Hagiographic Commememorafiction in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé

In her landmark work A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon defines the now well-known category of what she has termed "historiographic metafiction" as "well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages" (5). Given the strong historical emphasis of Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and her more recent novel In the Name of Salome, it is not surprising that scholars have analyzed and discussed Alvarez's fictions in Hutcheon's terms. (1) But where the fictions that Hutcheon highlights in her study privilege an ironic, even parodic view of their past-made-present through fictive artifice (105-40), I contend that Alvarez's novels betray instead a stubborn earnestness, evidencing a desire not for parody but for the honorific treatment of their heroine subjects. As such, In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salome belong more properly to a category that I would name "hagiographic commemorafiction." Hagiographic commemorafiction, as I define it, blends historiographic metafiction's attention to the postmodern novel's recognition of its own artifice and to its idiosyncratic constructions of historical narrative with older, even pre-modern models of spiritual exempla: moralizing parables designed to provide examples worthy of readerly emulation. Thus hagiographic commemorafiction gives birth to a peculiar textual artifact, one that weds postmodern techniques of decentered narration, collage, and pastiche to age-old practices of hagiography that honor and "commemorate" saints without undermining its honorific mode through a postmodern use of irony. I would also argue that the textual monument created by hagiographic commemorafiction finally desires its real-life reiteration, both through readerly emulation of the heroism of "saints" in its text and perhaps even through the actual creation of physical monuments that echo the textual one. In Alvarez's case, at least one such physical monument has been raised with her involvement and endorsement, cementing the tie between Alvarez's commemorafictional text and the real-world commemoration in stone of the Mirabal sisters' posthumous victory over General Trujillo's tyrannical regime. (2) Perhaps the most important monuments that hagiographic commemorafiction creates, however, are the archives that guard and mediate any future discourse about the saints that its fictions honor; literal archives arise in both In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salome to carry out these protective and proscriptive functions. The idea that hagiography could freely emerge from Alvarez's two historical novels might seem unlikely since for some the saint-making impulse of hagiography runs counter to the fact-finding aims of traditionally-construed history. But Michel de Certeau identifies hagiography in his The Writing of History as a "variant" in historiography, a "literary genre" that "favors the actors of the sacred realm, 'saints,' and intends to edify, through 'exemplarity'" (269). De Certeau explains that hagiography, which at one level is "a written monument inspired by and destined to promote the worship of saints," has been "viewed too much from the angle of historical criticism and source studies, and thereby classed with legend" (26970). "It is also impossible," contends de Certeau, "to consider hagiography solely in terms of its 'authenticity' or 'historical value': this would be equivalent to submitting a literary genre to the laws of another genre--historiography" (270). At the center of this type of writing is the saintly hero of the work, or, the case of Alvarez's novels, three heroines in Butterflies and two in Salome. I again turn to de Certeau's characterization of hagiography: The tale is no less dramatic, but the only transformation concerns the progressive manifestation of a destiny. The successive places of the story are essentially divided between a time of trial (solitary struggles) and a time of glorification (public miracles), in a passage from a private to a public sphere. …