Linda Hutcheon and the concept of historiographic metafiction

"Historiographic metafiction, like both historical fiction and narrative history, cannot avoid dealing with the problem of the status of their “facts” and of the nature of their evidence, their documents. And, obviously, the related issue is that of how those documentary sources are deployed: can they be objectively, neutrally related? Or does interpretation inevitably enter with narrativization?

The epistemological question of how we know the past joins the ontological one of the status of the traces of that past. Needless to say, the postmodern raising of these questions offers few answers, but this provisionality does not result in some sort of historical relativism or presentism. It rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts, in strong terms, the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. Nevertheless, it also realizes that we are epistemologically limited in our ability to know that past, since we are both spectators of and actors in the historical process."

HUTCHEON, Linda, “Poetics of Postmodernism”, New York, Routledge - Taylor&Francis Group, 2004, p. 122