forget how history shapes their crafting of history.
    
    
20. The Discovery Channel. The Hollywood basement. The postmodern page, where everything is always-already something else.
    
    

References:

• Berry, R. M. Leonardo’s Horse. Normal, IL: FC2, 1997.
• Davenport, Guy. Da Vinci’s Bicycle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• -------------------. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Californication". Released June 1999.
• White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.