“In the dream he was awake”: Ontological instability in James Robertson’s 'The Fanatic'

Abstract

Set in the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, James Robertson’s first novel The Fanatic (2000) is not only a powerful exploration of Scottish history and the interrelationships between past and present, but also an example of historical metafiction, concerned with the nature of historical and fictional reconstructions. As this article argues, the world model created in The Fanatic is characterized by inherent epistemological and ontological instability, visible at all levels of the text’s construction. The two plot lines, the seventeenth century past and the twentieth century present, initially set apart, increasingly blur and permeate each other until finally it is impossible to tell what is past and what is present, what is “real” and what re-constructed or imagined. The ontological status of the narrated events is equally unstable, as they often turn out to be false memories, hallucinations or delusions of the characters, while the fictionality of the characters is foregrounded by means of intertextual allusions. Finally, the status and reliability of the seemingly objective, heterodiegetic narrator becomes increasingly questionable as the story unfolds. Far from despairing of the possibility of offering a reliable historical reconstruction; however, the novel celebrates the very instability, which allows for constant imaginative reinterpretation and renewal of the past in the present, and of reality in fiction.