21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past [1st ed.] 9783030418960, 9783030418977

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
US Historical Fiction Since 2000 (Ruth Maxey)....Pages 1-14
Front Matter ....Pages 15-15
Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream: James McBride’s Song Yet Sung (Judie Newman)....Pages 17-32
To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Michael Docherty)....Pages 33-52
Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction of Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy (James Peacock)....Pages 53-72
“Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (Clare Hayes-Brady)....Pages 73-91
Front Matter ....Pages 93-93
“We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed (Rachael McLennan)....Pages 95-110
“Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”: The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley (Villy Karagouni)....Pages 111-128
Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers (Aimee Pozorski)....Pages 129-147
Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction (Ruth Maxey)....Pages 149-169
Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Debra Shostak)....Pages 171-189
Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and the Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman (Rebecca Martin)....Pages 191-207
The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction (Mark West)....Pages 209-227
“What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and the Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia (Diletta De Cristofaro)....Pages 229-244
“To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres (DeLisa D. Hawkes)....Pages 245-263
Back Matter ....Pages 265-275

Citation preview

21st Century US Historical Fiction Contemporary Responses to the Past Edited by Ruth Maxey

21st Century US Historical Fiction

Ruth Maxey Editor

21st Century US Historical Fiction Contemporary Responses to the Past

Editor Ruth Maxey Department of American & Canadian Studies University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-41896-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41897-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Chris Hackett/Getty Images, Image ID: 555175279 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In loving memory of my grandparents, Fritz and Margaret Hillenbrand and William and Margaret Jordan

Acknowledgments

This collection has its origins in a one-day symposium, “Historical Fiction in the United States since 2000: Contemporary Responses to the Past,” held in March 2017. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham, UK, for its generous funding of this event. I am grateful to the team at Palgrave for all their assistance in publishing this book. Above all, I thank the contributors to this volume for their energy, enthusiasm, and patient commitment to the project. Their inspiring work takes this field forward in new and exciting ways.

vii

Contents

1

US Historical Fiction Since 2000 Ruth Maxey

1

Part I Imagining 19th-century America in Recent Historical Fiction 2

3

4

5

Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream: James McBride’s Song Yet Sung Judie Newman

17

To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad Michael Docherty

33

Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction of Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy James Peacock

53

“Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo Clare Hayes-Brady

73

ix

x

CONTENTS

Part II Representations of the 20th-Century United States 6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

“We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed Rachael McLennan “Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”: The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley Villy Karagouni

95

111

Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers Aimee Pozorski

129

Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction Ruth Maxey

149

Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer Debra Shostak

171

Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and the Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman Rebecca Martin

191

The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction Mark West “What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and the Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia Diletta De Cristofaro

209

229

CONTENTS

14

“To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres DeLisa D. Hawkes

Index

xi

245

265

Notes on Contributors

Diletta De Cristofaro is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham and a specialist in temporality and writings responding to twenty-first-century crises and anxieties. She has published widely on the contemporary apocalyptic imagination, including her first monograph, The Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times (Bloomsbury, 2019). Michael Docherty is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English and Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent. He has also worked as a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at California State University, Long Beach. His research principally explores intersections between race, masculinity, and mytho-history in twentieth-century and twentyfirst-century American literature. DeLisa D. Hawkes is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture and an affiliate faculty of the African American Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has articles forthcoming in MELUS and the North Carolina Literary Review, and her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century to twenty-firstcentury African American literature, critical race studies, historical fiction, passing novels, and visual culture. Clare Hayes-Brady is a Lecturer in American Literature at University College Dublin and the author of The Unspeakable Failures of David

xiii

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, now available in paperback). She is editor of the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Her research interests include medical humanities and narrative medicine, adolescence in contemporary fiction, and dystopian narrative. Villy Karagouni is a Lecturer at the Academy of Music & Sound in Glasgow. A classically trained musician, she has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. She has published on Jean Rhys and her current research centers on the relationship between music and text. She is also involved in a number of contemporary musical projects in Glasgow. Rebecca Martin is a graduate of Ryerson University’s Literatures of Modernity M.A. Program in Toronto. She is currently a Research Fellow at Ryerson’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her writing has appeared in The White Wall Review and The Yellow Nineties Online. Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Understanding Bharati Mukherjee (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and coeditor (with Paul McGarr) of India at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Rachael McLennan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Developing Figures: Adolescence in American Culture, Post-1950 (Palgrave, 2008); American Autobiography (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and In Different Rooms: Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature (Routledge, 2016). Judie Newman, O.B.E. is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Fellow of the British Association for American Studies. She has published 11 books and more than 100 critical essays on American and postcolonial fiction. Her Contemporary Fictions: Essays on American and Postcolonial Narratives is forthcoming from the Modern Humanities Research Association/Legenda in 2020. James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Keele University. He is the author of Understanding Paul Auster (University of South Carolina Press, 2010); Jonathan Lethem (Manchester University Press, 2012); and Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently researching contemporary fictions of gentrification. Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University and co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. She has authored Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (Continuum, 2011); Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014); and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (Lexington, 2019), and edited or co-edited volumes on Philip Roth, American Modernism, and HIV/AIDS representation. Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at the College of Wooster. She is the author of Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (University of South Carolina, 2004) and Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020), and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (Continuum, 2011). Mark West teaches at the University of Glasgow where he researches twenty-first-century American historical and ecological fiction. He has published articles on such contemporary North American writers as Joseph O’Neill, David Foster Wallace, and Emily St. John Mandel, and has work forthcoming on Lauren Groff. Currently at work on his first book, he is also an editor for the Glasgow Review of Books.

CHAPTER 1

US Historical Fiction Since 2000 Ruth Maxey

Historical novels in English belong to their own long tradition but in recent years the genre has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, reflecting “our current hunger for historical fiction” (Park 2018, 112). As Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou (2015) contend, “while the ‘history turn’ in the humanities has assumed an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in contemporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and intriguing manifestations” (1). Hilary Mantel, the British author of two Man Booker prize-winning historical novels—Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)—devoted her 2017 Reith Lectures to discussion of the genre, contending: “facts and alternative facts, truth and verisimilitude, knowledge and information, art and lies: what could be more timely or topical than to discuss where the boundaries lie?” (quoted in Quinn 2017). Mantel’s allusion to the Trump administration’s championing of false claims as so-called alternative facts can be linked to the subject of 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past —namely, the suspicion and skepticism toward “truth” of many

R. Maxey (B) Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_1

1

2

R. MAXEY

American historical novels published since 2000. As a genre, the historical novel invariably raises questions of evidence, authenticity, veracity, and authority (Stocker 2012, 309–10), issues that overlap with the narrativizing, sense-making work of the professional historian (compare Slotkin 2005, 223; White 2005). These questions are of particular interest at the present political and technological moment: if “historical novels are always political in their implications” (Slotkin 2005, 231), then we also live in a digital age where different forms of information—and “truth”—are so abundantly available that they should be appraised even more closely. 21st Century US Historical Fiction speaks directly to these issues, fulfilling the particular need for scholarly research into what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction.” Discussing contemporary British writing, she argues that the neo-historical novel “consciously re-interprets, rediscovers and revises key aspects of the period it returns to …these works are not set solely in the past, but conduct an active interrogation of that past” (2014, 2). Rousselot also discerns “clear continuities” between this subgenre and “the historiographic metafiction which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s …[through] similar postmodern preoccupations with questioning prevalent cultural ideologies” (1–2). Historiographic metafiction, as defined by Linda Hutcheon (1989), comprises novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their implicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic …Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the “world” and literature. (3–4)

The “neo-historical” turn that Rousselot identifies can be distinguished from this well-known model in that the contemporary fiction she examines is less “overtly disruptive …[and] carries out its potential for radical possibilities in more implicit ways” (2014, 5). For Rousselot, such neo-historical novels—with their inherent paradoxes and contradictions—occupy an ambiguous position vis-à-vis nostalgia, voyeurism, commodification, and consumption, offering a privileged First World reader a kind of “escapist fantasy” from the anxieties of a globalized present-day world through “a perception of the past as inferior …simultaneously an object of allure and repulsion, fascination and rejection

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

3

…[an] otherness as …‘spectacle,’ to be observed and enjoyed at a distance, and without accountability” (7–8). Many of these “neo-historical” characteristics can be applied to twentyfirst-century American historical fiction. After all, contemporary US writers employ an authorial mode that is questioning and skeptical, antipositivist and distrustful of so-called master narratives of history. Their work is also formally playful and often strongly intertextual. At the same time, it seems reductive to confer too specific a designation upon the rich panoply of recent US historical fiction, whether that be “historiographic metafiction” or the “neo-historical novel.” As Paul Wake (2016) notes, “while much recent critical commentary has been dedicated to the genre in its postmodern iteration, the historical novel demonstrates a range of characteristics and is itself subject to numerous subdivisions” (82). It is a branch of fiction known for its “formal hybridity …[where] little consensus exists about the principal forms [it] …has taken even within the same cultural and/or geographical context” (Harrison and Spiropoulou 2015, 2–3). Beyond this agreed formal hybridity, what, then, is distinctive about US historical fiction produced since 2000? As for earlier American writers working in this genre, the fictive subject matter is most often drawn from American history (compare Savvas 2011, 1) and reflects what Lois Parkinson Zamora (1997) terms an “anxiety of origins.” According to Zamora, this phenomenon impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of community) rather than escape from them (in the name of individuation); to connect to traditions and histories (in the name of a usable past) rather than dissociate from them (in the name of originality) …its textual symptoms are not caution or constraint …but rather narrative complexity and linguistic exuberance …Their search for origins may be ironic and at the same time “authentic,” simultaneously self-doubting and subversive. (1997, 5–6; emphasis in original)

Pace Zamora, the continuing bid to create a usable past comes from an anxiety that is richly generative. In many contemporary US historical novels, that past is a twentieth-century one, as writers grapple with modernity and rapid technological change. Within this twentieth-century timescale, they are more likely to turn to the 1960s than the 1940s—the latter decade being more characteristic of British historical fiction—and they

4

R. MAXEY

interrogate issues of race, war, and trauma in particularly American, but also more transnational ways: US fictions of elsewhere, such as novelists’ imaginative responses to global conflicts in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. And as Mark West argues about the 1960s novel in Chapter 12 of this collection, “post-postmodern writers” in the United States approach recent history in more intimate and less ironic ways as they confront a past that also, in some sense, represents their own personal memory and lived experience. In other words, their fiction uncovers a distinction between “the past …[which] is ontological …and history [which] is epistemological” (Savvas 2011, 2). That history is of course mediated through the lens and lessons of today’s world. Indeed, the novelistic emphasis upon warfare (see Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 13 of this volume) reflects what Joseph Darda (2015) calls “the narrative logic of permanent war” (82)—that is, decades of uninterrupted US warfare overseas. The fraught, complex, racially diverse roots of the contemporary United States also require further excavation as writers fruitfully return to the nineteenth-century nation: to the antebellum and postbellum periods and to the cities of an industrializing North, especially New York (see Chapter 4). In so doing, many of the American novelists considered in this collection complicate traditionally dominant conceptions of national identity by foregrounding minority voices and the vulnerable figure of the child. Thus they counter the erasure of marginalized peoples by exposing and recuperating hidden histories through fiction. This also leads to new forms of memorialization. US writers in the twenty-first century continue to question enduring mythologies since “at the core of culture is a continuous dialogue between myth and history, ‘plain invention’ and the ‘core of historical fact’” (Slotkin 2005, 229). Hence a number of the writers examined here critique white privilege, especially white male privilege. Some also question “compulsory heterosexuality” in Adrienne Rich’s phrase (1980; see Chapter 11). American historical fiction continues to be compellingly relevant because “writers …problematize issues by identifying the historicity of behaviors, motives, and beliefs …suggesting that presentist approaches are part of the suppression of underlying reality” (Byerman 2005, 9). Contemporary US historical novels are also exciting thanks to their formal experimentation, as many of the chapters in this collection reveal, and these literary techniques are, of course, inextricably connected to the ways in which particular themes are unsettled and contested. Polyphonic narration and a range of other narrative devices are engaged here to suggest the restoration of

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

5

lost voices, while some writers also play with chronology, upsetting readerly expectations of any putatively straightforward—linear, sequential, teleological—temporal framework. The energetic use of intertextuality enriches these works further and—recalling some of the characteristics of historiographical metafiction (Hutcheon 1989)—results in subversive counternarratives that write back to US political and cultural hegemony at home and abroad (see Chapter 10). A number of scholars have recently produced monographs or edited collections on contemporary works of historical fiction in English, reflecting the significance of the genre and its ever-growing appeal to different audiences. It is notable that these academic studies are primarily concerned with British novels.1 By contrast, some important scholarly works consider recent US historical fiction but they examine different writers and texts from the present study.2 In other words, there remains a clear gap in the currently available scholarly literature on recent historical novels from the United States and it is this gap that 21st Century US Historical Fiction fills. Providing some of the first critical insights into very recently published and prize-winning US works, some by first-time novelists—while also looking at the fiction of well-established American writers—leading and emergent scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Ireland analyze key examples of the US historical novel from recent years. Their essays ask how American novelists are examining the past and investigate the periods they are exploring. They also question why writers favor particular historical eras—for instance, antebellum America or the long 1960s—over others. The 13 main chapters in this volume are organized chronologically, beginning with fiction set in the 1840s and ’50s. These chapters concern recent novels by canonical writers such as the late E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth, and well-known literary figures including Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Joyce Carol Oates, and George Saunders. They also consider such new novelists as David Means and Viet Thanh Nguyen and tackle some of the most prominent and provocative contemporary illustrations of US historical fiction: for example, Anthony Doerr’s World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See (2014); Nguyen’s Vietnam War narrative, The Sympathizer (2015); and Colson Whitehead’s reclamation of US slavery, The Underground Railroad (2016)—all recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—and the critically lauded neo-Victorian fiction of Lyndsay Faye.

6

R. MAXEY

Part I, “Imagining 19th-Century America in Recent Historical Fiction,” begins with Judie Newman’s chapter on James McBride’s novel Song Yet Sung (2008). Set in 1850 on Maryland’s eastern shore, the novel dissects the relation between history and popular myth, and the legitimacy of African American folklore as an empowering, imaginative resource. Controversially, in plot and symbolic structure, McBride exploits the “Quilt Code,” the secret instructions supposedly sewn into quilts to aid escaped slaves. Although roundly condemned by academic historians as a hoax, the Quilt Code remains an example of fakelore, a synthetic product claimed as an authentic oral tradition and used as the basis of classroom lessons, museum exhibits, public artworks, and children’s literature. Newman argues that if McBride mythologizes, he also demythologizes by recreating two women from American folklore: the Dreamer, an escaped slave based upon Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad; and Patty Cannon, historically notorious stealer of free blacks, operating an Underground Railroad in reverse. Newman contends that while McBride questions both official and oral narratives, his novel validates the vital role of the imagination in historical critique. In Chapter 3, “To ‘Refract Time’: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” Michael Docherty examines this acclaimed 2016 novel, contending that Whitehead challenges us to rethink definitions of the “historical novel,” since—embedded within a familiarly “real” setting, the antebellum South of historical record—he creates an underground railroad that is a literal subway and events that are frequently (and deliberately) inaccurate historically. Through these spatiotemporal anomalies, Whitehead “shape-shifts and refracts time and history” (Winfrey 2016). Docherty asks whether Whitehead’s creative, flexible approach to history generates a usable past (or projects a future) from its subject matter in ways that more “conventional” historical fiction could not. On this basis, however, he also wonders if Whitehead’s novel can or should be regarded as historical fiction at all, suggesting that the author instead offers what one might call “magical history.” This leads him to consider the significance of genre—“popular” historical fiction versus “elite” literary fiction—in Oprah Winfrey’s public championing of The Underground Railroad and to a discussion of the paratextual apparatus that shaped the novel’s early critical and popular reception. James Peacock’s chapter examines Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham trilogy of bestselling historical thrillers set in New York City in the 1840s.

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

7

Each offers the reader an appetizing mixture of Grand Guignol violence, political intrigue, sentimentality, and apocalyptic conflagration. Peacock analyzes the depiction of childhood in the trilogy, arguing that the ambiguities of these representations reflect both the vicissitudes of thinking about children through history and the inherent tensions of the historical novel in its need to speak simultaneously to past structures of feeling and to the contemporary moment. If children have long been sites of ideological contestation—variously conceived of as precious innocents, Dionysian vessels for original sin, and morally superior creatures—then Faye’s fictional children, imagined post-Freud within a pre-Freudian social environment, are pulled in many directions. They move between myth and material reality, innocence and experience, sentimentality and commodity, between—in the context of the historical novel—their present and the contemporary present of the readership, and so between multiple, competing constructions of childhood in different historical periods. Peacock argues that the time of the historical novel is also vulnerable: Faye’s mid-nineteenth century exists in an uneasy dependent relation, perhaps inevitably, with the post-9/11 era of the novel’s writing and readership. Completing this first section is Clare Hayes-Brady’s chapter, “‘Everyone, We Are Dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo,” which explores Saunders’ award-winning first novel as both a work of historical fiction and an experimental tour de force. Hayes-Brady argues that, although Lincoln in the Bardo was critically received as a radical departure in form and focus from the familiar working-class latecapitalist lens of the author’s short stories, it actually continues the themes and strategies of Saunders’ earlier work, offering at its heart a sharply contemporary vision of a divided society. After situating the novel in the context of contemporary historical fiction, this chapter offers a close reading of the novel’s unusual construction, demonstrating that its symphonic narrative structure posits and reinforces the work’s central thematic concerns. By foregrounding so many voices, and effectively leveling every utterance, Saunders invites us to consider history, memory, and truth in the context of death: the unavoidable event that universalizes human experience. Yet he simultaneously demonstrates that even in death, there are vestigial striations of privilege and power mediated through language and narrative control. Part II, “Representations of the 20th-Century United States,” starts with two chapters by Rachael McLennan and Villy Karagouni. In

8

R. MAXEY

McLennan’s chapter, she argues that in Oates’s baffling, enormous novel The Accursed (2013), the undecidability of genre is key to an understanding of the text, which employs, deconstructs and parodies a number of conventions of historical fiction in its recounting of seemingly supernatural events. Responding to the lack of critical attention this ambitious novel has received, McLennan contends that Oates’s genre-defying exploration of mysterious happenings in early twentieth-century Princeton, New Jersey, is conducted in order to explore some of her most central concerns—principally the explicit and implicit violence of power as it relates to gender and race in America—as these concerns complicate or compromise the act of telling stories about history. And she shows that through such concerns, the novel can be read as a cautionary message to twenty-first-century America. In Chapter 7, “‘Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens’: The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley,” Karagouni argues that music is a system of central historical and narrative signification in Doctorow’s 2009 novel. She posits that Doctorow brings together popular and highbrow musical styles and their corresponding ideologies, exploring the multilayered relationship of sound to the moving image and highlighting the interplay between different forms of narrativization. In the novel’s closing pages it is revealed that the blind narrator-protagonist Homer Collyer’s narrative has in fact been recorded in writing with the help of several Braille typewriters. Moreover, it emerges that the written word has come to replace Homer’s active engagement with music in his final years, as his hearing diminishes and eventually deteriorates altogether. Karagouni demonstrates that—far from being a mere stylistic or allusive feature—music emerges as a pivotal narrative motif and explicit intertext in Homer and Langley. The next three chapters—by Aimee Pozorski, Ruth Maxey and Debra Shostak—examine recent US fictions of war. In Chapter 8, “Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers,” Pozorski notes the “third-generation survivors,” a generation removed from the Holocaust and drawing upon archival research in their fictional writing. Her essay develops this question of the Holocaust archive in relation to two recent American bestsellers about World War II: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015), novels grounded in historical research: a process both authors emphasize in their book

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

9

tours. What does it mean for authors from the Midwest and the West Coast, respectively, to pursue the Holocaust as the topic of their fiction, fiction that depends upon the scholarly enterprise of the past and a hope for the memory of the Holocaust into the future? Through close readings of the novels’ achronological representations of time and the figure of a vulnerable child, Pozorski argues that these twenty-first-century American bestsellers reflect a cultural trauma we have yet to confront: trauma that grows out of both willful ignorance during the early parts of the Nazi genocide and a failure adequately to help refugees upon the war’s end. My own chapter, “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction,” asks why such different writers as Philip Roth and Chang-rae Lee have produced fictional responses to the Korean War in the past 10 years. Comparing the US-centrism of Roth’s campus novel Indignation (2008) with Lee’s much lengthier, intergenerational Korea-based novel The Surrendered (2010), this essay explores the diverse literary strategies used to render the war and its aftermath. While Roth and Lee address the conflict by writing about it through a specific ethnic and racial lens, they display a fundamental discomfort with representing the war itself. Roth depicts it as an absent presence through such techniques as prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, metonymy, and experimental narration. Lee’s novel also handles the Korean War with caution and detachment, deploying the events of 1950–1953 as a framing device to tell a larger, transnational, post-conflict tale of US imperialism, expatriation, and the white American adoption of Korean children. I question what kind of usable past these writers create through their Korean War novels and to what extent they shed new light on the so-called forgotten war. In Chapter 10, “Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer,” Shostak argues that a white, Western father’s failure to recognize his “illegitimate,” “half-breed” son in Nguyen’s satirical The Sympathizer (2015) allegorizes the untold Vietnamese story of the Vietnam War in American fiction of the postwar period. She explores the manner in which the unnamed, unreliable narrator, son of a French missionary and a Vietnamese woman he raped, uses his doubleness/duplicity to construct a riddle of sameness/otherness within the discourse of his life story, allowing Nguyen to illuminate the problem of representation at the core of the violence perpetrated against the Vietnamese, deprived of authority over their identities and traumatic histories. Shostak’s chapter traces Nguyen’s thick texture of allusion to

10

R. MAXEY

American high and popular culture, within which the narrator rewrites the novel of recent American history through irony and parody—in a kind of displaced oedipal patricide—as revenge against and reparation for misrepresentation and lack of recognition. In considering works that re-imagine the long 1960s, Rebecca Martin and Mark West use their chapters to assess the recent return to this period by Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Christopher Sorrentino, and Dana Spiotta. Martin’s chapter, “Queering the Lost Year: Transcription and the Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman,” analyzes Choi’s 2003 novel and its reimagining of Patricia Hearst’s (the fictional Pauline’s) “lost year” from the perspective of Wendy Yoshimura (fictionalized as Jenny Shimada). As the characters in Choi’s novel live in symbiotic isolation, their images circulate widely in the public sphere. Drawing from Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” as well as Jack/Judith Halberstam’s essay “Shadow Feminisms,” Martin examines the intense bond of survival that develops between Jenny and Pauline within a fugitive space. She argues that, by foregrounding the difficulties of attempting to connect to another person through mediated forms such as letters, photographs, or even acts of violence captured on film, Choi reveals the problematics of connecting through any language. In American Woman, the most potent relationship in the novel is the queer one that exists beyond definitive borders or marked history. West’s chapter, “The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Postpostmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction,” charts the attempt by recent American writers to reappraise and historicize the social, political, and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, particularly the extended period between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the end of the Vietnam War. Although this period has attracted writers from different generations, West’s essay focuses upon authors whose sensibility and attempts at temporal experimentation might be described as “post-postmodern.” Offering brief accounts of novels by Egan, Spiotta, and Sorrentino, West considers their work in the context of recent scholarship on neo-historical fiction, showing how their treatment of the period reveals their understanding of history and temporal experience and arguing that a return to the 1960s becomes a way to reassess postmodernism and tentatively mark out a “post-postmodern” aesthetics. Turning to alternative historical and speculative fiction, Diletta De Cristofaro and DeLisa D. Hawkes offer chapters that investigate recent

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

11

novels by David Means and Dwayne Alexander Smith respectively. De Cristofaro’s “‘What’s the Plot, Man?’: Alternate History and the Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia” situates this 2016 novel within the context of critical debates and theories about alternative historical fiction. Set in a world in which President Kennedy survives several assassination attempts and pursues the Vietnam War in his third term, Means’ novel provides a fertile example of the relationship between alternate history and the postmodern turn in historiography. De Cristofaro argues that in foregrounding the narrative nature of history, Hystopia shows how privileging certain historical narratives as objective over others can prop up and legitimize power structures. She maintains that the novel exposes the constructedness of history as orderly and meaningful by drawing attention to the mode of emplotment based on the sense of an ending and exposing how this retrospective deterministic patterning of the temporal sequence undermines historical agency. In the last chapter, “‘To Avenging My People’: Speculating Revenge for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres,” Hawkes explores Smith’s 2014 thriller which pushes against traditional historical and speculative fiction by questioning which realities are possible if people try to “fix” rather than merely critique history. Black rage, or “black noise” in the novel, represents a psychological extension of US slavery in the twenty-first century that results in adverse realities for black Americans. The only way that the characters in Forty Acres can be cured from “black noise” is to return to the moment where the illness began by avenging their ancestors who were captured and enslaved through the establishment of a secret society of successful black men who kidnap and enslave white people. Drawing on legal theories of revenge and retribution as empowerment strategies, Hawkes’ essay examines Forty Acres as a “speculative revenge narrative” or one that imagines a solution to historical problems that fall out of line with current legal and social understandings of the real world. She asks how one can decide who is a worthy recipient of punishment, how Smith engages with speculative fiction to tell this story, and how the text considers US slavery and its complex aftermath. No collection of this kind can hope to be comprehensive. There are, for instance, no chapters covering Native American or Latinx fiction. And rather than revisiting the heavily researched historical fiction of Toni Morrison, William Styron, or Cormac McCarthy, to name a few notable examples, contributors turn their attention to post-2000 novels that have

12

R. MAXEY

received little scholarly notice to date, yet compel further reading and interpretation. These are literary works that push US historical fiction in new directions, both formally and thematically. Investigating periodization, theoretical terms such as “post-postmodernism,” and notions of genre, the scholars in this collection demonstrate the emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse array of key American writers. As an original, groundbreaking, and wide-ranging collection of essays, 21st Century US Historical Fiction offers a unique contribution to this growing academic field through its particular combination of writers and texts and, as a collection, through its specifically US focus.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Wallace (2005), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010), Adiseshiah and Hildyard (2013), Mitchell and Parsons (2013), and Rousselot (2014). Cooper and Short (2012) also consider Australian and Canadian writers, as does Hulan (2014), while Brantly (2017) provides a European focus. 2. These studies include Byerman (2005), Swirski (2009), Gauthier (2011), Nunes (2011), and Savvas (2011). Only the works by Swirski and Savvas contain any overlap with this collection since they offer chapters on Philip Roth and E. L. Doctorow respectively. But the Roth and Doctorow novels considered by David Rampton in Swirski’s edited volume (see Rampton 2009) and by Savvas (2011) in his monograph are earlier ones: Roth’s American trilogy—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), and The March (2005). De Groot (2010) makes reference to several US historical novels, but his textual examples are again quite distinct from the ones in this collection; Boulter 2011 discusses Paul Auster, but no other US writers; and in Rousselot (2014), there is just one essay on an American writer, Michael Chabon.

Bibliography Adiseshiah, Siân, and Rupert Hildyard, eds. 2013. Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Boccardi, Mariadele. 2009. The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

1

US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000

13

Boulter, Jonathan. 2011. Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel. London: Continuum. Brantly, Susan. 2017. The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era Presenting the Past. New York: Routledge. Byerman, Keith. 2005. Remembering the Past in African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cooper, Katherine, and Emma Short, eds. 2012. The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Darda, Joseph. 2015. “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War.” American Literature 87 (1): 79–105. De Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. Abingdon: Routledge. Gauthier, Marni. 2011. Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory. New York: Palgrave. Harrison, Christine, and Angeliki Spiropoulou. 2015. “Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature.” Synthesis 8: 1–13. Hulan, Renée. 2014. Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains. New York: Palgrave. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, 3–32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mitchell, Kate, and Nicola Parsons, eds. 2013. Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nunes, Ana. 2011. African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. New York: Palgrave. Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. 2018. “Korean American Literature.” In A Companion to Korean American Studies, edited by Rachael Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, 105–27. Leiden: Brill. Quinn, Ben. 2017. “Historical Fiction and ‘Alternative Facts’ …Mantel Reveals All About Retelling Our Past.” The Observer. May 21. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/20/hilary-mantel-swaps-historicalfiction-alternative-facts-radio-4. Rampton, David. 2009. “Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and TwentiethCentury American History.” In I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Peter Swirski, 12–46. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5: 631–60. Rousselot, Elodie. 2014. “Introduction: Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction.” In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary NeoHistorical Fiction, edited by Elodie Rousselot, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

14

R. MAXEY

Savvas, Theophilus. 2011. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Slotkin, Richard. 2005. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9 (2/3): 221–36. Stocker, Bryony. 2012. “‘Bygonese’—Is This Really the Authentic Language of Historical Fiction?” International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 9 (3): 308–18. Swirski, Peter, ed. 2009. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wake, Paul. 2016. “‘Except in the Case of Historical Fact’: History and the Historical Novel.” Rethinking History 20 (1): 80–96. Wallace, Diana. 2005. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave. White, Hayden. 2005. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9 (2/3): 147–57. Winfrey, Oprah. 2016. “Oprah Talks to The Underground Railroad Author Colson Whitehead.” O, The Oprah Magazine, August. http://www.oprah. com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-interview-with-colson-whitehead. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. 1997. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Imagining 19th-century America in Recent Historical Fiction

CHAPTER 2

Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream: James McBride’s Song Yet Sung Judie Newman

James McBride’s commitment to historical writing is evident right through his literary career, beginning with his prize-winning memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996) which spanned the 1920s to the 1990s and revealed that his mother Ruth began life as Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, the daughter of an orthodox rabbi in the American South, an immigrant from Poland. When she married an African American in 1942, she was immediately treated as dead by her family. McBride was her eighth child, born after his father died, and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, eventually one of 12 children. The memoir alternates between McBride and his mother and was an immediate bestseller, partly because of its utopian post-racial message. When McBride asks his mother whether God is black or white, she replies that “God is the color of water” (McBride 1996, 51), which, of course, does not have a color. When interviewed, McBride himself argued that “we’re all pretty much the same” (quoted in Trachtenberg 2008). His

J. Newman (B) Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_2

17

18

J. NEWMAN

first novel, Miracle at Sant’Anna (2002), an account of the African American “Buffalo” soldiers and the campaign of the 92nd infantry in Italy in 1944–1945, was designed to demonstrate that “all Germans were not bad, nor all Americans good” (Trachtenberg 2008). Similarly, “just because you’re a descendant of a slave owner, you’re no less worthy. And just because you’re the descendant of a slave that doesn’t mean you’re right” (Trachtenberg 2008). It is a comment which bears interestingly on Song Yet Sung (2008), McBride’s second novel, in which Martin Luther King descends from the child of one of the less heroic slave characters, whose survival depends upon the power of the gun of a white slave owner. If the satirical, rumbustious, tragicomic treatment of John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid in The Good Lord Bird (2013) bears witness to McBride’s irreverent treatment of history, Song Yet Sung gives the demythologizing impulse full rein. Set in 1850 on Maryland’s eastern shore, the novel interrogates the relation between history and popular myth and explores the legitimacy of African American folklore as an empowering, imaginative resource. Controversially, in plot and symbolic structure, McBride exploits the “Quilt Code” (secret instructions supposedly sewn into quilts to aid escaped slaves). In 2007, plans were unveiled for the Frederick Douglass Circle Memorial in Central Park which involved an eight-foot sculpture of Douglass and an array of squares, each of which represented a symbol, supposedly part of a secret Quilt Code. Historian David Blight immediately condemned the code as “a myth bordering on a hoax” (Cohen 2007), and battle was joined between academic and oral historians. Despite the absence of any reliable historical evidence, the code remains the basis of classroom lessons, museum exhibits, public artworks, and children’s literature. Defenders argued that the code embodied both oral and women’s history, as opposed to official history, and that academic historians needed to take that on board (Brackman 2006, 7). Song Yet Sung introduces the code, with an explicit reference to the untrustworthiness of white words, as the enslaved Woman with No Name describes it to Liz Spocott, the Dreamer. The woman has no name because “whatever name was gived me was not mine. Whatever I knowed about is what I been told. All the truths I been told is lies, and the lies is truths” (McBride 2008, 17). The code is described as involving scratching a crooked line in the dirt, because evil travels in straight lines; double wedding rings; five knots (North, South, East, West, and free); and the song which has to be sung twice. She continues “the coach wrench turns

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

19

the wagon wheel. The turkey buzzard flies a short distance. And he’s hidden in plain sight. The blacksmith is handling marriage these days. Don’t forget the double wedding rings and the five points. And it ain’t the song, it’s the singer of it. It’s got to be sung twice, y’know, the song. That’s the song yet sung” (18). In his “Acknowledgments,” McBride mentions Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (1999) by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard as “required reading for anyone interested in how the Underground Railroad functioned” (357). Tobin and Dobard’s book was enormously influential, with its argument that slaves made quilts with secret messages in them, in code. A quilt might be hung outside a “safe house” on the Underground Railroad, for example, or used as some sort of signal. Quilts are knotted and much was made of the symbolism of knotting (important in some African symbolic systems). Five knots supposedly protected travelers. Reference was made in the book to the important role of blacksmiths (often cultural leaders in African secret societies) and the noise of their hammering (recalling African communication by drumming), which whites might well ignore, along with most women’s day-to-day activities, such as quilt airing. Particular patterns meant different things, the monkey wrench pattern suggesting the need to collect tools for escape, for example. (The wrench is used by blacksmiths to turn the wagon wheel.) The wagon wheel pattern referred to the escape, the Drunkard’s Path to the need to travel in a zigzag way, by an indirect route, the Flying Geese to the route North, the Log Cabin to a place of safety, and the double rings referred to chains (or to bells ringing or the ringing of hammer on anvil). The authors buttressed their case by analogies with the use of songs to carry messages undetected, as has been suggested in the case of spirituals which may encompass messages of protest, solidarity, or even, potentially, instruction. “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” for example, has been interpreted as communicating how to find the north by the stars, by locating the big dipper. “Wade in the Water” has been connected to throwing dogs off the scent, and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” seen as referring to the Underground Railroad (Bordewich 2007). While musicologists disagree about the dating and interpretation of particular songs, novelists have dramatized the use of song in this fashion from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of “Steal Away to Jesus” in Dred (1856) to the use of “Tell me sister, tell me brother” in a slave revolt in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986). McBride dedicated Song Yet Sung to Moses Hogan,

20

J. NEWMAN

the African American composer known for his settings of spirituals. Himself a saxophonist and composer, McBride has described how he grew up “playing many of these songs, that pointed the way to freedom” (Seltzer 2008). Dobard and Tobin also referred to Harriet Tubman—known as the “Moses” of her people, leading them out of bondage on the Underground Railroad—who often communicated by song (Larson 2004, 188). Her “all clear” signal was “Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits,” but fugitives in hiding were cautioned to wait until the song had been sung twice before it was safe to come out of hiding. If she sang “Moses, go down in Egypt,” they had to stay hidden. Tubman, who came from the eastern shore, worked with a timber gang and as a result was well-acquainted with the covert communication networks of Maryland watermen, slaves, and free blacks (Larson 2004, 65). The Quilt Code itself nonetheless remains an example of what Richard M. Dorson (1950) has called fakelore, a synthetic product claimed as an authentic oral tradition, often tailored for mass edification. There was an explosion of interest in quilts and quiltmaking in the 1970s, influenced by Afrocentrism and women’s studies. The first mention of a Quilt Code appears in 1987 (Fellner 2006) and its popularity has been traced to a children’s book, Deborah Hopkinson’s Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt (1993). Clara, a slave, maps her plantation in various ingenious ways and makes a quilt to help other slaves escape after her. There are no arcane symbols, merely a representation of the plantation and surrounding landscape features, a hidden boat on the Ohio River and the North Star at the top. In her second book, however, Under the Quilt of Night (2002), Hopkinson introduces a quilt as marking a safe house, an idea also employed by Courtni C. Wright in Journey to Freedom (1994), another children’s book. Tobin and Dobard got their “facts” from one informant, a woman who sold quilts to tourists, telling them stories to increase sales (Fellner 2006). The historical evidence is unsubstantiated. Many of the patterns mentioned as symbolic are anachronistic (dating from after the Civil War, and as late as the 1930s). Although abolitionists did sell “North Star” cradle quilts in anti-slavery bazaars to raise money for the fight against slavery, and Harriet Tubman gave a quilt to a woman who helped her to freedom, there are very few surviving slave quilts and no coded images in them. No slave narratives, no slave letters, no WPA accounts of slavery contain any references to a Quilt Code. The idea that slaves (mostly not particularly well-clothed) would have the time and materials for making

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

21

their own quilts seems unconvincing. Quilts use two layers of fabric and a great deal of thread. The Underground Railroad was cellular and the idea of a code known by many people is similarly unlikely. Practically speaking, quilts are fairly unworkable as code-carriers. How, from hiding, was an escaped slave supposed to get close enough to a quilt to read its symbols? Especially in darkness? Moreover, most slaves escaped from the border states and hardly needed a complex code to help them. As McBride himself points out, freedom was less than eighty miles away from his setting in Maryland: “in Annapolis on a clear day, a colored boy could climb a tree and practically look out on Philadelphia” (McBride 2008, 104). This is not to devalue the importance of oral history, especially for African Americans. William Lynwood Montell famously reconstructed the story of the no-longer-existent black community in South Kentucky from oral sources (Montell 1970), and Gladys-Marie Fry demonstrated that stories about “night doctors” were a clue to the ways in which slave owners terrorized slaves to keep them on the plantation with tales of night riders who would sell their bodies to medical schools (Fry 1975). The existence of Jefferson’s slave children was dismissed and ignored despite the oral history, until DNA proved their descent. (Dobard appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show with Jefferson’s descendants.) But the Quilt Code is not genuine. Its presence in the Central Park memorial would put Frederick Douglass on the same mythical plane as Washington and the cherry tree. Above all, it devalues the real hardship of slave escapes, the documented evidence of courage, resourcefulness and determination, and the hunger, fear, illness, betrayal, and bad weather on the road to freedom. The code is nonetheless very appealing to contemporary audiences, as are stories of the Underground Railroad. As James Horton argues, the Underground Railroad offers a real Hollywood story: “everyone gets to be a hero” (quoted in Brackman 2006, 8). Whites are helpful; blacks have agency and triumph in the end. The code puts a premium on intellectual prowess, rather than physical endurance, minds not bodies, conveying a sense of clever blacks with their own symbolic systems, getting the better of dumb whites who cannot see what is right in front of their own eyes. It corrects the whole notion of “stupid” slaves and shows that they are better readers of signs than whites. Even better, it involves a cozy sentimental artifact and a puzzle element. It is eminently suitable for children (and for classroom activities) and represents a continuity of family heritage, a link back to the slave past. As Fergus M. Bordewich, an expert on the Underground Railroad, commented when reviewing the novel, “myths deliver

22

J. NEWMAN

us the heroes we crave, and submerge the horrific reality of slavery in a gilded haze of uplift” (Bordewich 2007). There are now some 15 different versions of the code circulating, and it features in bestselling children’s books where its intrinsic visual elements are an added attraction. Children’s books tend to favor Afrocentric elements and pride in heritage. A good example is Bettye Stroud’s The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom (2005) in which young Hannah learns to sew the secret code into the quilt and she and her father use its instructions to escape. The symbols are handsomely illustrated and glossed from the beginning, and associated with African culture. Hannah’s escape, for example, takes her to a church where she hides under a floor covered in mysterious carved signs, from which she escapes by tunnel to a river, following its bed upstream to Canada. This is recognizably the First African Baptist church in Savannah, built by slaves and known for its “Congolese” cosmogram carvings. Its position close to the wharves of a busy port city is obscured in the tale. Children’s books tend to situate escapes in rural areas, even though many slaves escaped to cities. Inevitably, and understandably, they also protect their readers from exposure to the more traumatic elements of the story, and in this respect, fantasy and folklore are usefully deployed (Connolly 2013). In many respects, children’s books explore not only what slavery was in history but also what it still is in American society and culture. Slavery is not a closed event. As a result, quilts are ever-present in all sorts of plot variations. Marcia Vaughan’s The Secret to Freedom (2001) tells the story of a 10-year-old slave girl whose brother, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, gives her a whole sack of quilts which she uses to help slaves escape. In Clarice Boswell’s Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journey to Freedom (2002), the secret quilt patterns are introduced to the slaves by abolitionists. Faith Ringgold’s Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) translates the Underground Railroad into an actual engine and carriages conducted by Harriet Tubman, and features a quilt as the sign of a safe house. Just as Ringgold’s book has carried forward into Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008) where the London Underground is the secret route to freedom, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) which involves real platforms, rails, and trains, so the Quilt Code has permeated American culture via children’s books. The puffing steam trains of the Underground Railroad are clearly marked in stories as a fantasy motif, but the same is not true of the Quilt Code. Indeed, the story has snowballed from fiction into

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

23

fact. The Plymouth Historical Museum, in Plymouth, Michigan, ran an exhibition Quilts of the Underground Railroad for five years. Six thousand schoolchildren viewed it. In Kingston, Ontario in 2004, a family made a corn maze, through which visitors were guided by a Quilt Code (Fellner 2006). The residents of Stony Brook were reported in 2005 as claiming that local Native Americans also used Quilt Codes, to help slave fugitives, and assertions have even been made that Jews hung quilts to warn of Nazi dangers—a claim dismissed in 2006 by Severin Hochberg, senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as completely without foundation (Fellner 2006). The spread of the Quilt Code story offers historians a rare opportunity to watch a historical myth unfurl in real time. Yet despite vigorous challenges, no historian has been able to prevent its spread. It has captured the public imagination and clearly says something about our culture’s distrust of the official line, our fascination with codes and visual symbols, and our need for a positive spin on past horrors. Rather like Brer Rabbit, the story has a strong trickster element in which the powerless fool the powerful, an abiding motif in folklore which provides a basis for challenging the larger social order. McBride is, of course, not a historian but a novelist and one might argue that he should be perfectly free to use whatever myths he chooses. James Stevens contested Dorson’s condemnation of fakelore, maintaining that artists have always drawn imaginative inspiration from folklore, just as Marlowe and Goethe did with Faust, or Byron with Don Juan, or Washington Irving with Rip Van Winkle. McBride himself has remarked that “the musings of scholars never stopped writers from drawing plot, content, and character from disputed history to power the muscle of their imaginations” (2008, 357). He went on to complain that Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936), required reading for his daughter’s ninth grade class, portrays African Americans as “babbling idiots and bubbleheads,” but that “I recall no current literary wave challenging that author’s license to let loose her imagination” (357). His own novel makes wholesale use of the code. Song Yet Sung follows the fortunes of Liz Spocott, an escaped slave, pursued by Denwood Long, a slave catcher employed by her owner, and Patty Cannon, a notorious stealer of free blacks whose henchman Liz has killed, triggering a mass slave escape. The plot is structured around a series of pursuits, with Liz variously helped or hindered by other characters, including Kathleen Sullivan, a slave owner sympathetic to her three slaves, Amber, Wiley, and

24

J. NEWMAN

Mary, and the Woolman, a monstrously huge, black wild-man-of-thewoods, whose son is taken by whites, and who then steals Kathleen’s son as a hostage. In the action, McBride deploys most of the elements from Tobin and Dobard’s account: quilts, songs, double rings, blacksmith’s signals, knots, a crooked line scratched in the dirt, and an emphasis on uncomprehending whites unable to see what is being signaled right in front of their eyes. When Liz escapes, she encounters a slave and draws a crooked line in the dirt to gain his trust. When she rescues Woolman’s son from a muskrat trap, he leaves her food and supplies in a sack tied with a rope with five knots. When Sarah leaves food for Big Linus, another escapee, she ties five knots into her boat’s rope, with a collar running East to West tied around each. The direction means that it is unsafe to come out of hiding. Linus cannot remember the code, however, and is shot dead. Amber hides Liz and tells her to wait for a man with no name singing a song without words—his uncle, humming. Liz is eventually hidden by the blacksmith, shown tapping out a five-two-five-two rhythm. Her hiding place is reached by a trapdoor with two large rings as handles, and the code is tapped out right in front of a white customer who is blissfully unaware of it. Denwood, who has picked up some elements of the code, recognizes that the message of the blacksmith’s hammer travels faster than his horse. The whole landscape is signaling trouble to those who can read the signs; watermen are running their sails to leeward (from right to left) and a quilt has been hung outside the Gables farm. Another, hung by Mary on a boat with its star pattern facing west, is enough to convey a message to two black watermen, who then unload their cargo and stack its barrels in a pattern of fives and twos facing west, secured by five-knotted ropes. Unlike their white master (who is watching them minutely), another slave, Clarence, decodes the message (that two slaves are on the run) and communicates to the blacksmith that it is time to “wake up the network” (239). The blacksmith’s message travels swiftly to the plantations all around and a slave finds out where Amber is hiding and sends the message back to Mary via another quilt, also star-patterned, and a coded arrangement of five baked chicken pieces, one placed to the left (west) on a mounded napkin. Mary promptly tells Denwood that Amber is to the west, near an old Indian burying ground. While the sequence of events certainly buttresses the notion that slaves had good, covert communication networks, it has to be said that the end result is less than satisfactory. Too many people seem to be familiar with the code. And coded chicken pieces are probably a step too far for most readers.

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

25

Liz’s escape does, however, dramatize the importance of imagination for slaves. Almost as soon as she runs, the story explodes into myth, growing by leaps and bounds until Liz becomes known as a shape-shifter and trickster able to take the form of a bird or horse, her story circulating through jokes, poems, songs, and entire re-enacted escape scenes as slaves rejoice that Patty has been “outdone by a colored woman” (20). Not all of the story is unhistorical, however, though it is a history less well-known, perhaps, than that of the Deep South. Unusually, this is a story of slavery without large plantations, whippings, or cotton. McBride draws on both the history of Maryland and on white popular myth and folklore, using one myth to undercut another and to set up a critical dynamic. The action is set in 1850, when the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law made the Underground Railroad more secretive, more important, and more heroic. Free blacks were being kidnapped in Maryland (DiPaolo 1998) and sold into slavery, particularly once an influx of German and Irish immigrants displaced them from skilled work and created a surplus of cheap labor. The internal slave trade was also stimulated by the fact that Maryland had moved to a less labor-intensive economy of small farms. More slaves were manumitted, creating a large free black population, and slaves could be bought cheaply in Maryland and sold at a large profit in the emerging cotton plantations of the South (Clayton 2007). Patty Cannon is a historical figure, though she flourished at an earlier period to that of the novel. As Hal Roth (1998) has demonstrated, she was a well-known figure in folklore, featuring in a penny dreadful pamphlet, novels, newspaper articles, a nineteenth-century melodrama, and a modern play. McBride follows the “female fiend” elements of the legend, portraying her as attractive, dark, physically strong, a ruthless killer who enjoyed wrestling and employed a mixed-race gang of slave-stealers (including her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, a character here). Popular myth lacks ambiguity and exaggerates virtues and vices. Patty’s appeal may thus be seen as directly the opposite to that of Harriet Tubman: the subject of myriad plays, films, novels, poems, operas, and children’s books. Popular myth took Patty Cannon—probably not a husband-poisoner or executed serial killer, but a woman who died eventually of old age—and blew her up into a stereotypically evil figure. Tubman, however, who packed a pistol and was not afraid to use it to threaten vacillating escapees, a point to which McBride refers in the novel, underwent the reverse process. McBride has commented that “you do an injustice to history …when you paint your characters as one-dimensional” (quoted in Seltzer 2008).

26

J. NEWMAN

He complains on Tubman’s behalf that “in a society that loves to mythologize its heroes and make them larger than life, her life is treated as a kind of Aesop’s fable …a children’s tale, a moral, polite, good-girl story taught to elementary school kids” (McBride 2008, 356), whereas in reality her life was an adventure that should spark any writer’s imagination. Tubman suffered a blow to her head in childhood which left her subject to trances and visions (probably the result of frontal lobe epilepsy), just as Liz has a head injury and dreams of the future, of rap music, and of Martin Luther King—though Liz point-blank refuses to escape to the North and declares skepticism about the possibility or the value of African American freedom. Her dreams are almost entirely dystopian. The vision of slavery here is complex in its moral shadings. In the novel, the blacksmith, a captain on the Underground Railroad, betrays Liz, whose arrival has exposed other slaves to danger; an African American woman extracts vital information from Woolman’s son and passes it on to whites; Mary betrays her own son Amber to avoid family separation; Liz shoots Woolman dead as he struggles with the slave catcher; and only Kathleen Sullivan emerges untainted. Patty’s crew includes black accomplices in slave stealing. Even the slave escape is portrayed as a violent, animalistic event, with slaves fighting among themselves. Woolman, the swamp-dwelling heir to Stowe’s eponymous Dred, is literally larger than life, but inspires nothing but fear and horror wherever he goes. On the other hand, Denwood the sharpshooting slave catcher emerges as something less than a villain, with a strong streak of morality. Unambiguous heroes are in distinctly short supply in McBride’s pages. And that is the point. McBride gives the reader a good run for his or her money, exploiting popular folklore and myth, but at the same time he demythologizes American history, breaking down easy binaries between good and bad, slave or slave owner, in ways which undercut the very process of popular mythmaking. McBride’s major strategy is to exploit the myth of the Wild West, a myth which exemplifies the American love of myth rather than history: “we Americans like our mythology. We need it. We pay for it. We want it to run free. Otherwise how to explain the hundreds of novels, films, and television shows based on the Wild West, an era of gunslingers, cowpokes, and cattle drives that lasted twenty years, from roughly 1870 to 1890” (358). Elsewhere McBride has described the watermen of Maryland as “America’s original cowboys” (quoted in Trachtenberg 2008) and Song Yet Sung develops the analogy. The area is described as “rough, untamed land, populated by watermen, a breed

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

27

of white pioneer whose toughness and grit made the most grizzled Western cowboys seem like choirboys by comparison” (McBride 2008, 22). Denwood Long, the slave catcher, went west when his son died and has knocked men through tavern windows from Kansas to Canada, tearing up saloons across the Nebraska territory, and learning in the West “the ways of the Devil” (34). In the upshot he finds the fabled West a hollow experience, realizes that he is “running in the same direction as the emptiness” (31) and returns to Maryland, coming out of retirement only for a hefty fee. Woolman lives out past the old Indian Burial Ground, whose wall was built according to Amber by “the red man” (311) to keep bad spirits out. The action culminates in this emblematic location in a knife fight and shoot-out. Woolman, so-named for his long woolly hair, is described as like a tree but also “as if he were magic and his feet did not touch the earth” (47). His humanity is barely recognized. He is likened to wild nature—he runs barefoot through the swamps as if his feet were webbed or winged. Wiley describes him as tall, muscular, dark, wildlooking, “more like an Indian than a Negro” (173). His son is described as a “savage” (259). When the latter is held in the Town Gaol (and sale into slavery is threatened), Woolman abducts a white child to exchange for him, drawing on the plot of the captivity narrative as popularized in classic films such as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). He ambushes the boy Apache-style, concealed beneath greenery in a hole in the ground. Unlike earlier noble savages of this type, such as Stowe’s prophetic, Biblespouting Dred, Woolman is not at all articulate and looks like “sculptured evil” (260), an ogre from an all-American horror story. Patty Cannon, “a rough rider” (186), and her gang animate a plot replete with fast horses, knifings, shootings, ambushes, drinks in the Tin Teacup saloon, and a range of weaponry from Colt Patersons to a Winchester. The action culminates in a three-cornered gunfight, in which Woolman fells Patty’s henchman Joe with a hatchet, tomahawk style, and wrestles Denwood in a knife fight, close to the wall of the Indian burial ground. In the fight, Denwood remembers wrestling men to the ground in Fort Laramie, Wyoming and in Indiana, screaming “c’mon, you pimping, pioneering frauds, I can take you all” (336). This time, as the two men grapple “like savages” (337), he realizes he will not win so easily. The cowboy is being beaten by the “Indian,” or perhaps the white Western hero is meeting his match in the black Marylander. Denwood is only saved by a woman when Liz shoots the injured Woolman, sending him to freedom. When Patty Cannon appears and is about to kill everybody left standing in order

28

J. NEWMAN

to wipe out the witnesses to her crimes, it is Kathleen Sullivan (in the Grace Kelly role from Fred Zinneman’s High Noon [1952]) who raises her Winchester and shoots Patty dead. It will not have escaped the reader that three women are the mainspring of the action here, and intervene decisively, with deadly results, while the Western males are all losing their footing. White Western prowess and the American myth of the frontier are being demythologized with a vengeance. Both Western and slave-captivity narratives culminate in a denouement in which Kathleen buys freedom for Amber, and for Woolman’s child; and a white Maryland waterman’s wife sets the black child free, to become the progenitor of Martin Luther King. In the novel, the use of rival mythologies underlines the vexed nature of truth. Like the No Name Woman, Liz is wary of truth claims. What she believes in is the power of dreams: “that’s the one thing the white man can’t take, you know, your dreams” (157). Dreams are linked to freedom. It is in a dream that Liz learns how to twist branches in order to force open the muskrat trap which has immobilized Woolman’s son. In captivity, she wakes to find that in her dreams she has bitten around the timber of the floor which was holding a small spike and uses it as a weapon to get herself free. Throughout the novel, Liz also has dreams of the future, culminating in a vision of Martin Luther King making his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 1963. The novel begins with the Woman with No Name singing “Way Down Yonder in the Graveyard Walk,” which Liz later recalls. The Woman did not know all the words but Liz hears them in the dream, spoken by King: “he reached into the past and shouted a song from our own time. A song not yet sung. I heard this preacher say them. And when he did, them words changed the whole world somehow …He said, Free at last – Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last” (281). The line “Free at last – Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last” is the chorus to the spiritual and is repeated after every line and at the end. The implication is that the song has finally been sung twice, that freedom is therefore in sight. As the Woman said, it is not the song which is significant, but the singer, Martin Luther King. Clarence, her interlocutor, strikes a warning note, however. If the preacher was “hollering about being free …well then he wasn’t free, now was he?. …What time of tomorrow was you dreaming about?” (282), he asks. Liz replies, “I said I would tell you of tomorrow. I didn’t say tomorrow wasn’t gonna hurt” (282).

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

29

Arguably, the Underground Railroad was the first racially integrated Civil Rights Movement, a huge civilly disobedient, grassroots organization. But the novel asks its readers whether King’s Civil Rights Movement was its fulfillment. King’s speech suggests that the capacity to dream, to imagine, is vital to black survival, that imagination and rhetoric can move us toward freedom and a better future—just as the Quilt Code inspires present-day African Americans and underlines the importance of freedom. Liz describes King’s speech as using words that seemed to lift him into the air, transporting his audience. Her own dystopian visions, however, focus on King’s debatable legacy. His utopian vision of a post-racial future and his creed of nonviolence both contrast strongly with the present. Has the promise of Civil Rights activism been fulfilled? As the Dreamer, Liz is a danger to other blacks, unleashing a wave of violence, beginning when she wakes from a dream and stabs her captor, Little George. The other slaves first beat him to death and then turn on each other, fighting “out of shame, fighting out of humiliation …and, mostly, fighting to get clear of each other” (16). Violence breeds violence. Present-day violence draws upon that of the past. McBride found his inspiration for Liz’s dreams from a Meg Ryan movie, James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold (2001), in which a nineteenth-century Duke time travels into the present (Trachtenberg 2008). McBride wondered what a slave transported to the New York of today would make of it, and concluded that a slave would see America as primarily a consumer society. In her dreams, Liz offers a quasi-Martian view of gangsta and rap culture. She sees fat, black children smoking oddsmelling cigars, with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes, men who have lost “every bit of pride, decency and morality” (McBride 2008, 1), in a society where music teaches murder, and girls trade black eyes for blue. One whole dream concerns obese African American children gorging on monster portions, another shows children running from books as though they were poison. Some of this is drily ironic. Amber is particularly astonished by the description of obese children, never having seen “a fat colored child his entire life” (126). Other elements are more cutting. The black men of the future appear not to love their women or children, but they do love gold chains, an obvious reference to the ways in which materialism has become a new form of slavery, thwarting the promises of true freedom. Rappers come in for McBride’s particular ire, evoking a very different song to King’s. Liz dreams of one, clad in the clothing of a farmer (denim) but covered in shiny jewelry, speaking with the speed of a rat-tat-tat telegraph and preaching “murder and larceny, cursing women

30

J. NEWMAN

savagely, and promising to kill, maim and destroy” (248). Voicing the words of a song by Petey Pablo, a hip-hop artist who had served a prison term for armed robbery, he shouts “who am I? He seemed not to know” (248). Through him Liz looks back through “generations and generations of who he was, and where he’d come from” (248). It is a vision of the destruction of the dream of freedom by the violent legacy of slavery. History will always be disputed. As the Dreamer says, “only tomorrow is truly truthful” (304). The novel ends with the song “All God’s Children Got Wings,” a claim for absolute justice in heaven, but in the political and social sphere, the action ends on an image of unfulfillment and a promise deferred. At the end Liz is carried to her final resting place to die, as Amber and Woolman’s son set off for freedom, paid for by Kathleen who has provided written documents to ensure their safety. Amber believes that the boy (unnamed) has a special gift, “some kind of ability to dream” (352). Kathleen is skeptical but concedes that “even to her doubting ears, the story sounded wonderful, and even if it was just a fable, you had to give the girl Liz – the Dreamer the colored called her – credit for dreaming it up” (353). “History has its own life,” as McBride emphasized in his account of James Brown (2016, 20), which frankly delineates the myths and false stories which surrounded Brown, many set in motion by Brown himself and well-nigh impossible to dispel. In his most recent volume, the short story collection Five-Carat Soul (2017), McBride counters the dominance of white history by dreaming up some history of his own. In “The Fish Man Angel,” Abraham Lincoln draws his inspiration for the Emancipation Proclamation from a fictional overheard conversation between two black stable workers. In “The Christmas Dance,” the narrator, writing a thesis about the 92nd Infantry, interviews black and Puerto Rican veterans of the Battle of Sommocolonia, fought on Christmas Day 1944. Although 53 of the American soldiers present were killed, the battle is described as a skirmish in the official record. The white officers, who resented leading a black regiment, and whose incompetence killed most of their men, wrote the reports which then became history. The veterans tell a different (and true) story, that of the heroic death of a comrade who ordered them to fire on his own position to prevent it being overrun by the enemy. His original, John Fox, received his Distinguished Service Cross many years later, after pressure from black veterans’ associations. The title of the lead story of the collection, “The Under Graham Railroad Box Set,” refers to a unique antique toy, a steam locomotive equipped with a tiny burner

2

FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM …

31

and compressor, feeding water into a miniscule steam box. Commissioned from Horace Smith (of Smith and Wesson fame) in 1859, it could run for 4 hours at 25 miles per hour on its track, faster than any horse and carriage at the time. The train was a gift from Robert E. Lee to his son Graham. Two weeks after it arrived, Lee received a telegram to say that his son was dead. His slave attendant immediately escaped on the Underground Railroad, taking the steam train with her, hence its nickname. A reporter baptized it in a story which played on the way that the train went north, one train riding on another. The train was valuable also for another reason. Within its tiny widgets lay a weapon of war. Lee realized that if the train’s technology was available to Southern engineers and scaled up, the war would turn in their favor: A full-sized version could revolutionize troop movements. The slave woman had averted a potential Confederate victory by taking the train north, never to be seen again. This time McBride has invented every detail of the story. Robert E. Lee never had a son called Graham and was survived by all but one of his seven children. The train set is entirely imaginary. But the story conveys the consequences of slavery as a living force in American culture and history, a story which needs to be creatively reimagined and communicated in each generation.

Bibliography Bordewich, Fergus M. 2007. “History’s Tangled Threads.” New York Times, February 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/opinion/02bordewich. html. Brackman, Barbara. 2006. Facts and Fabrication: Unravelling the History of Quilts and Slavery. Lafayette, CA: C & T Publishing. Clayton, Ralph. 2007. Cash for Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic Slave Trade. Westminster, MD: Heritage Books. Cohen, Noam. 2007. “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide.” New York Times, January 23. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/ nyreagion/23quilt.html. Connolly, Paula T. 2013. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010. Iowa City: Iowa University Press. DiPaolo, Joseph F., ed. 1998. My Business Was to Fight the Devil: Recollections of Rev. Adam Wallace, Peninsula Circuit Rider 1847–65. Acton, MA: Tapestry Press. Dorson, Richard M. 1950. “Folklore and Fakelore.” American Mercury 70: 335–43.

32

J. NEWMAN

Fellner, Leigh. 2006. “Betsy Ross Redux: The Underground Railroad ‘Quilt Code’.” Author website. https://web.archive.org/web/20130120160626/ http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/betsy%20ross%20redux.pdf. Fry, Gladys-Marie. 1975. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Larson, Kate Clifford. 2004. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero. New York: One World. McBride, James. 1996. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books. McBride, James. 2008. Song Yet Sung. New York: Riverhead Books. McBride, James. 2016. Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Montell, William Lynwood. 1970. The Saga of Coe Ridge. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Roth, Hal. 1998. The Monster’s Hidden Face: Patty Cannon in Fiction and Fact. Vienna, MD: Nanticoke Books. Seltzer, Sarah. 2008. “Running to Freedom.” Publishers Weekly 255 (1): 34. Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. 2008. “James McBride Song Yet Sung.” Wall Street Journal, February 9. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120222661678044327. html.

CHAPTER 3

To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad Michael Docherty

In this essay, I examine how Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad simultaneously engages with and subverts conventions associated with “historical fiction.” I further suggest that the novel’s status as a publishing phenomenon, achieving a rare combination of immense commercial success and literary critical acclaim, owes much to that ambivalent negotiation of its own relationship with genre. In doing so, I articulate the complex relationship between the novel’s remarkable way of exploring history and its own history as a consumed object.

Plot Devices, Marketing Devices Railroad imagines that the secret network used to move escaped slaves out of the antebellum South was a literal, physical subway system. Moreover, although the states visited by Whitehead’s protagonist, the fugitive Cora, bear familiar names, they are not historical, factual depictions of

M. Docherty (B) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_3

33

34

M. DOCHERTY

those states. Rather, they serve as what both Whitehead and one of his characters refer to as “states of possibility” in African American history (Whitehead 2016, 68; Kirch 2016). Whitehead draws episodes and ideas from America’s tortuous racial history and renders them as conceptual geographies. This narrative strategy, which Whitehead has also described as a series of “takes” on America, embodies (and often blends) a range of historically extant racial ideologies and political strategies as physical spaces through which his characters travel (Gross 2016). His North Carolina, for example, is a brutally punitive regime that has outlawed black people entirely: “the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes” (Whitehead 2016, 156). By Whitehead’s own explanation, this state can thus evoke the specters of both Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and Oregon’s foundation as a white separatist state (Gross 2016). In the novel’s narrative progression, it appears in marked contrast to the previous stop on Cora’s journey, South Carolina, where all slaves are owned, cared for, given employment, and educated by the government, in a system which initially appears quasi-benevolent, even progressive, but is ultimately revealed as a sinister project of eugenicist experimentation. Speaking to Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air, Whitehead described the historical inspirations behind the “state of possibility” embodied in his South Carolina: In general, you know, the technology, culture and speech is from the year 1850. That was my sort of mental cutoff for technology and slang. But it [the liberty with the historical record granted by conceiving of the book’s settings as “states of possibility”] allowed me to bring in things that didn’t happen in 1850—skyscrapers, aspects of the eugenics movement, forced sterilization and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. (Gross 2016)

The work Whitehead does here, then, sounds like anything but “conventional” historical fiction—a slippery categorization that must necessarily incorporate a variety of writerly approaches but which might in the broadest terms demand a certain historical faithfulness of setting or at least the consistent, plausible illusion thereof, an imbrication of the fictive plot within the veracities of documentary record. If, as Ladislav Nagy argues, historical fiction has “always drawn some of its appeal …from the blurred divide between fact and imagination,” the genre in its conventional forms is nonetheless perhaps definable by what Barbara Foley describes as the process by which “empirical data …reinforce the text’s

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

35

claim to offer a persuasive interpretation of its referent” (Nagy 2014, 9; Foley 1986, 145). That is, the conventional historical novel’s defining dramatic tension is typically created from the interposition of acts of invention within a setting that makes claims not merely to realism but to some degree of historical facticity. Whitehead’s description of his own method of creating setting, by contrast, sounds profoundly and deliberately ahistorical. The initial familiarity of the names that appear in the novel’s table of contents—Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana—is deceptive; the places described in the chapters bearing those headings constitute in no conventional sense historical accounts—even fictionalized ones—of their real namesakes. Rather, Whitehead essentially only borrows the names of those states to support the novel’s geographic conceit, on a basis that he has acknowledged is “really just arbitrary” (Kachka 2016). Notwithstanding this, however, Whitehead’s descriptions of his “states of possibility” make clear that even the most profoundly ahistorical aspects of his novel are not the stuff of pure invention; they are rooted firmly in a reality or rather, realities. They have merely been set out of joint from their original contexts and the expectations created by the book’s ostensible setting(s). Furthermore, Whitehead’s comment on the importance of period-specific technology, culture, slang, and speech affirms that this ahistorical webbing of spatiotemporal anomalies is embedded in a text that elsewhere does uphold key conventions of historical fiction. That is, the period setting remains identifiable despite radical creative irruptions in the invoked historical record because Whitehead brings to bear upon the text a weight of “authenticating” period detail (the “empirical data” Foley describes) deriving from an intensive research process that constituted a key discussion point in many interviews Whitehead gave to publicize the book (Dean 2016; Gross 2016; Kachka 2016; Winfrey 2016). In striving thus for the historical novelist’s diligently researched plausibility of speech, setting and experience (and, when publicizing the novel, in extratextually drawing prospective readers’ attention to those efforts), Whitehead offers an uncanny past. It is instantly recognizable and credible as the antebellum South it evokes and yet it is at once something entirely other. Crucial to this effect is the fact that 53 pages of the book, a sixth of its length, elapse before the railroad’s literal nature is even suggested; another 13 pass before this is confirmed, and at least 20 more beyond that until it begins to become clear that Whitehead’s states are in many

36

M. DOCHERTY

other respects not their historical namesakes. This subtle drip of odd discoveries, the discomfiting, disorientating way in which the fullness of this world’s slanted strangeness and divergence from its historical counterpart are only revealed piecemeal to the reader, is one of the narrative’s defining structural and stylistic characteristics. Curiously, however, it runs counter to publicity efforts surrounding the novel’s publication, which extensively prepared prospective readers for these revelations, thereby precluding their effects. The novel’s multiple space-and-time-bending conceits were openly and extensively discussed and explained by Whitehead in multiple interviews conducted to promote the novel’s publication. A clear example is Whitehead’s interview with Gross, which appears on the NPR Web site under an expository title describing a “Literal Train to Freedom,” and in which Whitehead explains how the literal railroad device “freed” him to “play with time a bit more” (Gross 2016). The same foregrounding of the railroad’s literal state as something about which readers must be informed before reading the book is similarly prominent in numerous other interviews, whether in Whitehead’s own words and/or as part of the interviewer’s preamble to the piece (Dean 2016; Harris 2016; Kachka 2016; O’Grady 2016; Schwartz 2016; Schuessler 2016; Winfrey 2016). Likewise, the explanation Whitehead gave to Gross of the book’s locations each constituting “a different state of American possibility” is one he emphasized on multiple other occasions around the book’s publication (Gross 2016; O’Grady 2016; Schwartz 2016; Kirch 2016). Boris Kachka, interviewing Whitehead for Vulture, also quotes and glosses the concept in his preamble, while Whitehead, in conversation with Oprah Winfrey, offered the variation of “each state …representing a different opportunity or danger” (Kachka 2016; Winfrey 2016). Numerous prepublication notices anticipating Railroad’s release likewise referred to its non-metaphorical central conceit (Hoffert 2016; “Most Anticipated” 2016). By the same token, the main ahistorical or “unrealistic” devices of the novel, namely the literal railroad and the notion of “states of possibility,” were explicitly described in the promotional copy accompanying the book’s listing on both its British and American publishers’ websites (Little, Brown Book Group n.d.; Penguin Random House n.d.). What I wish to illustrate here is that the entire, vast publicity machine that operated around Railroad’s publication was seemingly geared specifically toward preparing readers for the creative liberties that the novel takes with time and space. The literal railroad and states of possibility were, it appears, deemed the book’s essential selling points, appearing as they do

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

37

with such frequency and dominance in media coverage surrounding the novel’s release. These are, almost all publicity surrounding the book suggests, the things that must be explained to the book-buying public in order to understand why Railroad is a particularly remarkable literary achievement and thus worth purchasing. As a publicity strategy, one in which Whitehead participated, this is perplexing for its total disjunction from the way in which the text itself addresses its own unrealities and ahistoricities to the reader. On one level, the strategy is of course understandable. It draws attention to the aspects of the novel that render it distinct from a more “conventional” piece of historical fiction about escapee and rebel slaves—a well-populated and diverse subgenre that includes most famously Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and perhaps most infamously William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Whitehead’s central artistic innovation is thereby highlighted. In the process, however, any and all potential revelatory effect of that innovation is excised. What could have been an experience of multiple surreal shocks as a piece of seemingly conventional historical fiction veers into the apparently fantastical has been denied, sabotaged by the outflanking prescience of advance publicity. Jennifer Schuessler (2016) rightly notes in the introduction to her interview with the author that this is a book whose capricious, readerwrong-footing ahistoricity, its “Whiteheadian weirdness” as she terms it, “creeps in slowly, with a subtlety that may send some readers to Google to check their memories of high school history.” In the very act of noting this, however, Schuessler prejudices the possibility of any reader then going on to experience Railroad in such a way; she renders predictable the novel’s defining texture of unpredictability. Hers is a piece which, like so much of the book’s publicity (and possibly in reflection of broader digital-age “spoiler” culture), preempts such a sense of unsettling “creeping” deviation from known history by making that quality its own subject. In the process, that quality is by definition expunged. The Kirkus pre-publication review notes likewise that “for roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative” (“The Underground Railroad” 2016). Up to and including the point at which Cora’s accomplice Caesar raises the possibility of escape from their plantation and the existence of the railroad (not yet disclosed as literal), the review continues, Railroad is “so far, so familiar.” Again though, this review only offers these observations on the novel’s destabilizing turn from the familiar to

38

M. DOCHERTY

the “historically unrecognizable” in the process of explaining the concept of the real railroad. We thus see how one of the great strengths of the text’s internal construction has been forced into an irreconcilable tension with its commercial status as a major “publishing event.” The former seems to introduce the book’s unreality, its spatial and temporal flexing and restructuring of the historical record, with an emphasis for the reader on a process of slowly, quietly unfolding realization, the self-doubting surprise of the matter-of-fact. The latter, by contrast, seems to have required the subjects of those realizations and surprises to be foregrounded in order to affirm precisely why the novel’s publication merited such attention. The inescapability of this publicity campaign has essentially occluded the possibility of rendering oneself subject to the horrors and wonders of Whitehead’s creation as they are revealed by the text itself alone—gradually and challengingly, with the disorienting sense of a world that with each passing chapter grows more askew even as its echoes of our own accrete. Such a reading experience can only be reconstructed, as I do here, as a hypothetical possibility. In announcing that Railroad is a singular reading experience at least in part because of the spatiotemporal surprises it holds, that singularity is inevitably destroyed. To read Railroad after any of its major press features is to some extent merely to re-read it. In mitigation, to discuss Railroad without at least hinting at its surreal central conceits would of course pose challenges to any interviewer or reviewer. This is not, however, an isolated case of an errant journalist including a “spoiler” in a review. That the book’s great deviations from the historical record (which the text per se reveals as surprises) are not merely mentioned in but constitute the central narrative of almost all of the novel’s press coverage suggests strongly a concerted strategy on the part of the novel’s publishers and publicists. The complex formal work performed by Railroad in troubling readers’ certainties about their own world’s history—by refusing to announce which parts of its textual one are historically “real” and which are not—has been foreclosed upon by a marketing effort that deemed it necessary to give the answers away in advance. That strategy has, it seems, been a vast commercial success (as will subsequently be further discussed), but in terms of the novel’s aesthetic and social force it is ultimately self-defeating. The novel’s major original invention is one whose very nature means that it is inevitably destroyed, rendered unoriginal in the act of being discussed outside the text. The construction of a narrative around the text has compromised

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

39

the construction of the narrative within, and one wonders what kind of reading has been lost in the need to ensure that the book would be read.

Contouring the Textual Past(s) The simultaneous countervailing emphases in the book’s publicity campaign on both its departures from recognizable past reality and the historical research with which it is suffused have, however, created a common discursive frame for Railroad that articulates its relationship to the historical fiction genre in terms of departure and disruption rather than straightforward participation. This befits the way in which the novel itself engages ambivalently with the conventions of historical fiction. Whitehead prefaces four chapters with advertisements offering rewards for the capture of escaped slaves. These advertisements bear no direct relation to the plot, but can be read as echoing the events of the surrounding chapters. The advertisements have been styled to imitate nineteenth-century typesetting, lending them a “real” appearance. Indeed, as Whitehead confirms in his acknowledgments, they are real, having been drawn from a collection of such material maintained at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Whitehead 2016, 309). This, then, appears to be an archetypal historical novelist’s gambit: import the intertextual value of real artifacts to one’s fiction to suggest the latter’s connection with historical truth. The picture, however, is less transparent than Whitehead’s acknowledgment of his sources suggests. An examination of one advertisement as it appears in Whitehead’s book (the UK first edition) alongside the original 1839 notice discloses that the appearance of nineteenth-century printing is just that: an appearance. The advertisement as it features in Railroad actually differs considerably in font and formatting from the original, while still evoking its original context via a typographical equivalent of “bygonese,” to borrow the novelist David Mitchell’s memorable term for the kind of faux-archaic dialogue that is used in much historical fiction to apply a patina of supposed authenticity (Mitchell 2010). More significant are the changes in content. The second paragraph of the advertisement is omitted entirely by Whitehead, leaving the last line as “I understand she will try to pass as a free girl” (Whitehead 2016, 142). The effect of this is twofold. First, it enables the dialogue between the advertisement and the events of the novel to stand with the greatest possible clarity: In the previous chapter, Cora has indeed been living under an

40

M. DOCHERTY

alias, though not quite as a free girl but as a state-owned slave in Whitehead’s superficially liberal South Carolina. Second, the final line of the portion of the advertisement quoted by Whitehead is the one which most disarmingly expresses the chilling lack of recognition by the slave-owning system that another mode of life could even be possible. The nonchalance and seeming redundancy of the advertiser’s declaration that he “understand[s] she will try to pass as a free girl” unwittingly suggests an ontological question about the nature and source of freedom, how it is defined and by whom (Raleigh Register 1839). Whitehead’s omission of the more mundane details that follow in the original advert presents in the sharpest possible relief this discomfiting suggestion that even a successful escapee never truly becomes free but rather can only offer an impression of freedom. Finally, Whitehead also changes the name of the advertiser, one Rigdon Valentine, presumably to prevent confusion with a sympathetic character named Valentine who appears later in the novel. A fifth advertisement, written by Whitehead from Cora’s perspective, is presented identically to the real notices, afforded equal status, with no distinction made within the text between the fictional and historical (Whitehead 2016, 298). Its fictional nature is not declared in the acknowledgment that notes the North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project as the source of the other advertisements (309). Whitehead has, however, publicly discussed writing it to “mimic” the others in a manner appropriate to Cora’s story (Gross 2016). Thus, while some of Whitehead’s digressions from the historical record (the literal railroad, the states of possibility) are obvious, his reshaping of historical fact also pervades the book in much subtler and arguably deliberately concealed ways. When interviewed by Gross, Whitehead stated his rationale for including these advertisements was that “sometimes you can’t compete with the actual historical document” (Gross 2016). He also claimed that these advertisements, Cora’s invented one aside, are “mostly verbatim from newspapers,” but “mostly verbatim” seems to misrepresent the extent of the textual manipulations I have described (Gross 2016). Whitehead carefully contours the real runaway announcements in order to maximize their integration in and resonance with his fiction, even though his acknowledgments attest only to their facticity as historical artifacts, and not to his emendatory interventions. It seems significant that when asked about the advertisements by Kachka, Whitehead explained his use thereof in words that are almost identical to those he used in conversation with Gross, but which carry a

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

41

crucial, subtly disclamatory modifier: “sometimes you can’t really compete with the actual rhythms of historical documents” (Kachka 2016; emphasis added). There is an essential difference, perhaps indeed the difference that ultimately distinguishes historical fiction from history, between using “the actual historical document” (Whitehead to Gross) and using “the rhythms” of such a document (Whitehead to Kachka); the latter is by far the truer reflection of Whitehead’s use of the slave advertisements, but it is a concession given almost invisibly, via an extremely delicate shift of phrasing. That Whitehead has offered an account of his use of the slave advertisements that omits his authorial contouring thereof, and another account that differs from the former so subtly in its construction but so significantly in its import, seems entirely of a piece with his novel’s characteristically tricky, mutable, and complex relationship with the historical past. Whitehead’s arguably less-than-candid way of discussing the advertisements mirrors not only the mediatory work he performs with them, but more generally the way in which his novel variously superposes, in continual confounding flux, “real” period detail, dramatic yet matter-offactly presented disjunctions from historical reality, and events which have historic bases but are wrought into unfamiliar times, places, and forms. Indeed, the text itself remarks self-reflexively on its own flexible and conflicted relationship with historical fact by means of several metafictional asides, almost jokes, in which characters do not quite break, but certainly lean against, the fourth wall. Lumbly, for instance, the agent at Cora and her fellow escapee Caesar’s first stop on the railroad, seems to operate as a kind of avatar for Whitehead: Caesar could scarcely speak. “How far does the tunnel extend?” Lumbly shrugged. “Far enough for you.” “It must have taken years.” “More than you know. Solving the problem of ventilation, that took a bit of time.” “Who builds anything in this country?” Cora saw that Lumbly relished their astonishment. This was not his first performance. Caesar said, “But how?” “With their hands, how else? We need to discuss your departure.” (Whitehead 2016, 67)

Lumbly’s remarks all allude to the fictitious and authored nature of the underground railroad in the novel and thus inevitably of Railroad as a novel. When he states that the tunnel extends “far enough for you,” that indeterminacy invokes both the impossibility of the railroad—the sense

42

M. DOCHERTY

that its length cannot be known because it cannot exist—and the sense that it has been conjured into being to serve a narrative purpose. Truly, the railroad does not extend beyond the words by which it is represented in the novel, it runs precisely as far as Cora and Caesar’s narrative progress requires it, because they are one and the same, created by Whitehead to articulate each other. Similarly, there is a twofold effect in Lumbly’s opaque response to Caesar’s query about how long the railroad has taken to create. On one level, this is a wry nod to the physical impossibility of the novel’s railroad: Lumbly’s free admission without explanation of the technical challenges involved in such an enterprise actively draws our attention to the fact that this is something that could only exist in the faintly magical realm of fiction. At the same time, his remark on the time it has taken to build resonates with Whitehead’s frequent admissions of how long it took him to produce Railroad: an idea he had in gestation for 16 years before finally deeming himself able to write it. I was pretty reluctant to immerse myself into that history. It took 16 years for me to finish the book. I first had the idea in the year 2000. And it seemed like a cool idea. It also seemed very daunting. I didn’t want to delve into slavery …it seemed like a very huge topic for me at the time. I wasn’t sure if I was up for writing it in terms of my talent …I figured if I waited, I might become a better writer. And if I waited and became a more mature person, I might be able to actually take it on. So there was no one thing that made me want to do it and there were many factors that made me not want to take it on. (Gross 2016)

Like a novelist, Lumbly performs narrative in his role as the explicator of the railroad’s literal mechanics (which are the novel’s fictional mechanics); he is doubly correct when he states that the underground railroad was built by hand, suggesting not just a fictional work of manual labor, but a manual work of fictional labor, the authorial typing fingers that brought the railroad into hard-won textual existence. It is also Lumbly who informs the escapees that each state is “a state of possibility,” voicing the phrase used by Whitehead himself in so many interviews (Whitehead 2016, 68). Alluding directly to his creator’s own overarching fictional device of using each of the book’s locales to represent sets of ideas, potential permutations of the historical African American experience, a character speaks out of the novel in explanation and defense of the narrative strategy to which his fictional existence is unwittingly bound.

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

43

That narrative strategy—Whitehead’s combination of historical novelistic convention with an approach that in other respects is defiantly ahistorical—is potentially problematic. One could argue that it decontextualizes the events described or alluded to, diminishing the horror of their reality by placing them in sequences, places, and times that never existed. By the same token, however, one might suggest that Whitehead’s strategy permits the fresh juxtaposition of events in such a way that emphasizes their shared context, the points of connection between these episodes, their mutual inextricability in a centuries-long tapestry of racial oppression. In such a context, Whitehead’s chronological distance from the time about which he writes reveals itself not as a barrier to his engagement with history but an active practice by which he self-consciously creates art from that history. Whitehead’s technique thereby makes the political case that the story of escaped slaves in Georgia in the early nineteenth century cannot be seen in isolation from Oregon’s white separatist origins, or from lynchings in the 1920s, or indeed from the Tuskegee syphilis experiment’s eventual end in the 1970s. He suggests that a story which dispenses with much historical facticity in order to coalesce these different stories may in fact offer a fuller and more accurate historical truth than a text which tells one without the others. Claims to “truth” made by the novel do not come despite a fast-and-loose approach to what actually happened where and when, but rather are derived precisely from such an approach.

The “Buxom Best-Seller” and the “Oprah Effect” Efforts to classify with existing genre labels the ambiguous relationship with the historical past that defines Whitehead’s novel are fraught with difficulty. Maud Casey has offered the term “secret history” to describe historical fiction that explores a recognizably real past principally via invented elements. She describes a subgenre of historical fiction—what I’ve started calling the secret history. This secret history troubles the category of historical fiction and the idea of history itself because it involves largely imagined figures …[They] intersect with historical moments we recognize to create reverberations (as opposed to reflections) of truth, which might otherwise remain hidden in the shadows …The imagination is useful, the secret history says. Fiction is useful, it says, as a way of understanding our past and ourselves. (Casey 2010, 54)

44

M. DOCHERTY

There may indeed be a critical need at times to distinguish between such texts and those which focus instead on the fictionalized actions of real personages. I remain skeptical, however, of Casey’s suggestion that this so-called secret history troubles the category of historical fiction, and certainly of her identification of this subcategory and the application thereto of the label “secret history” as anything novel or revelatory. It seems only to describe how much historical fiction has always operated, even in canonical foundational texts of the genre (by, say, Walter Scott) that we recognize today. It is, in other words, difficult to identify grounds on which the phenomenon Casey describes can easily be demarcated or distinguished from the type of invention that necessarily occurs in all historical fiction in order to make it fictional. As Richard Slotkin writes, the very essence of the historical novel is the way it “sacrifices fidelity to non-essential facts in order to create in the reader a vivid sense of what it may have been like to live among such facts” (Slotkin 2005, 225). Between a novel that imagines what a historical person may or could have said (but probably did not), and one that imagines an invented person’s response to a historical circumstance, the difference is perhaps better understood as one of degree within a spectrum rather than of separate categories or subgenres of fiction. What Whitehead offers in Railroad, by contrast, does seem to challenge conventional expectations of where the boundaries of historical fiction lie. A Slotkinite “sacrifice of fidelity” might constitute either omitting some elements of the historical record of a given time and place, or adding elements that may not have happened or did not happen, but which theoretically could have taken place in accord with the known parameters of a given place and era. The sacrifice of fidelity could equally, as Bryony Stocker notes, be a creative exploitation of a “lack of evidence” in the record, which “gives writers …scope” for invention that is non-historical but historically plausible (Stocker 2012, 311). Whitehead, however, goes far further than this. The essential modus operandi of his fiction is the intrusion—of events and activities that not only did not happen then and there but could not have done—into an otherwise realist depiction of a given time and place. His ahistoricity is a feature, not a bug or defect. That said, the term “alternate” history does not comfortably fit Whitehead’s novel either. We are not granted that form’s typical ironic distance to consider another linear timeline running parallel to our own. We are not asked, “what if?” by Whitehead’s world; it is not a vision of how

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

45

things could have transpired under other circumstances but ultimately did not. Rather, his states are best understood allegorically. That is, they refer and respond to ideas and events that were and are part of our world, our historical timeline; it is only the spatiotemporal form in which they are presented for ease of narrative exploration that is ahistorical. As “takes” on the United States, these are not visions of alternative Americas but alternative expressions of conditions manifest in the America we already know. Thus, Whitehead does not offer a speculative fiction; he remains in the historical novelist’s business of seeking to explore the ways in which our actual past has come to affect our actual present—of creating fiction which, in Casey’s phrase, “is useful …as a way of understanding our past and ourselves” (2010, 54). It is merely that Whitehead chooses to do so, paradoxically, by presenting a vision of that real past that does not correspond, in its chronological, geographical, or technological forms, to the historical record. Whitehead might instead be said to offer the “new kind” of “postmodern metahistorical” historical novel described by Hayden White in his introduction to the 2005 issue of Rethinking History that also included Slotkin’s thoughts on the “sacrifice of fidelity” (White 2005, 151–52). White here draws extensively on ideas advanced by Amy Elias, both in her own contribution to that special issue and elsewhere (Elias 2001, xvii– xviii). He thus describes the recent development of literature that may appear “anti-historical” but in fact “‘manages’ the borderlands between a chaotic or entropic historical reality …and the orderly and domesticated versions of that reality provided by professional historians,” to create a “new consciousness of history” (White 2005, 151–52). Certainly, Whitehead’s creative use of spatiotemporal anomalies to dissolve our accepted chronology into something more “chaotic or entropic” precisely to convey a story that is deeply historical would seem to place Railroad in this “metahistorical” category posited by Elias and White. Even this, though, seems not to express adequately the work performed by Railroad. This is why I am here venturing the term magical history. The impossible, ahistorical elements of the novel are not in conflict with its wealth of well-researched, finely observed historical detail but rather are how that wealth of detail is reconstituted and catalyzed to tell a bigger story than that of Cora herself: Whitehead levers ahistoricity precisely to imbricate his narrative in a deeper and broader sense of the sweep of American racial history than would otherwise have

46

M. DOCHERTY

been possible in a single conventional historical narrative. If magical realism is the paradoxical literary art of using the utterly unreal and the mystifying to penetrate more effectively the mysteries of a given reality, then Whitehead’s magical history is a project that similarly flies in the face of the historical record precisely to grasp it more firmly. In an interview with Whitehead, Oprah Winfrey described the novel as working to “refract time” (Winfrey 2016). The phrase is apt. The railroad’s manifold and unknowable branches leading to different states of possibility in African American experience do indeed function prismatically. The linear beam of temporality enters on one side, and the events of the chronological record are split out on the other. They no longer appear as we perceive them via the “naked eye” of a consciousness that reflects our linear experience of time, but alongside or atop each other, re-sequenced, in a relationship that could not hitherto be glimpsed but is no less real or valid a way of seeing time. Indeed, this is precisely a way to make seeing time possible. Another analogy might be a Cubist painting, which superimposes different views of an object on the same plane to give a perspective that in one sense is impossible and unreal but in another is more representative of the thing in question—in this case, the history of the African American experience of racism—than any single viewpoint, or any single historical snapshot, could be. A Harveyan-Marxist annihilation of space by time is radically reversed by the underground railroad’s magical access to states of possibility that defy and circumvent spatiotemporal reality as glimpsed on the surface (Harvey 1991, 292–95). One might reasonably ask if the question of whether or not Railroad constitutes historical fiction matters at all. It surely does, however, because it has implications for understanding the novel’s previously discussed critical and commercial positioning and success. Given an already-estimable literary reputation established by five previous, critically acclaimed novels (from 1999’s The Intuitionist to 2011’s Zone One), a new Colson Whitehead book was guaranteed to elicit a good deal of interest at the highbrow end of the popular press. That Railroad represented one of the leading African American novelists of his generation grappling with slavery was always likely to make it an even greater sensation. The novel was, however, catapulted into an entirely different category of prominence when Winfrey selected it for “Oprah’s Book Club,” originally a 1990s TV sensation as a segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show, latterly revived and retooled using the tripartite platforms of her multimedia empire: print (O,

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

47

The Oprah Magazine); television (the Oprah Winfrey Network [OWN]); and the Internet (Oprah.com). The history of twentieth-century literature reveals some telling points of commonality in how self-consciously “high” literary novelists have related both to historical fiction as a genre and to the book club as a phenomenon. In his 1948 lecture “Good Readers and Good Writers,” reproduced in the 1980 collection Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov infamously dismissed “buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novel” (1). More recently, Jonathan Franzen had his invitation to have his novel The Corrections (2001) featured on Oprah’s Book Club rescinded after he expressed reservations about the supposedly “schmaltzy, one dimensional” book choices he felt Winfrey and her team often made (Dave 2006). Vice’s Brandon Harris echoed Franzen’s position when he prefaced his interview with Whitehead by offering some scarcely disguised condescension about the supposed incongruity of the populist Winfrey selecting a novel by the highbrow Whitehead for her mass audience. “[T]hose familiar with [Whitehead’s] work couldn’t help but chuckle at the occurrence,” Harris wrote. “A well-regarded ironist with a bleak comic outlook who writes obliquely about race, Whitehead has a sensibility that feels, if not at odds with Winfrey’s, then certainly at a remove” (Harris 2016). The viability of such observations demands a certain myopia about Winfrey’s selections, which have included the works of Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Eugenides, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and even (eventually, in 2010) a contrite Jonathan Franzen. When Harris asked Whitehead a euphemistic question about his possible surprise on discovering that his “sensibility” was admired by Winfrey, the interviewee seemingly ignored the subtext. Instead, Whitehead first responded by dismissing Harris’ implied division between supposedly Winfreyan mass-market fiction (Franzen’s “one dimensional schmaltz”) and Whiteheadian high literature, stating simply that “you hope if you do a good book, people like it” (Harris 2016). He then went on to challenge the mistaken perception that Oprah’s Book Club was not a forum suited to books that challenged their readers in either form or content, by citing Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and McCarthy’s The Road (2006) among previous selections and noting the influence of both of those novels on his own (Harris 2016). He expanded further on these sentiments elsewhere,

48

M. DOCHERTY

suggesting that the strength of Winfrey’s platform was precisely in its ability to “testify” on behalf of writers engaged with challenging or esoteric material, thereby introducing it to audiences perhaps unaccustomed to it. The contrast with Franzen is striking: I still am in a pretty good mood about Oprah, you know, picking it …obviously, she just reaches a huge audience and people who have no interest in reading a book about elevator inspectors or zombies or poker or black kids growing up in the ’80s will come to the book now …And I’m not sure why people wouldn’t want to pick up a book about elevator inspectors. But having Oprah testify for the book was really great. (Gross 2016)

Franzen and Whitehead do share a basic level of admiration for Winfrey’s public service in the propagation of literature to broader audiences, but Whitehead apparently has none of Franzen’s qualms about the “Oprah effect” signifying “popular” fiction and thus having a negative impact on perceptions of his own work. Whitehead’s warm appreciation of Oprah’s role in Railroad’s success is, however, more complex than it perhaps at first appears. It subtly discloses a tacit acknowledgment that the novel’s reception by a wider audience than his previous works is not purely a consequence of being picked by Oprah but also of his own decision to write a novel with inbuilt broader appeal than his previous fiction. People who had no interest in Whitehead’s earlier novels will come to the book (and perhaps ultimately to those earlier works) because of Oprah, he suggests, but Oprah would not have picked a book about zombies or elevator inspectors. Although there is none of Franzen’s pejorative inflection, and despite citing McCarthy and Morrison as other Oprah authors accustomed to high regard in the critical firmament surrounding “serious” literature, Whitehead does imply that there is such a thing as an “Oprah-type” of book; that in order to be chosen by Oprah and read by her audience, he first had to write a book thought likely to have sufficient appeal to that audience. That appeal of course simply lies partly in the grimly enduring popular resonance of Railroad’s subject matter. Slavery’s violent histories and insidious legacies remain disturbing, traumatic, and, for many white Americans, unspeakably shameful, but continue to exert a powerful grip on the American fiction-buying public. This eager consumption of fictional slave narratives might suggest something akin to Morrison’s characterization of Ahab’s obsession with

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

49

the white whale in Moby-Dick as a project of attempting to identify, isolate, and annihilate “the ideology of race.” The reading public, perhaps, consumes slave fiction in a comparable (and, surely, comparably vain) hope of “pursu[ing] an idea in order to destroy it,” of trying to “expunge the trauma of racism” by repeatedly seeking out encounters with narratives that purport to speak its most unspeakable horrors (Morrison, 15–16). (Such a proposal does, however, invite the countervailing possibility that engagement with slavery through the medium of fiction suggests instead a troubling desire to dislocate racism’s worst realities into the realm of the imaginary.) Yet Railroad’s success also surely resides in its partial participation in one of the most popular forms of genre fiction: the historical novel. Railroad has approached space and time with an inventiveness and freedom that seems in some senses thoroughly postmodern, the stuff supposedly of “high literature,” while simultaneously engaging—in style, ostensible period and subject, and partial adoption of conventions—with a genre regarded, whether pejoratively or positively, as “popular.” Whitehead offers what on one level appears to be a piece of historical fiction, addressing a theme and a period of enduring national interest and contest. Simultaneously, though, Railroad refutes conventional expectations of that genre and displays self-consciously literary innovation in its approach to time and space. That blend seems to have been a canny one. As expected, given the effect of Oprah’s patronage, the book has been a huge commercial success. It entered the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list at number four on 21 August 2016, quickly rising to first place, and then spent 21 consecutive weeks in the top 10 (“Hardcover Fiction” 2016). As of April 2017, Doubleday had reported 825,000 US sales (McClurg 2017). This sales triumph far eclipses the commercial performances of Whitehead’s previous novels, but did not come at the expense of critical regard. Railroad has won the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize, and was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Reviews in the highbrow press were likewise universally glowing. Further evincing the novel’s genre- and audience-hopping agility, its many accolades even include the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a prominent science-fiction prize. Between Whitehead’s tacit acknowledgment that in order for Oprah to “testify” for him he first had to write a book that was “testifiable,” and a publicity campaign that dulled the novel’s most idiosyncratic textual effects and affects by deeming it necessary to explain them in advance

50

M. DOCHERTY

to readers, there is a thread of continuity. Just as many states of possibility are embodied in each of its geographic states, Railroad itself exists at once in multiple states, multiple literary spaces. Both its subject matter and its engagement with the conventions of a “popular” genre—historical fiction—ensured a far broader audience than those enjoyed by Whitehead’s previous novels. Simultaneously, though, it remains replete with sufficient “Whiteheadian weirdness,” in its conceits and construction, to preclude any possibility that Franzenite-Nabokovian critics could dismiss it merely as a superior potboiler, a workmanlike exercise in ventriloquizing the past. This peculiar combination and the unique artistic effects that it enables have made Railroad that rare novel embraced equally enthusiastically by both the highbrow literary establishment and the book-buying public. In that rare concordance, we may ascertain that Railroad’s publicity campaign succeeded not despite but because of its exposition and demystification of qualities whose very nature and experiential value in the intrinsic text are to remain stubbornly obscured, slippery, distorted, abstruse, and resistant.

Bibliography Casey, Maud. 2010. “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction.” Literary Imagination 12 (1): 54–67. Dave [sic]. 2006. “Jonathan Franzen Uncorrected.” PowellsBooks.Blog, October 10, 2006. http://www.powells.com/post/interviews/jonathan-franzenuncorrected. Dean, Michelle. 2016. “My Agent Said: Oprah. I Said: Shut the Front Door.” The Guardian, August 17, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/aug/17/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad-oprah-book-club. Elias, Amy J. 2001. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foley, Barbara. 1986. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gross, Terry. 2016. “Colson Whitehead’s ‘Underground Railroad’ Is a Literal Train to Freedom.” Fresh Air, August 8, 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/ 08/08/489168232/colson-whiteheads-underground-railroad-is-a-literaltrain-to-freedom. “Hardcover Fiction.” 2016. New York Times, August 21, 2016. https://www. nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2016/08/21/hardcover-fiction. Harris, Brandon. 2016. “Colson Whitehead Explains How He Grew as a Writer for ‘The Underground Railroad.’” Vice, August 31, 2016. https://www.vice.

3

TO “REFRACT TIME”: THE MAGICAL HISTORY …

51

com/en_uk/article/4w5xqw/colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroadvice-interview. Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hoffert, Barbara. 2016. Review of The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Library Journal, July 18, 2016. https://www.libraryjournal. com/?detailStory=the-underground-railroad-by-colson-whitehead-lj-reviews. Kachka, Boris. 2016. “In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.” Vulture, August 15, 2016. http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/colson-whiteheadauthor-of-the-underground-railroad-c-v-r.html. Kirch, Claire. 2016. “BEA 2016: Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad as More Than Metaphor.” Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2016. https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/70228-bea2016-colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad-as-more-than-metaphor. html. Little, Brown Book Group. n.d. “The Underground Railroad.” https:// www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/colson-whitehead/the-underground-railroad/ 9780708898383/. McClurg, Jocelyn. 2017. “The ‘Underground Railroad’ Chugs Back into USA TODAY’s Top 50.” USA Today, April 19, 2017. https://www.usatoday. com/story/life/books/2017/04/19/colson-whitehead-the-undergroundrailroad-usa-today-best-selling-books/100601284/. Mitchell, David. 2010. “David Mitchell on Historical Fiction.” The Telegraph, May 8, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/ 7685510/David-Mitchell-on-Historical-Fiction.html. Morrison, Toni. 1989. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1): 1–34. “Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.” 2016. The Millions, July 6, 2016. http://themillions.com/2016/07/most-anticipatedthe-great-second-half-2016-book-preview.html. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harvest. Nagy, Ladislav. 2014. “Historical Fiction as a Mixture of History and Romance: Towards the Genre Definition of the Historical Novel.” Prague Journal of English Studies 3 (1): 7–17. O’Grady, Megan. 2016. “Colson Whitehead on His Spectacular New Novel, The Underground Railroad.” Vogue, August 18, 2016. https://www.vogue. com/article/colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad-author-interview. Penguin Random House. n.d. “The Underground Railroad.” https://www. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/232365/the-underground-railroadpulitzer-prize-winner-national-book-award-winner-oprahs-book-club-bycolson-whitehead/.

52

M. DOCHERTY

Raleigh Register and North Carolina Weekly Advertiser. 1839. “Runaway or Conveyed Off.” August 31, 1839. North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements Digital Collection, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC. http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/RAS/id/1737. Schuessler, Jennifer. 2016. “Colson Whitehead on Slavery, Success and Writing the Novel That Really Scared Him.” New York Times, August 2, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/books/colson-whitehead-onslavery-success-and-writing-the-novel-that-really-scared-him.html. Schwartz, John Burnham. 2016. “Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2016. http://www.wsj.com/ articles/colson-whiteheads-the-underground-railroad-1470671964. Slotkin, Richard. 2005. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9 (2–3): 221–36. Stocker, Bryony D. 2012. “‘Bygonese’—Is This Really the Authentic Language of Historical Fiction?” New Writing 9 (3): 308–18. “The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.” 2016. Kirkus Reviews, April 13, 2016. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/colsonwhitehead/the-underground-railroad/. White, Hayden. 2005. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9 (2–3): 147–57. Whitehead, Colson. 2016. The Underground Railroad. London: Fleet. Winfrey, Oprah. 2016. “Oprah Talks to The Underground Railroad Author Colson Whitehead.” O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2016. http://www. oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-interview-with-colson-whitehead.

CHAPTER 4

Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction of Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy James Peacock

“On the night of August 21, 1845, one of the children escaped” (Faye 2012, 1; emphasis in original). With this tantalizing statement, Lyndsay Faye’s historical thriller The Gods of Gotham (2012) begins. A young girl, employed as a kinchin-mab (a child prostitute) in a brothel run by the diabolical madam Silkie Marsh, climbs out of her room and down a makeshift rope made from “three stolen ladies’ stockings” tied together (3).1 Images such as this suggest a forced, premature entry into the adult world. There are many more: the girl lands on “an empty beer barrel” after negotiating the rope (3); she proceeds down Broadway through throngs of “[s]tevedores, politicians, merchants” and sees “a group of newsboys with unlit cigars tucked in their rosy lips,” a masculine image parallel to that of the female child prostitute (3–4). And when she encounters women on the street, she knows “the mabs from the ladies

J. Peacock (B) English Literature, Creative Writing and English and American Literature, School of Humanities, Keele University, Keele, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_4

53

54

J. PEACOCK

instantly” (4). Through hard experience, she possesses knowledge no 10year-old should. If this passage concerns innocence lost early (a point foregrounded by Faye placing it so early in the narrative) and unwelcome childish knowledge gained under extreme duress, it also concerns adult knowledge— or, more accurately, adult constructions—of children. It is peppered with images of surveillance and adult representation. Escaping her confinement, the girl “suddenly wonder[s] if there could be a spyhole in her bedroom wall. None of the boys or girls had ever yet found one, but it was the sort of thing they would do” (3; emphasis in original). Harboring such a suspicion, it is little wonder that the girl wishes herself invisible in the streets. She need not worry, however: in a city as overcrowded and frenetic as New York, the egregious attentions of the private bawdy house are swapped in public spaces for “the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern” (4). Indifference and physical abuse are both forms of violence. In both locations, she is rendered invisible, her humanity denied, her vulnerability elided in the commodifying of her body. In the passage quoted above, the italicized pronoun “they,” considered in juxtaposition to the generic label “one of the children,” appears to reinforce a strict demarcation between “adults” and “children” as separate, antagonistic realms. And yet the imagery used, as well as what is learned about the girl’s professional experience, militate against such a division and blur the boundaries. The resultant representational tension derives partly from narrative voice. For the words we are reading come from the journal of Timothy Wilde, the novel’s first-person narrator, into whom the girl, “covered in blood” (6), eventually bumps on her latenight odyssey. Wilde’s motives for writing are noble: to provide “a fit memorial” to the lost, including the children (2), to resist the indifference of the masses and be one of “the few who stop and look” (4). They are also deeply personal; Wilde is “closer to the question” of vagrant children because he nearly was one (5). He remembers with vivid horror the blaze that killed his parents and left him terrified of fire; he remembers “being two years orphaned, scrawny and pale skinned and twelve” (17), the years of near starvation that left him short in stature and dependent on his rambunctious older brother, Valentine. The joys of his childhood abruptly ended, Wilde’s desire to emphasize the girl’s essential childishness and vulnerability is understandable.

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

55

Equally understandable, however, are the slippages that occur through the first-person focalization, particularly when one considers that Wilde’s portrayal of Bird Daly (as the girl becomes known) is filtered through both his traumatic memories of childhood and the adult sympathies and suppositions shaped by his traumas. His account includes descriptive embellishments designed to evoke sympathy for Daly, but which also risk fetishizing and eroticizing details; for example, when he writes that “[t]he breeze through the open casement felt hot where her nightdress slipped from one shoulder and her bare feet touched the hardwood” (3). When he observes that her face is “square as a picture frame,” and that “she carried herself so fluid that she can seem taller in memory than in person” (6), it is evident that this opening sequence is as much about conscious and unconscious representational strategies as it is about the child herself. (Wilde reprises such descriptions elsewhere: in The Fatal Flame (2015), the third book of Faye’s series, Daly’s face has “a timelessness like a marble figure” [Faye 2015, 211]). Wilde’s well-intentioned, though ambiguous, representations are intricately bound up in questions of personal memory and the relationship between the past and the present—questions integral to the historical novel. Essentially a Rousseauvian believer in innate childhood innocence, Wilde is nonetheless gloomily realistic (again as a result of his experience) about the inevitability of its destruction: for example, in describing the mute chimney sweep he meets in Seven for a Secret (2013), the second book of Faye’s Gods of Gotham trilogy, he remarks: “there was an innocence to Jean-Baptiste, that wide joy at tiny blessings, I’d have liked to see preserved longer than the next fortnight or so” (Faye 2013, 48). Wilde invests in his account of Daly and other vulnerable children the possibility of “the imaginative recovery of his own childhood” through remembrance and writing (Woolf 1998, 381). Moreover, his broader project is to fight against widespread amnesia, the tendency he identifies in “we Gothamites …to divorce ourselves so completely from our pasts” (Faye 2015, 134). Wilde’s quest to rescue childhood in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, to “fix” it in both senses, evolves through three bestselling novels by Faye: The Gods of Gotham, Seven for a Secret and The Fatal Flame. All of them are set in the 1840s; all of them are narrated in the first person; and all offer an appetizing mixture of Grand Guignol violence, political intrigue, sentimentality, and apocalyptic conflagration. In this essay, I analyze representations of childhood in the trilogy and argue that their ambiguities reflect both the vicissitudes of thinking about

56

J. PEACOCK

children through history, and the inherent tensions of the historical novel: its need to speak simultaneously to past structures of feeling and the contemporary moment. Children have long been sites of ideological contestation—conceived of variously as “imperfect adults,” or as beings distinguished from adults by an inability to exercise control or reason (Heywood 2018, 2); as precious innocents; as Dionysian vessels for original sin; or as “creatures of deeper wisdom, finer aesthetic sensitivity, and a more profound awareness of enduring moral truths” (Grylls 1978, 35). In a post-Freudian imagining of a pre-Freudian social environment, Faye’s fictional children are pulled in many directions: between myth and material reality, innocence and experience, sentimentality and commodity, between—in the context of the historical novel—their present and the contemporary present of the readership, and so between multiple, competing constructions of childhood in different historical periods. Central to the proceeding arguments are two related terms: “metaxis,” the state of liminality, and “vulnerability,” used in the sense employed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) to refer to the “permeable borders” of selfhood (xii), the often terrifying experience of feeling open to the power of others which can, nonetheless, remind us of “collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another” (30). Caught between competing constructions, Faye’s vulnerable child characters hypostasize metaxis and exemplify the human condition of being, in Butler’s terms, “outside ourselves, constituted in cultural norms that precede and exceed us” (45). Moreover, I argue that the time of the historical novel is vulnerable: Faye’s August 1845, the date when we first meet Daly and Wilde, exists in an uneasy dependent relation, inevitably, with the time of the novel’s writing and the contemporary readership. In Alan Robinson’s terms, it is “a subjective present past ” which “differs from a wholly invented spatiotemporal world, as it is modelled on and anchored in a former reality” (2011, 29; emphasis in original). Inhabiting this present past, Daly and the trilogy’s other children exist in different, though related, worlds simultaneously. My contention is that these tensions in childhood’s construction in the context of the historical novel generate ethical possibilities. Precisely because of their suffering, their vulnerability, their in-betweenness, Faye’s fictional children in their violent historical context have the potential to suggest new allegiances and heterogeneous family and community formations. Thus, I argue that a cosmopolitan outlook emerges, one of distinct relevance to a post-9/11 world characterized in part by a widespread

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

57

perception of greater vulnerability. After all, as Ellen Pifer writes, “concern for children increases during times of cultural crisis” (2000, 12). As my reading of the novels suggests, and as I pursue further in the last section of the essay, the connections with twenty-first-century concerns— anxieties over mass immigration, in particular, but also workplace gender inequality, authoritarian politics and corruption, economic disparities, and institutionalized racism—are palpable. These issues intermingle in a rapidly changing Manhattan itself defined by vulnerability: young, ambitious, diverse, and always on the verge of disaster.2 It should be apparent that my underlying approach to childhood is social constructionist. Like Patrizia Lombardo (1993), I maintain that the child is not a universal figure but “a cultural object, and is culturally and historically determined” (2). Like Colin Heywood (2018), drawing on the ground-breaking work of Allison James and Alan Prout (themselves indebted to Philippe Ariès), I proceed from the assumption that childhood is “to a considerable degree a function of adult expectations” (9) and that these expectations are ideologically inflected according to the historical and sociopolitical circumstances that pertain, or, as Susan Honeyman (2005) argues, to “biases that are personal, constantly changing, and often contradictory” (3). However, this is not to say that postEnlightenment, Western discourse on childhood has been entirely capricious. Underlying the various constructions of children as untarnished innocents, or as miniature demons ruled entirely by passions and instincts they are too immature to understand or control, are consistent ideas of rationality and development. As James and Prout state: “the concept of ‘development’ inextricably links the biological facts of immaturity, such as dependence, to the social aspects of childhood” (1997a, 11–12) with the potential therefore to blur the lines between nature and nurture, to assume that what is constructed or conditioned is natural, to recast ideology as biological fact. For James Kincaid, the narrative of development culminating in adult rationality casts the child as “everything the sophisticated adult [is] not, everything the rational man of the Enlightenment [is] not” (1992, 15). Honeyman extrapolates from this to posit a nostalgic, “prelapsarian” quality to adult constructions: “childhood is whatever adults have lost and maybe never had”—a state free of the demands of rational discourse, education, structures of power and ideology (2005, 4). Represented as such in literature, children can be “idealized as flexible sites of possible resistance to rationalism” (142), figures of careless or transgressive

58

J. PEACOCK

pleasure, symbols of what has been lost. These representations are, in Honeyman’s terms, “impossible” because they are circumscribed by an adult discourse which insists on configuring the child as outside that discourse. And it follows that just as childhood is continually reconstructed in different historical circumstances, so too is its loss. To read historical accounts of childhood is to understand that childhood, for many reasons and to many ideological ends, has been lost repeatedly. The Gods of Gotham trilogy depicts a time when labor practices prematurely curtailed a privileged space of childhood play. Later, Neil Postman argues that “our electric information environment is ‘disappearing’ childhood” and creating a breed of “adult-child” whose “intellectual and emotional capacities are unrealized” (1994, 99). Relatedly, Lombardo suggests that childhood may have ended when the child became a targeted consumer, “a powerful potential buyer for the most technologically advanced goods” (1993, 1). Whichever of these narratives is considered, it is evident that the epistemological impossibility of adult representations extends to how, when and with what societal ramifications childhood is destroyed. Even depictions of children’s premature deaths (and Faye’s novels contain many such tragedies) are rendered impossible. For Reinhard Kuhn (1982), “the destruction of innocence is an event that has a universal if somewhat perverse appeal” (177), an assessment that fully convinces only if one accepts the association of childhood with innocence. Kuhn also acknowledges, however, that child-death fulfills a paradoxical “universal wish” simultaneously to destroy and preserve that which shames and undermines confidence in the adult world and yet “accounts for whatever is transcendental in the human experience” (178). All these examples of loss are supposed aberrant and measured against a “normal” or universal standard of uninterrupted progress from happy, irrational childhood to rational, responsible adulthood. They in turn inform adults’ constructions of prelapsarian childhood, such that the child is caught in an ideological feedback loop, always-already lost, but always subject to “rediscovery” through cultural representations created by adults. My choice of prefatory title—“Growing up too quickly”—responds to Faye’s thematic concerns, as I will show, but also reflects a self-conscious recognition of the danger for the novelist and for critics like me: that one might succumb to assumptions about childhood development, linear narratives of progress, and nostalgia for childhood lost. Resisting such ideological impositions is for Honeyman the “great challenge” for any writer (2005, 22) and requires specific literary techniques and approaches.

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

59

Among these she examines Henry James’ use of external focalization in his novel What Maisie Knew (1897) to render the titular character an ironic, inaccessible center rather than “create[e] an illusion of access” to her thoughts and feelings (32). Also instructive is the proliferation of difficult questions asked by children in American fiction. Honeyman regards these sometimes Socratic questions as potentially disruptive of adult discourse because they draw attention “to what is debatable or flawed in adult logic” while maintaining innocence (2005, 26). Through her narrator, Faye occasionally uses both external focalization and Socratic questioning. In addition, Wilde is fond of similes which compare adults to children and vice versa. Daly, crashing into Wilde near the start of the first novel, is described as “[p]ulling at her hair like an Irish widow of half a century” (Faye 2012, 55); the narrator himself, deep into a brutal fight with a fellow Copper Star in Seven for a Secret , writes: “My back hit the wall. I crouched, flinging my greatcoat over my head like a kinchin afraid of the dark” (Faye 2013, 245); in the same novel, the kidnapper of free blacks, Varker, responds to a police interrogation with sweat trickling down his neck “like tears from a frightened kinchin” (273); and in The Fatal Flame Valentine’s lover Jim compares the squabbling Wilde brothers to “a pair of schoolchildren scrapping over a marble” (Faye 2015, 163). If similes balance likeness and difference in tension, then their persistence through the trilogy reinforces the sense of metaxis, vulnerability, and profound ambiguity. For any supposed recovery of childhood reveals a category inseparable from adult perception and which therefore refuses to be confined to an innocent past; by extension the past is accessible only as a construction or emplotment of the present, even as it must shape that present while appearing to look to the future. Thus, the historical novel, in its many manifestations—for, as critics such as Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou argue (2015, 2) and this volume demonstrates, it is far from a monolithic genre—engages past, present, and future in a complex process of invagination. Just as children, in Emma Uprichard’s terms, demand to be considered both “beings”—social actors and constructors of their own childhoods—and “becomings”—future-oriented entities on the road to adulthood (2007, 304)—so the historical novel fuses retrospection and anticipation with an active critique of its depicted narrative moment. It, too, is a being and a becoming, and it is this fact which allows stories such as Faye’s to offer critiques of the discourse of linear development per se, as well as the specific period of the books’ publication.

60

J. PEACOCK

Wilde, as our gateway to a history which is not synonymous with the past but “rather denotes the narrative representation of the past” (Wake 2016, 81), is fully aware of the inherent complexities of his chronicle. His self-conscious first-person prose is propitious and has a mettlesome lyricism entirely appropriate to his subject matter and morality. Every copper star, he claims, is “damaged” in some way, with “a lacking shaped a little different every time” (Faye 2012, 55), and his idiosyncratic responses to the horrors he witnesses derive partly from his own traumatic childhood. However, they also stem from an instinctive understanding that any attempts objectively to record such horrors are both futile and undesirable. Contemplating the writing of a police report about Daly’s escape, he is repelled by the need to appear objective: “Police reports are meant to read ‘X killed Y by means of Z.’ But facts without motives, without the story, are just road signs with all the letters worn off. Meaningless as blank tombstones. And I can’t bear reducing lives to the lowest of their statistics” (2012, 1; emphasis in original). He cannot even bear the legibility of his own handwriting “when recording human indecencies” (Faye 2015, 47). If one views Wilde’s writing as homologous to the historian’s, then one observes in both the same reliance “on empathy and imagination to transcend his or her cultural framework,” to compensate for a lack of direct experience of “the interior perspective of participants” (Robinson 2011, 22). Cumulatively, Wilde’s critiques of “the dry march of data” or facts as “blank tombstones” (Faye 2012, 1) read like a manifesto for an empathetic, imaginative approach to the representation of historical events, one which partakes of fictional and narrativizing techniques, one which honestly acknowledges the affective investment of the writer. At the beginning of Seven for a Secret , as he contemplates penning the tragic story of the escaped slave Lucy Adams, Wilde displays the necessary honesty: “I could pretend that recording Lucy Adams’s story is important for posterity. Justice, even. But that would be humbug. Smoke obscuring a charnel-house landscape. What truly matters just now to me is that a black saga resides at the back of my eyes” (Faye 2013, 2). In chronicling the lives of the vulnerable—children, persecuted slaves, oppressed women—Wilde addresses his own vulnerability, the fragility of his selfhood. Each narrative is part of the process of his becoming, his growing understanding of, and participation in, what his friend Jim calls the “vast orchestra” of New York City in its cosmopolitan network of relations (Faye 2013, 440). The interpolation of his police reports into his

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

61

more subjective accounts, and his critique of both, indicate that an integral aspect of this becoming is the need to find a literary form conducive to representing it, while recognizing the inadequacy of words in capturing the lives of others and also being able “to tell why people did bestial things” in the course of history (Faye 2012, 1; emphasis in original). And there are plenty of bestial, terrible things in Faye’s thrillers. To summarize them in a way he would surely find repugnant: Wilde, who loses his parents in a fire as a child, then loses his bar job and his life savings in another. His smart, tough, dissolute, and politicking brother enlists him into the newly formed New York Police Department, an institution held in contempt by most of Gotham’s populace. Unsurprisingly, Wilde shows an aptitude for police work, partly because, as he explains, “[p]eople, all manner and persuasion of people, want to tell me things of their own accord” (2013, 5). That he feels guilty about this, comparing himself, ironically, to “a thief” apt to steal “a person’s history” (2013, 5), further testifies to the knotty ethics of his narrative. His first three major cases, which constitute the action of the novels, explore major social and political issues of the 1840s: child exploitation in The Gods of Gotham, slavery in Seven for a Secret , women’s rights and political corruption in The Fatal Flame. The first novel, against a backdrop of nativism and antiIrish sentiment, raises the possibility of a serial killer preying on children. The second features a group of escaped slaves living in New York City, one of whom, Lucy Adams, has become involved with a politician called Rutherford Gates. When Gates threatens to cast Lucy and her family off for the sake of the Party, leaving them at the mercy of the local slave catchers, Lucy is forced into a terrible decision. The Fatal Flame focuses more intently on political corruption and venality. The wholly malign Alderman Robert Symmes is engaged in a citywide scam, having his own buildings torched for the insurance money and attempting to frame Sally Woods, a women’s rights organizer who ran a strike for female sewing workers in one of his manufactories, for the crimes. In a narrative expressly concerned with patriarchal power, Symmes demonstrates a willingness to employ rape as a weapon against campaigning feminists. Children are central to all three stories. As embodiments of vulnerability, they provide a link between the dominant themes of each novel. In Seven for a Secret , Faye makes explicit an association between child labor and slavery that reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe) were keen to emphasize to further their cause (Hendrick 1997, 41): Wilde describes trafficked children as

62

J. PEACOCK

“small slaves of every color and description” (Faye 2013, 342). Likewise, in The Fatal Flame Valentine Wilde suggests, in a moment of rather cumbersome proto-Freudianism, that adult male attitudes toward women can be linked to whether or not one has witnessed or experienced child abuse in the House of Refuge, the orphanage where the brothers spent much of their youth (Faye 2015, 161). However, children are important not just as victims, plot drivers, mirrors of the narrator’s unresolved traumas, or vessels intended for readerly sympathy (though they function as all of these), but also as metaxic embodiments of the novels’ pervasive ambiguity with regard to ideas of newness and progress, emergent national identity and otherness, and hegemonic assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the family. As, at least in part, “symbols of the future and of what is at stake in contests over cultural identity” (Stephens 1995, 6), Faye’s fictional children invite a reading of the trilogy as a Bildungsroman, charting the development of a metropolis and a nation during a tumultuous period, while casting into doubt the ideological assumptions shaping the discourse of progress and coming-of-age. Kenneth Millard, noting how the Bildungsroman has a special status in the literature of a “young” nation like the United States, goes on to highlight the “cultural relativity” of the term “coming-of-age” (2007, 4) and to cite examples in which it does not necessarily denote transition into adulthood. With boundaries between adult and child consistently blurred, Faye’s version of coming-of-age, as we shall see, has its endpoint not in adulthood as a distinct and rational identity, but rather in an increased appreciation, exemplified by Wilde, of vulnerability, provisionality and in-betweenness. The connections between the city, its children, and the “progress” of both are made most explicit in The Gods of Gotham. Wilde’s first case is particularly traumatic: as Catholic Irish immigrants flood into New York, a city with neither “the means nor the desire to feed them all” (Faye 2012, 12), a series of brutal murders of Irish child prostitutes takes place. Nineteen child corpses are found in a meadow “[i]nnocent and very beautiful, so green and so yellow it hurt your eyes,” a mockery of virgin soil (130). Each child’s torso is hacked open “in the exact shape of a cross” (91), fueling fear of a religious fanatic out to wreak vengeance upon a fallen metropolis. When key characters, including Wilde, start receiving letters signed by “the Hand of the God of Gotham” and claiming responsibility for the murders (162)—perhaps an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant psychopath, or someone from within the Catholic community intent on punishing that community for its sins, or perhaps, even, the eccentric visionary

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

63

Dr. Palsgrave, working on his elixir of life—this fear is amplified and the city risks falling into anarchy. One of The Gods of Gotham’s most obvious concerns is rapid urbanization and increasing economic disparities. As he walks his beat in downtown Manhattan, Wilde observes how “[n]eighborhoods in New York change quicker than its weather” and notes the “dizzying pendulum swing” between rich and poor along Broadway (41, 58). When he returns to the area devastated by the fire that took his home, he is astonished at its rapid redevelopment: “Dozens of half-formed thoughts had somehow erupted into buildings” (101). The apposite word here is “half-formed”: so often in the trilogy one sees a wanton acceleration toward completion with imperfect, even dangerous results. Reference is made in The Fatal Flame, for example, to the clumsy paving over of the swamp beneath the Five Points neighborhood, an apt image of the denial of the past in the headlong pursuit of development (Faye 2015, 255). Another example, from the first novel, is the wooden house Wilde sees just before the gruesome discovery of a child murdered by its impoverished mother in a downtown tenement, a house “[d]estined to be a hell before they’d even finished building it” (Faye 2012, 62). Contemplating the construction that immediately follows destruction, Wilde reflects: “Yes. We keep going. Maybe in another direction, maybe even in the wrong one. But by whichever God you fancy, we keep going ” (101; emphasis in original). From one point of view, this reads as a familiar affirmation of New Yorkers’ resourcefulness and strength: attributes regularly invoked by the media in the aftermath of 9/11. From another, however, the possibility of proceeding in the “wrong” direction calls this affirmation into question. At the very least, the entrepreneurial spirit demonstrated in the speedy bringing of a building to maturity is altogether less admirable when applied to a child. And it is the centrality of children that provides the biggest clue to the ambivalent attitude to “progress” in The Gods of Gotham. One of the most vivid and disturbing images is of the “kinchin-mabs” like Bird Daly dressed up to resemble grown women: “Kinchin-mabs are most often hidden away indoors. But when they do walk abroad, they’re painted to look like tiny society women. Hair pinned up like the belles of a ghastly miniature ball” (76). If this is the most distressing example of children forced into the appearance of maturity, there are others. Enlisting the help of a news hawker nicknamed Ninepin, Timothy calls him “an uncommonly fine example,” elaborating: “This one had reached the ripe age of

64

J. PEACOCK

twelve, I thought, for the cigar in his grinning mouth was pretty well practiced, and his blue vest and knee-length purple trousers fit him well …his muscles of necessity and pugilism better developed than they should have been” (177–78). The painted mabs and muscled hawkers in Faye’s book constitute a factitious and debased version of coming-of-age in a society riddled with contradictions engendered by incipient capital. Although they appear to undermine a post-Enlightenment, Romantic binary construction of adulthood and childhood and the qualities attached to those labels, this is only superficially true. Inhabiting a space between, in Virginia Blum’s words, “the sentimental and material value of children” (1995, 9), the child prostitutes’ youth is at once prized, fetishized and denied; it is commodified yet disavowed in the pitiful attempt to disguise such children as adults. Roaming the streets and working the brothels of New York barely 70 years after independence, these children symbolize, like the haphazard building projects, a nation intent on appearing to grow up too quickly. Although it would be tempting to view them, in the context of an historical novel, as symbols of the “young” nation, they are more accurately representative of the nation’s ambiguous relationship with its own “newness.” In terms of the contemporary twentyfirst-century moment, they also speak to increased societal fears around child protection and the sexualization of children. Given the “wide-awake nightmare” of Daly’s past (Faye 2013, 280), it is hardly surprising that she dreads being sent back to Silkie Marsh’s establishment, or that Wilde yearns to turn back the clock and offer her a conventional childhood. And yet Wilde’s coming-of-age through the trilogy consists in understanding first that his desire to rescue her childhood is too closely embroiled with his own traumas, and secondly that the unsullied innocence he wants for her is impossible to regain, partly because it is a fiction of his own (and other adults’) construction. An important foreshadowing of this realization comes when Wilde takes Daly to see his brother at Democratic Party headquarters. Valentine sends the girl off to find some new clothes and when she returns, she is wearing “an ivory cotton summer dress with a scooped neck and a high falling waist, covered in orange poppies at the seams” (Faye 2012, 240). Wilde’s reaction is revealing for what it omits: “She truly was a different person— not a kinchin-mab, not a hot-corn wench in pilfered nankeen trousers, but simply a little girl, furrowing her brow in a way I was growing used to” (241). There is nothing simple about it: what he neglects to state is

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

65

that this is a costume—she is dressed as a little girl in images of summer and new life, and the costume allows Wilde to perceive her as innocent. Through his many encounters with vulnerable children—Ninepin the news hawker; Jean-Baptiste, the sweep who invents “his own version of sign language” (Faye 2013, 42); Dunla Duffy, the Irish sewing-girl “too tall to be a child, too lost to be a woman full grown” in The Fatal Flame (Faye 2015, 92); and in particular Daly—Wilde eventually comes to recognize how childhood arrives differently costumed according to adult perceptions and, importantly, material circumstances. A case in point is the sweeps: “a class of emaciated kinchin who appear to remain forever childlike …because they find better work by the ripe age of twelve, when they’ve grown too big for such narrow spaces – or they’re already dead” (Faye 2013, 34). Even as he assumes the role of surrogate father, sending Daly (at the end of the first novel) to a Catholic school for orphans and welcoming her into a makeshift family unit with his landlady, Mrs Boehm, Wilde begins to learn that he cannot and should not, despite his longing to, recapture the girl’s “lost” childhood. In Seven for a Secret , he admits: “if I could remake her into simply a little girl with grey eyes and high cheekbones and a splash of freckles across her face and shoulders instead of a melancholy adult with the untroubled complexion of a child – I’d do it in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t make me any less fond of the Bird who exists now” (Faye 2013, 280–81). Granting her a degree of autonomy and present-ness, as he begins to do here, involves accepting her in-betweenness and vulnerability—in the sense both of her mental fragility after the abuse to which she has been subjected, and of her need to be recognized as a complex individual, constituted in material social relations. In starting to accept Daly as what James and Prout call a “being in the present” rather than an exemplar of an ideologically fossilized, nostalgic category called “child” (1997b, 245), Wilde effects a mutual transformation, a becoming instigated, as Butler observes, in the very act of recognition between individuals (Butler 2004, 44). At the end of Seven for a Secret, when the narrator learns that Lucy Adams has made the ultimate sacrifice for her son Jonas to protect him from exposure and a return to enslavement, Wilde writes: “Lucy Adams had taught me a lesson, though one I’d never be able to thank her for. Bird, like Lucy, could never go back. And Bird, like Lucy, was perfect. As beautiful and heartbreaking as an unsent letter” (Faye 2013, 449). Perfection thus conceived is not synonymous with individual sovereignty, nor with prelapsarian purity, but

66

J. PEACOCK

with the recognition of vulnerability, the potential for new relations. As an “unsent” letter, Bird embodies not the lost past but the potential “to petition the future always in relation to the Other” (Butler 2004, 44), to work toward a future that is always becoming, never achieved. The development thus implied has nothing to do with progress from childhood innocence to adult rationality, but everything to do with an outward movement toward complex and unexpected communal relations. This is why children in these novels, often orphaned, are so rarely depicted in traditional family environments and why, furthermore, the limitations and depredations of the heteronormative family unit are consistently exposed. Biological parent–child relationships are either destroyed through unhappy circumstance, as is the case for the Wilde brothers or, more frequently, rendered tragically dysfunctional by neglect and fanaticism. Toward the end of The Gods of Gotham, Wilde finds the love of his life, Mercy Underhill, tied up and plunged into a freezing bath by her father, a clergyman whose virulent anti-Catholic sentiments have inspired him to pose as “the God of Gotham” and denounce his daughter’s writing and charity work as pornography (Faye 2012, 387). The arsonist in The Fatal Flame, it transpires, is Nell Grimshaw (or “The Witch”), desperately trying to ingratiate herself back into the life of her illegitimate son, Alderman Symmes, who has summarily abandoned her to pursue his political ambitions (Faye 2015, 384). Marriage, likewise, is only rarely predicated on love and more often on convention or political expediency. Although two narrative threads—Bird Daly’s and Mrs Boehm’s—are allowed the traditional happy ending of marriage, it is clear that marriage often remains a political, patriarchal institution founded on power. As Wilde muses in Seven for a Secret , for example: “Marriages matter to politicians. They reflect purpose and intent—are badges of responsibility. Those wives have sweet smiles and domestic accomplishments, have memorized poetry and pianoforte airs, can quote the Bible while mixing a deadly whiskey punch for the lads” (2013, 255). Focused on his status and reputation, rather than “principles,” as Wilde ironically calls them, Senator Rutherford Gates is prepared to countenance the murder of his African American lover to preserve his position in the Party. While never underplaying the dehumanizing effects of exploitative child labor, Faye’s novels suggest that the traditional family is far from representing a utopian alternative because it has the potential to instantiate other forms of exploitation. A narrative of coming-of-age or development, therefore, may not depend on assimilation into a nurturing family

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

67

unit. This is largely because, as Jo Boyden (1997) argues, the heteronormative family, which depends on the regulation of parental roles and on ideological notions of ideal childhood, has itself developed, particularly in the West, in tandem with “[t]he expansion of capitalism” (192). As Sharon Stephens (1995) explains, drawing on Boyden’s work: “the ‘hardening’ of the modern dichotomy of child/adult, like the modern distinction female/male, was crucial to setting up hierarchical relations between distinct domains of social life – the private and public, consumption and production, objective need and subjective desire – upon which modern capitalism and the modern nation-state depended” (6). Thus, children merely acquire different forms of use and exchange-value; the domain of childhood leisure becomes a privileged space of capital-generating consumption; and family and schooling prepare the young for adult life as part of a “skilled and differentiated laborforce” (Boyden 1997, 192). In this way, the post-Enlightenment discourse of innocence and experience is remodeled according to the demands of capital. By laying bare the patriarchal politics of marriage and the family; emphasizing the constitutive vulnerability of both children and adults and the constructedness of these categories; and by destabilizing binaries such as dependency/autonomy, rational/irrational and adult/child, Faye’s novels suggest alternative trajectories and alternative relationships beyond the “regrettably nonnegotiable” ones of family (Faye 2015, 330). The most successful bonds in the trilogy, those based on mutual recognition, respect and shared vulnerability, frequently fall outside hegemonic expectations of biological kinship, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. Seven for a Secret ends with Jean-Baptiste joining Lucy Adams’ son Jonas, the latter’s aunt Delia and her admirer George Higgins on their escape to Canada. In The Fatal Flame, Wilde finds companionship in his job as detective in an ethnically diverse police force and grows into his role as unofficial adoptive father to Bird Daly, who eventually marries Ninepin. Valentine finds love with Jim Playfair, an English pianist. Mercy Underhill and Dunla Duffy find refuge in a theatrical boarding house, ministered to with compassion by an eccentric band of “bawdy, warmhearted almost-strangers” (Faye 2015, 394) connected to the theater. And Sally Woods rekindles her deep “sisterhood” with her former workmate, Ellie Abell, who has suffered at the hands of Symmes and his acolytes (416). If a better future is even possible, the strong implication is that it lies not in entrenchment in familiar, exclusive communities, but in relations which are sometimes

68

J. PEACOCK

provisional, often unexpected, and which one might fruitfully describe as cosmopolitan. It is in its tendencies toward cosmopolitanism, which Kristian Shaw (2017) defines as “a process of creative engagement between peoples and cultures in developing an openness to forms of alterity and the negotiation of a more interdependent world” (7), that Faye’s trilogy has most to say about the contemporary moment. Moreover, in dramatizing historical continuities, the endurance of conflict and controversies surrounding race, immigration, and gender inequalities, these novels propose cosmopolitanism, to paraphrase Kwame Anthony Appiah, as a challenge rather than a utopian solution (2006, xvii). That cosmopolitanism will always be provisional, under negotiation, contested, and has much to do with the ethics of vulnerability which underpins it. If, as Jean-Michel Ganteau (2015) states, vulnerability entails a breakdown in individual autonomy, as well as responsibilities to “others who do not belong to the usual restricted field of the family and circle of friends” but to the wider community (2), then it necessarily involves greater danger and risk of failure. Children in the trilogy, who, as we have seen, frequently find themselves outside traditional families, encapsulate vulnerability: they place demands on adults, not just to provide a duty of care, but also to acknowledge adults’ roles in the construction of childhood and to recognize that “vulnerability is shared, that it is common property,” that it constitutes social relations (Ganteau 2015, 5). According to Ganteau, vulnerability has become “a paradigm of the contemporary and of contemporary culture, and a template for the wounded contemporary subject” (4). It is a broad concept, incorporating cosmopolitanism, the “ethics of alterity to the ethics of care through trauma studies and narrative ethics” (25), as well as theories of hauntology. With regard to the latter, Ganteau explores examples of the modern elegy, a genre which examines how the past continues to haunt the present, in which characters are “haunted by a past that keeps repeating itself in the present, according to the most basic logic of trauma” (74). In other words, the present is vulnerable to the past. With this in mind, it is surprising that Ganteau’s generic approach to the novelistic aesthetics of vulnerability does not expressly include the historical novel. Whether or not one agrees with critics such as Suzanne Keen (2006), Harrison, and Spiropoulou that there has been an “historical turn” in twentyfirst-century fiction, it is evident that historical narratives have an important contribution to make to a contemporary ethics of vulnerability. They

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

69

can challenge “conventional ideas of ‘historical progress’” and reveal the inconvenient repetitions and ruptures, the “discontinuities, disjunctions and struggles between rival regimes of knowledge” that linear narratives of inexorable, rational progress might seek to suppress (Morrison 2003, 18, 19). In The Gods of Gotham stories, children are once again central to this disruptive drive because of their metaxis. Wilde’s first-person narration, as we have seen, allows no easy separation of adulthood and childhood, rationality and innocence. Neither does it consign children to the nostalgic past or to “some timeless zone standing …to the side of mainstream (that is adult) history and culture” (James and Prout 1997b, 234). Nor does it define children as entirely future-oriented, valuable only for their status as guardians of a better life to come. Rather, they are beings as well as becomings, social actors with a part to play in shaping historical events, but beings in which adults invest complex, contradictory ideologies of time, nostalgia and progress. “Growing up too soon” thus signifies both the imposition of “impossible” adult representations on children and an ideology of progressive history that ignores history’s essential vulnerability—its dependence on an infinite number of encounters across ages and cultures, multiple comings-into-being. Historical novels such as Faye’s do not show that life is better now: instead, they “produce encounters and confrontations between and among characters that postulate a relational model of humanity” (Ganteau 2015, 17). They suggest that history is, in Butler’s terms, a continual (re)making. Counterintuitively, history becomes “that which we have yet to know” (Butler 2004, 49) because its construction is never complete. Wilde’s closing remarks in The Fatal Flame, written on “April 16, 1854,” are: “Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons” (2015, 427; emphasis in original). By now, his hard-earned wisdom has become expansive; recognizing the power of words, he nonetheless understands their potential to obscure the histories of others as well as capturing them: “We so stubbornly speak to each other in our best pet languages. When really, how much simpler would it be to speak to the listener in his or her own?” (Faye 2015, 427). Although he cannot be sure that Mercy Underhill will read and understand his “nearly-books” (427), and surely cannot envisage a contemporary readership for them, here is a final exhortation to accept what Butler (2004) calls the “fundamental dependency on anonymous others” (xii), to embrace vulnerability. The necessary irony is that Timothy Wilde finally finds the form to tell his story with this realization:

70

J. PEACOCK

words attain the power to speak to others at the moment that power is called into question.

Notes 1. In thieves’ slang, or “flash,” “kinchin” most likely derives from the German “Kind” meaning “children.” “Mab,” meaning a prostitute, is thought to refer to Queen Mab from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 2. Although my emphasis here is on vulnerability and not on the well-traversed field of post-9/11 fiction, it is worth observing that Faye’s novels join other New York historical thrillers, including Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis (2006), Jed Rubenfeld’s Freudian thriller The Interpretation of Murder (2006), Emily Barton’s Brookland (2006), and Reggie Nadelson’s hardboiled detective story Manhattan 62 (2014), in using conflagrations and apocalyptic scenarios as retroactive anticipations of 9/11. Such texts step outside the arrested time of trauma—what Kristiaan Versluys calls “springing the time trap” (2009, 4)—by engaging directly with historical themes, purposefully displacing the events of 9/11 so as to locate them within a longer form of “narrative memory” (Caruth 1996, 153). Thus, they show that what is perceived as a limit event is, in fact, commensurable, explicable, a part of history.

Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin. Blum, Virginia. 1995. Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Boyden, Jo. 1997. “Childhood and the Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of Childhood.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues on the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 167–201. London: Routledge Farmer. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Faye, Lindsay. 2012. The Gods of Gotham. New York: Berkley Books. Faye, Lindsay. 2013. Seven for a Secret. London: Headline Review. Faye, Lindsay. 2015. The Fatal Flame. London: Headline Review. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge.

4

GROWING UP TOO QUICKLY: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION …

71

Grylls, David. 1978. Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in NineteenthCentury Literature. London: Faber. Harrison, Christine, and Angeliki Spiropoulou. 2015. “Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature.” Synthesis 8: 1–13. Hendrick, Harry. 1997. “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues on the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 29–53. London: Routledge Farmer. Heywood, Colin. 2018. A History of Childhood. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honeyman, Susan. 2005. Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1997a. “Introduction.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues on the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 1–5. London: Routledge Farmer. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. 1997b. “Re-presenting Childhood: Time and Transition in the Study of Childhood.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues on the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 202–19. London: Routledge Farmer. Keen, Suzanne. 2006. “The Historical Turn in British Fiction.” In A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, edited by James F. English, 167–87. Oxford: Blackwell. Kincaid, James R. 1992. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge. Kuhn, Reinhard. 1982. Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Lombardo, Patrizia. 1993. “Introduction: The End of Childhood?” Critical Quarterly 39 (3): 1–7. Millard, Kenneth. 2007. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morrison, Jago. 2003. Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge. Pifer, Ellen. 2000. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Postman, Neil. 1994. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage. Robinson, Alan. 2011. Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, Kristian. 2017. Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stephens, Sharon. 1995. “Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’.” In Children and the Politics of Culture, edited by Sharon Stephens, 3–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

72

J. PEACOCK

Uprichard, Emma. 2007. “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood and Temporality.” Children and Society 22: 303–13. Versluys, Kristiaan. 2009. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Wake, Paul. 2016. “‘Except in the Case of Historical Fact’: History and the Historical Novel.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 20 (1): 80–96. Woolf, Larry. 1998. “When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (4): 377–401.

CHAPTER 5

“Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo Clare Hayes-Brady

Lincoln in the Bardo, the first novel by George Saunders, burst on to the literary scene to immense critical acclaim in 2017, winning the 2018 Man Booker Prize and wholly disrupting the coherence of Saunders’ oeuvre to date. Saunders, a comic short-story writer known for his attention to the mundane details of late-capitalist drudgery, confounded expectations with a lyrical period novel about the death from a fever of President Lincoln’s young son. The novel is a peculiar beast, emerging from actual historical sources referring to the boy’s death and swelling into an exquisite symphony of 166 contested, competing voices that articulate the most sustained anxieties we have about our own mortality, control, and the eternities of unfinished business. Critically received as a radical departure in form and focus from Saunders’ more familiar, working-class, late-capitalist lens of short fiction, I argue here that Lincoln in the Bardo in fact continues precisely the themes and strategies of Saunders’ earlier work. At its heart, in keeping

C. Hayes-Brady (B) School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_5

73

74

C. HAYES-BRADY

with Saunders’ reputation, it offers a sharply contemporary vision of a divided society. Here I explore Bardo as a historical novel that works also to echo and refract the contemporary concerns of morality and mortality that more usually concern its author. The novel can be situated in the context of contemporary historical fiction, joining the ranks of Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and others in Saunders’ use of radical formal experimentation as a means of disrupting conventional historiography. Using Linda Hutcheon’s paradigm of historiographic metafiction as a central critical scaffold, this essay goes on to engage in a close reading of the novel’s unusual construction, demonstrating that the work’s symphonic narrative structure posits and reinforces its central thematic concerns as well as engaging in this disruptive historiography. For a work that ostensibly occurs around the onset of the American Civil War, Lincoln in the Bardo is strikingly reticent on questions of race, although its treatment of slavery as a concept resonates with Saunders’ altogether more direct (though still deracialized) treatment of slavery in the contemporary dystopia of “Bounty” (1995). Tracing this link, I argue that Saunders’ oblique engagement with slavery marks another thread of consistency through his oeuvre, one that again destabilizes the idea of generic separation between historical and dystopian fictions, united by Saunders’ unusual approach to time and historicity and by the compassionate imperative that marks all of his fiction. I conclude that Lincoln in the Bardo ruptures the (arguable) generic bounds of historical fiction to create a transhistorical meditation on mortality, purpose and legacy, emerging as a sharply contemporary, distinctively American symphony of voices. As a writer strongly associated with the short story form, Saunders is known for experimentation; he writes what might be called comic dystopias, in which we encounter a somewhat familiar vision of the technocapitalist future. With a pervasive mimesis of corporate argot, the writing frequently plays with notions of disempowerment, disenfranchisement and various forms of precarity. His characters are what Judith Butler (2009) identifies as “ungrievable”: outsiders, collateral damage in the march of late (or post-) capitalist decline. Wildly divergent in form and focus from the semi-familiar near-future landscapes of his short fiction, Bardo operates in a kind of liminal formal or generic space and has striking commonalities with Saunders’ post-capitalist stories. By no means a traditional novel in its form or structures, Bardo borrows from magical realism and the gothic forms, steadfastly resisting anything that could be called

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

75

realism; in this respect, it shares a formal and structural playfulness with Saunders’ other work, where realist delivery is complicated by decisively jarring cultural notes, and where dialogue is often phonetic or otherwise unruly. In Bardo, Saunders destabilizes the historiographical form, disorienting the reader and forcing a direct confrontation with the workings of language and power, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Hayes-Brady, 2017), is the primary ethical and aesthetic work of his short fiction in general. Bardo’s formal insistence on multivocality, its kaleidoscopic orchestration, deconstructs familiar forms of both narrative and historiography, in the same way as the contemporary and near-futuristic short fiction deranges familiar tropes of luxury, labor and industry. Bardo’s constant interruptions and tonal switches persistently foreground the impoverishment and unreliability of monovocal narrative, reminding the reader at every turn of the mutable, mercurial quality of “truth.” The novel’s internal quirks of form further underscore this basic structural implication by recontextualizing all dialogue as quoted speech, removing quotation marks and attributing each remark in the manner of a memorial quotation or epitaph. This formal variation has further implications for interpreting the text, to which we will return shortly, but the ethical work of disruptive historiography that it performs is its primary point of relevance here. Writers of American historical fiction must deal with the need to grapple with what Lois Parkinson Zamora (1997) has called “anxiety of origins” and the creation of “the usable past” (6–15). Such fiction thus encounters its own forms of complexity, figured in cultural terms most strikingly in conceits of pastlessness and exceptionalism, conceits that Elizabeth Duquette (2013) has argued “collectively assert the unique nature of the United States, its exemption from historical forces that buffet the rest of the world” (473). Duquette highlights Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the American Frontier in American History” (1893) as an example of the entwining of emerging American national identity and the idea of freedom from the past, establishing “a link between geography and character, fundamentally masculinist” that later scholars recognized as maintaining a “narrow focus on a limited range of experience (white, male, Protestant, heterosexual)” (473). Saunders’ strange novel challenges this focus both by emphasizing the disempowered peripheral observers of American history, and by presenting history as the confluence of infinite collapsed temporalities, countless individual pasts that bear on infinite presents. Bardo is an unusually apposite example of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1996, 105–23); the novel

76

C. HAYES-BRADY

combines primary sources with imagined “ex-centric” characters who observe or peripherally engage in historical events and disrupt our experience of and assumptions about what is “known,” a practice that is lent additional layers by focusing on such a studied period in history and by including the perspective of a kind of afterlife. Hutcheon argues that this practice engages in a form of historiography that fundamentally “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge” (106) by drawing attention to the narrative structures that underpin the transmission of history and culture. Saunders’ reconfiguration of historical narrative has both formal and thematic properties; the multivocality, insistent attribution and extensive use of white space disrupt the familiar reading experience while the setting of the novel and the conversation of the ghostly protagonists also gently invites us to reckon with both the story and its ways of telling, and in a wider sense, what we can know about history in its widest sense. The inclusion of voices from long-dead characters also allows Saunders to expand his interpretive horizons beyond the strictly contemporary, placing the action of the novel in conversation with its own precursors and by extension with its own legacies, most notably the Civil War and Abolition. The characters who dispute the identity of the current president and who give voice to previous generations’ attitudes to slavery and nationalism trouble the linear surface of the novel’s teleology, which is Lincoln’s conversion to the cause of Abolition and its subsequent real-world unfolding. Bardo tells the story of the death of President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son William Wallace Lincoln in 1862, probably of typhoid. It is told from the Bardo, a place between life and death in Tibetan mythology, situated in Oak Hill Cemetery, where the boy was buried. The novel was inspired by a story Saunders heard about Lincoln returning several times to his son’s grave to hold his body, and the novel is a meditation on loss, grief and the rituals and beliefs about death. Saunders compared the story to the Pietà, Michelangelo’s image of the Madonna and Christ after his crucifixion, explaining that he had imagined, on hearing the story, “a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà,” an image that stayed with him for two decades until he finally wrote the novel that would win such praise (Saunders 2017b). While the story itself is a compelling one, and certainly chimes with Saunders’ tender portrayals of parent–child relationships throughout his writing,1 the novel’s primary feature is its extremely unusual form. Formally daring and at times confusing to read, the novel is marked by indeterminacy on a number of levels. Although Bardo engages

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

77

clearly in historiographic metafiction, there are several challenges to categorizing this peculiar text as a historical novel, most obviously its formal attributes. The next sections consider how Bardo undercuts its own generic attributes and how this troubling of boundaries both fulfills and transcends the work of historical writing. While “novel” most closely describes Bardo, Saunders originally wanted to write a play (see McVeigh 2017); indeed, the audiobook adaptation features a cast of 166 voice actors, including Saunders himself playing the Reverend Everly Thomas, and won the Audie prize for best audiobook in 2018. Bardo is indeed composed of direct speech, comprising lines of dialogue and quotes from written sources, real and imagined. In most cases, the quoted passage is presented like an epigraph, with the speaker’s name or the source given at the end. The book opens with what seems like standard first-person narration of a remembered wedding night, without quotation marks, which goes on for two pages until it is interrupted by another voice, at which point the novel’s central structural conceit makes its first appearance: […] A sort of sick-box was judged – was judged to be – hans vollman Efficacious roger bevins iii Efficacious, yes. Thank you, friend, hans vollman. (Saunders 2017a, 5)

The narrative proceeds in this way. Vollman and Bevins are two of the three main narrators in the book, whose dialogue provides a thread of coherence through the often cacophonous circulation of voices. The voice of the Reverend Everly Thomas joins the narrative in Chapter IX at the same time as young Willie Lincoln (the novel’s chapters are signaled by Roman numerals, which accentuates its historical setting). The chapters between I and IX are all composed of short extracts from historical descriptions of the period, specifically of a party at the White House while Willie lay sick with the fever that would kill him. Some of these sources are legitimate historical records, while some, as Saunders put it, are “invented ‘historical’ bits” that he wrote himself (Saunders 2017b). The invented passages are given the same structure as the “real” ones,

78

C. HAYES-BRADY

troubling the notion of historical sources, while the personal narratives of the other Bardo inhabitants destabilize the very concept of historiography as well as the conventions of narrative structure. Specifically, the juxtaposition of imagined voices from a place between life and death with real and imagined written sources presents all these kinds of voices from the past as equivalent, problematizing the idea of “truth.” In this way, the narrative creation of historical narratives is necessarily foregrounded as a structural consideration; the novel’s formal innovation is so total that the reader has no choice but to submit to simply experiencing the polyphonic progression of the narrative. In this regard, Bardo engages in what would normally be considered postmodernist aesthetic and formal practices, although Adam Kelly (2017) has argued that Saunders is part of a post-postmodernism movement he refers to as New Sincerity, where the strategies familiar from postmodernist practice are redeployed in the service of establishing sincere communication, breaking away from the cynicism and self-referentiality of the later postmodernist period. As a narrative that deals with death across time, Saunders is necessarily engaged with questions of history and heritage in a way that complicates the American ideals of pastlessness and reinvention and grapples with issues around memory and, more specifically, memorialization. In the novel’s broader context of the Civil War, this question takes on a wider societal and historical resonance, and Butler’s theory of grievability here offers an intriguing link between actual memorial and the reclaiming of historical agency by the otherwise marginalized inhabitants of the Bardo. These characters are the definition of ungrievable, which Butler (2009) defines as “those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone” (xix). In Bardo, Saunders renders them grievable by giving voice to their experiences, but by including such a plethora of competing voices, that grievability is glancing, contingent. Reading the work from the perspective of ghosts, Lincoln’s political considerations, and the contemporary reception of his presidency reflected in the historical fragments Saunders included in the text, simultaneously increase and decrease in urgency; on the one hand, there is a universal, timeless quality to the ramifications of his decisions, which we are aware of due to our historical understanding of what followed, while on the other hand, the constant presence of death and untouchable nature of the ghosts renders those same decisions inconsequential within the context of the novel. This is perhaps one reason why Saunders did not include the action of the Civil War in the

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

79

text, referring to it obliquely rather than directly. Saunders’ use of form expands Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction rather radically to include dozens of “ex-centric” characters, whose imagined personal histories serve to disrupt the received narrative of President Lincoln, the death of his son and his engagement in the Civil War. Saunders’ ghostly narrators, in conversation with his use of genuine historical accounts, tie Lincoln’s “amazing progress” from “virulent racist” to “out ahead of not only his culture but ours” in terms of racial politics (quoted in Paulson 2017) to the death of his son, articulating a profoundly personal backdrop for a fundamental political shift. On the other hand, the novel does not engage with the historical events of the time except in passing, and its protagonists are not of this world, begging the question of what precisely constitutes history. Certainly, through the ending of the novel, Saunders invites the reader to connect the forms of memory and identity in the novel with the unfolding of history, perhaps to consider the contingency of globally significant events on personally cataclysmic ones. By disrupting our sense of how history is created and culturally transmitted, and especially by the degree to which he undermines the notion of a coherent historical narrative, Saunders pushes readers to reconsider their assumptions about mid-nineteenth-century American history and the emergence of a national identity. But the novel also flattens these issues, pushing questions of national and historical significance to the margins of the text; rather than including Hutcheon’s “ex-centric” characters, Saunders focuses on them to the near-exclusion of all else. Moreover, while the work is ostensibly set immediately before the Civil War, the marginal voices of the text come from much further back, and as the Bardo is a space outside time, it does not conform to historicizing forces. Saunders channels this vagrant temporality through the polyphonic narrative that is the novel’s trademark, the primacy of space over time razing the niceties of periodicity and foregrounding a kind of timeless subjectivity and indeterminacy that anchors both text and reader in a recursive ever-present. This indeterminacy begins with the novel’s title, with several elements that effect uncertainty. Firstly, which Lincoln does the title refer to? The plot of the novel would suggest Willie, the child, who is the root of the novel’s dramatic action and one of its narrators (we hear President Lincoln’s voice but only mediated through the consciousness of other characters). However, that action is in large part caused by the repeated living presence within the graveyard that constitutes the novel’s setting of the

80

C. HAYES-BRADY

“exceedingly tall and unkempt” President Lincoln, who returns repeatedly in the novel’s single-night time frame to spend time with his son’s body (Saunders 2017a, 43). As such, it may be President Lincoln who is the Lincoln in the Bardo. Secondly, the term Bardo is not a common one in English and is never explained, or even used, in the body of the novel. It is presented as something the reader should understand, but never elaborated, and is therefore an implicit presence in the text. The Bardo is a concept that comes from Tibetan Buddhism and refers to a liminal or transitional state between death and rebirth, in which the behavior of a person during their life is weighed in relation to their next incarnation. Interestingly, in Saunders’ imagination of the space, it takes on a more strongly Judeo-Christian character, and functions not as a space between death and rebirth, but as a space between death and afterlife. The Bardo of Saunders’ novel is a space of liminality, but not of process; it is a place of pure waiting, of resistance to death. The inhabitants of this liminal realm refuse to know that they are dead, purporting rather to believe that they are experiencing an out-of-body experience necessary to their recovery from illness or accident. They refer to their coffins as “sick-boxes” (3 and passim) and avoid discussion of the complexities of their situation, including the passage of time. Indeed, the only time we see something that does resemble the Buddhist notion of the Bardo as a space of judgment is when one of the narrators, the Reverend Everly Thomas, admits that he knows that he is dead because he fled the judgment of the “Christ-emissary” and the beings who accompany him in the hall of judgment (190). Everly chooses therefore to remain in his transitional space in the full knowledge of his condition, participating in the grand delusion he cannot believe. The Bardo is not a concept with any precise equivalent in Christian theology, but its rendition in the novel is explicitly Christianized. The Bardo, then, as it is represented here, is a threshold not meant for lingering, a space characterized and animated by indeterminacy which becomes a feature of the characters themselves as a result of their long sojourns in this space. As they tell and retell their stories, features of their narratives become physically visible; the stories of their deaths are written on their bodies in very literal ways. Roger Bevins III, who killed himself over his homosexuality and the loss of a lover, but changed his mind in the midst of his death and is consumed by regrets at not having experienced the world more fully, grows sensory organs—eyes, noses, hands grasping desperately at a lost world—each time he tells his story. Hans Vollman,

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

81

whose death was caused by a roof beam falling on him as he went to bed with his new and much younger wife for the first time, is encumbered in death by a grotesquely large erection that he has to carry with him. Each character has a bodily indication of the business that keeps them in the Bardo, but even at that, their forms are unfixed. Depending on their attention and their stress levels, their forms wax and wane between resemblance of themselves in life and the wild exaggerations of their corporeal forms in death. The power of narrative takes on a physical force through repetition, assuming a quality not only of truth but of actual manifestation, a grotesque kind of Pinocchio play that functions as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the “science” of physiognomy popular in America in the nineteenth century, of which Lincoln himself was a prime subject (Finnegan 2005). Lastly, the novel’s primary formal characteristic—this frenetic multivocality—further foregrounds the role of indeterminacy, refusing to grant the reader any narrative coherence and problematizing the idea of history and the illusions of truth and narrative coherence. But it also disrupts the narrative at a simple plot level; there is no sense of relaxation in the work. Rather, the reader is placed in the same space of liminality and uncertainty as the characters, unable to progress or rest, mirroring the endless circular waiting of the characters. Notably, as the novel draws to a close, the disparate, kaleidoscopic narratives begin to converge on a single narrative thread: the realization of their condition, the choice to depart or remain, and the final departure of Abraham Lincoln from the cemetery. While the style does not change, the frenetic pace of movement between perspectives is smoothed by a similarity in focus if not a unity of voice. This urgent indeterminacy, which implicates the reader, and the reader’s historicizing instinct, in its temporal eddy, moves the novel away from the generic terms of historical fiction, since it both privileges the dislocated subjectivity of the liminally deceased and includes the voices of subjects with no knowledge of the novel’s ostensible “real-world” period. As such, the novel functions more as a transhistorical palimpsest of American identities orbiting a striated geographical center, in which the reader is invited to perform the work of historicizing. Apart from the generalized multivocality, Saunders makes particular use of two formal strategies to maintain the narrative tension of the Bardo and evade the direct interrogation of the novel’s real-world setting: a child narrator, and a focus on mortality rather than morality. Much of the

82

C. HAYES-BRADY

dramatic action in Lincoln in the Bardo stems from the youth of its protagonist, Willie Lincoln. Children, as a rule, do not linger in the Bardo. The reasons for this are unclear, but appear to concern the lack of unfinished business in their lives; the rest of the inhabitants of this threshold space are consumed by their unresolved questions and desires. In an effort to demonstrate to Willie the need for him to move on, they bring him to meet the only other child inhabitant, Elsie Traynor. Elsie is confined to the region of the dreaded fence; indeed, she has become part of it and is trapped inside a hard carapace composed of clinging tendrils. Elsie’s existence in the Bardo is one of terrible suffering. “These young ones are not meant to tarry,” according to Bevins (Saunders 2017a, 31). The three narrators discuss the arrival and departure of children to the Bardo that they recall, their ages and primary features, the length of their stay. When they bring young Lincoln to see Elsie, she shifts form from a “sort of horrid blackened furnace [to] the fallen bridge, the vulture, the large dog, the terrible hag gorging on black cake, the stand of flood-ravaged corn, the umbrella ripped open by a wind we could not feel,” but she eventually returns to her erstwhile human form and relates her story to Willie (37). Willie’s decision to obey and pass on is thwarted by his father’s arrival and the renewal of his determination to wait, the decision upon which the action of the novel turns, ineluctably connecting individual and familial desire with the geopolitical events of the nineteenth century. The child narrator works especially well in experimental fiction, where the particularities of a child’s engagement with the world often provide the tools for the text to unravel and undermine its own integrity, or cast a fresh eye on well-worn topics. In particular, the child narrator is often useful to relate a story that lacks coherence—the quintessential unreliable narrator, available without the complications of an adult unreliable narrator (such as intentional deceit or mental health issues). As Alexis Egan (2016) has argued, though, “few groups are seen as unreliable in their narration of a story’s events as are teenage and child narrators” (49). However, Saunders’ novel is notable because Willie, although he is the dramatic center of the narrative, is far from its primary narrator. Like the other characters in the text, Willie’s narrative voice is specific to him, and Saunders uses some interesting formal strategies in his representation of the young boy’s consciousness. One striking feature is the near-total absence of the full stop in Willie’s speech, although all other appropriate punctuation is used, and there are some occasions when a full stop is used, chiefly at the end of a line of reported speech. This gives the impression of

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

83

breathlessness and speed in Willie’s narration, as well as a sense of incompleteness. The spacing (both typographical and vocal) of his narration is also striking, with large gaps between clauses that jar the reader’s attention and force us to pause at unnatural points in the narrative, artificially accelerating and slowing the pace of reading, both reminding us that we are reading text and creating a clearer sense of the boy’s voice. Willie’s is the only narrative voice to use this formal tool of spacing. Strictly speaking, Willie is not the only child narrator used in the novel; we also meet Elsie, the cautionary tale. Elsie is only fourteen, and therefore is a child in some senses, but her narrative is one of sexual awakening and the desire for a child. As such, she is both child and adult, and her narrative forms a kind of bridge between the adult voices and Willie’s distinctly childlike syntax. Elsie’s expression is more in keeping with the less educated narrators coming from the other side of the fence, and her place at the fence as well as her blurring of the boundary between child and adult, position her as an unequivocally liminal figure in the text, straddling all the boundaries offered by the text and further resisting any strict categorization of the novel or its moral stances. Elsie’s liminal role—both child and adult, literal fence-sitter (which in this case also signifies racial indeterminacy)—is echoed in her specific yearning for a child; she is no longer a physical being, but her desire is still mediated through physical metamorphosis in both its object and its expression. Like Vollman and Bevins in particular, Elsie personifies the novel’s central tension between the physical and the metaphysical: the problem of the embodied self. While the novel’s various narrative voices are historically imbricated, the expressed anxieties about birth, illness and death resonate deeply with contemporary audiences. By having the inhabitants refer to their “sick-boxes” and “sick-forms” (Saunders 2017a, 58) Saunders manages here, as in his short fiction, to gently highlight the acrobatics we undertake to evade the question of our own finitude, even in the most extreme circumstances. The language of the hospital becomes the language of the crypt, ironically deferring the ultimate articulation of the truth. As the novel progresses—as is often the case with Saunders—it is the role of the child to speak truth, forcing a reckoning with death. Children are not supposed to stay in the Bardo, though, and Bevins in particular encourages young Lincoln to move on, but Lincoln is persuaded to stay by the visits of his grieving father. Ultimately the child realizes the truth of the Bardo and his revelation of this knowledge changes the other inhabitants (so to speak) of this threshold place. Because of the novel’s multivocal

84

C. HAYES-BRADY

structure, we witness a number of different voices coming to terms with death, acknowledging it and relinquishing their hold on the world. The whole novel revolves around the fear of the afterlife, the unwillingness or inability to articulate death as a reality and the capacity of language to obfuscate and defer the reality of one’s own death. This resistance is represented in the differing vocabularies of various shades, reflecting the different times of their demise, which comes to the fore late in the novel with a tussle over who is president. The experience of time, then, is central to the novel’s engagement with death. The shades live in a kind of endless present, physically trapped in the instant of their deaths and emotionally unable to move on, the recursive “now” of grief that also entraps the hazy figure of President Lincoln, drawn to a graveyard. This endless present, as I have suggested, works to dehistoricize the novel at one level, but the forward motion of the plot(s) simultaneously creates the sense of an infinitude of pasts converging on a real-world present, making Lincoln’s visits to the grave a turning point in history both within and without the Bardo. Besides the thematic necessity of the plural perspectives of the novel, the use of polyphonic narrative works at a formal level to break the illusions of totality and coherence associated with a single narrative voice. Aesthetically, multivocal narrative disrupts the perceived integrity of the narrative both visually, on the page, and systemically, in the sense of disrupting the reader’s literary experience of the narrative. Politically, the use of multivocality can be used to challenge the hegemonic forms of historiography with which we are familiar and the Foucauldian power dynamics of a history written from one perspective. As such, it is a medium in which the narratives of marginalized groups or individuals can be foregrounded or incorporated into a broader conversation. Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), for example, makes use of multivocality to imagine the weight of slavery as heritage and to honor the anonymity of Sethe’s ancestors. In Bardo, Saunders also adverts to race and racism in nineteenth-century America, as well as invoking class and economic status as symptoms of a deeply divided nation. Saunders employs the work’s democratizing polyphony as a tool for broadening the focus on the period and the use of the multivocal form in the novel is extremely effective. Saunders achieves this effect largely by returning to the same acute dialogic ear that marks his short fiction; rather than describing the condition or origin of his narrators, he relies on idiom and tone

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

85

to differentiate his characters in terms of class, race and—perhaps most interestingly for a historical novel—period. The numerous voices are well individuated by style, vocabulary and even punctuation; for example, Willie Lincoln’s passages are marked by erratic spacing and the absence of periods marking the ends of sentences, while the crowds who gather around President Lincoln on his visits to his son’s tomb range from very formal to very colloquial, with a similar range of precision in spelling and punctuation. Consider the following four passages, which occur successively in Chapter LXV: It was me started that fire. andy thorne I steal every chanse I git. janice p. dwightson I give her dimonds and perls and broke the harts of wife and children and sell the house from under us to buy more dimonds and perls but she throws me over for mr hollyfen with his big yellow laughing horseteeth and huge preceding paunch? robert g. twistings Sixty acres with a good return & a penful of hog & thirty head cattle & six fine horses & a cobbled stone house snug as a cradle in winter & a fine wife who looks adoringly at me & three fine boys who hang on my every word & a fine orchard giving pears apples plums peaches and still Father don’t care for me? lance durning. (Saunders 2017a, 207)

Immediately striking are the distinctions between the voices: the obvious ones like length, tone and spelling, and the less obvious ones like punctuation (the use of the ampersand by Durning evokes the epistolary style of the eighteenth century) and pacing (the headlong rush of Twistings’ emotion, combined with his poor spelling and absent punctuation give a clear impression of his character, even in so short a space, evoking the voices of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha). Notice also the content: All four quotations are in some way confessional—the first two directly, the latter two more obliquely. In each case, the speaker reveals him or herself and the central preoccupation of their character in just a few words. Each character is named, according them all equal status. None of the

86

C. HAYES-BRADY

names are capitalized. This is the case throughout the novel and distinguishes the narrative voices from the written sources, whose authors are cited more or less normally (capitalized surname, short citation after the first reference, page number where applicable) thus inviting the reader to reappraise the notion of naming. In what way is a person’s name still associated with them after death? The appending of the name each time a character speaks also evokes the form of the epitaph, and the significance accorded to final words; appending the name in this way to dialogue, and often trivial dialogue at that, again troubles the idea of ritual and the conventions of memorialization. Each voice and each utterance is thus equalized by the form, while the content continues to articulate differences, both between the characters and between their various statements. By writing the novel in this way, Saunders asks us to think of death as the great leveler, the unavoidable event that universalizes human experience, but simultaneously demonstrates that even in death there are striations of privilege and power; for example, the black denizens of this particular graveyard (Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, DC) continue to be physically segregated from the main cemetery, largely in a mass grave on the far side of the cemetery fence, which is referred to several times throughout the narrative as a boundary that induces nausea, horror and all manner of negative sensations in the shades; three of the shades have a competition “to see which of us may come the Closest, even while experiencing the nauseating Effects convey’d via Proximity to same” (Saunders 2017a, 120). The novel’s black characters, when their race is identified, are normally confined to a mass grave on the far side of the fence from the novel’s primary action. The grave is also a pauper’s grave, meaning that it connects class and race in a way that manages at times to elide both.2 Bardo marks a departure from this elision later in the novel, which ends not, as we might expect, with the resolution of Willie Lincoln’s troubling time in the Bardo, but with President Lincoln’s final departure from the graveyard, accompanied—or rather inhabited—by Thomas Havens, a dead slave who speaks fondly of the family that owned him, whom he maintains “were like family to me” (Saunders 2017a, 219; emphasis in original), a phrase he repeats each time we meet him. Havens’ narrative voice is calm and articulate, with precise spelling and punctuation, contrasting sharply with the revengehungry Elson Farwell, who dreams of murdering his former owners, who left him to die. In his cheerful recollections, Havens initially seems to embody the anti-Abolitionist stereotype of the happy

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

87

slave. However, elements of even his earliest appearance belie his acquiescence to slavery, including his admission that “of course, there was always a moment, just as an order was given, when a small, resistant voice would make itself known in the back of my mind” (219). It is ultimately Havens whose voice closes the novel, having earlier discovered a kind of “kinship” with President Lincoln when the president passes through him on his way out of the cemetery several chapters before the end (311). Unlike the remaining shades, Havens chooses to leave the cemetery with Lincoln, who has arrived at the conclusion that the Civil War is necessary to the good of the country, despite his reluctance to lead a side into such bloodshed. The goal of Emancipation is thus closely linked to both Willie’s death and his father’s grief and to the rather heavily drawn common humanity between Lincoln and Havens. Indeed, in a sense, the novel suggests that it is Havens’ presence within Lincoln that animates his Abolitionism; Lincoln has some pages previously decided that the freedom (explicitly white freedom) to forge one’s own destiny made the Civil War worth its price, but Havens insists that Lincoln “endeavor to do something for us, so that we might do something for ourselves” (312; emphasis in original). Saunders’ attempt to use the novel to complicate the history of Lincoln’s presidency is not an unqualified success; the suggestion that Lincoln espoused Emancipation because he was possessed by the ghost of a black man is at best clumsy and at worst engages in precisely the kind of magical thinking about racial responsibility Saunders’ work seems keen to undo. The novel never really addresses this, but relies on the men’s commonality of “sorrow” to establish an illusory equality between them (303). Indeed, Havens’ equality with Lincoln is reiterated strongly in the novel’s closing lines, when he rides out of the cemetery in the president’s body with the words, “and we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen” (343). The repetition of “we” attempts to collapse the boundaries of power between the two characters, but while the integrity of the characterization manages to avoid jarring, the failure to address Havens’ lingering anger and Lincoln’s own ambivalence is striking. Lincoln is felt by Vollman and Bevins to commit to the pursuit of the Civil War as a sort of long-term humanitarian necessity, but this commitment is couched in terms of striking violence:

88

C. HAYES-BRADY

We must, to do the maximum good, bring the thing to its swiftest halt and hans vollman Kill. roger bevins iii Kill more efficiently. hans vollman Hold nothing back. roger bevins iii Make the blood flow. hans vollman Bleed and bleed the enemy until his good sense be reborn. roger bevins iii. (306)

The incantatory quality of the alternating dialogue lends the exchange an almost religious fervor, turning it into a kind of commandment to maximal bloodshed. While Lincoln suddenly sees the world as composed of individuals united by sorrow, his commitment to the war is not motivated by a strong drive to racial equality, but by an awareness of individual suffering. His thinking on the subjects of slavery and race is vague and inconclusive, in no way as clear as the passages on the necessity of violence. Havens’ later claim—“he had no aversion to me, is how I might put it. Or rather, he had once had such an aversion, still bore traces of it, but, in examining that aversion, pushing it into the light, had somewhat, already, eroded it” (312; emphasis in original)—does little to simplify the antiblack antagonism displayed by several characters, especially by Lieutenant Cecil Stone, who acts as the white supremacist mouthpiece of the graveyard, much less to ameliorate the circumstances of the black lives in the Bardo and beyond. Saunders leans into the messiness of these human relationships, seeming to suggest that by embracing complication in our intimate human exchanges we might ease tensions on a larger scale. Like Bardo, “Bounty”—ultimately the narrative of a runaway slave— ends not with the resolution of the familial tension (the release of grief in Bardo is mirrored in “Bounty” by Cole’s success in finding his sister

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

89

and her child) but with the radicalization of the male family member in the service of family—the lost son of Bardo echoing the found niece of “Bounty.” Lincoln leaves the graveyard with the intention of going to war, and with a newfound zeal for Abolition, while Cole joins an underground rebel force whose echoes of the Abolitionist movement are unmistakable. In this respect, then, while neither text addresses race as a primary motivation, personal suffering and the experience of the ethnically marginalized are positioned as the driving forces for some change that lies beyond the borders of the text. It is empathy, in both texts, motivated by an encounter of some kind with a child—a liminal, nonverbal infantile presence—that provokes the action or decision that implicitly leads to a movement toward racial (or racially symbolized) equality. In this respect, we return to questions of sincerity, empathy and compassion. While critics and commentators on Saunders’ work have consistently noted his satirical comedy and his engagement with the forms and functions of late capitalism, another aspect of his writing that cannot be emphasized too strongly is its compassionate imperative. That is to say, Saunders insists on the primacy of compassion throughout his work, and it is arguably the highest vision espoused and the cruelest absence witnessed in his work. What Boddy terms “kindness” (8 et passim), Del George “empathy” (2017, 126) and Kelly “sincerity” (41 et passim) are all aspects of Saunders’ writing that orbit the idea of what we owe to each other. This drive for kindness, compassion and empathy is not advocated on an exclusively individual basis, but Saunders suggests that it is individual kindness and empathy that have the potential to overthrow the soulless late capitalism that governs, and circumscribes, the lives of his so-called “losers” (Rando 2012, 43). In Bardo and “Bounty,” it is arguable that this compassionate imperative allows Saunders to elide the difficulty of racism in his imagined societies. Although it is plainly present in the texts, its consistency across his works suggests that Huebert is correct in his reading of Saunders as concerned with social justice more as category than as praxis. Compassion, then, is affective rather than ethical in Saunders’ moral and aesthetic construction of the world, and involves paying close attention to what is being represented. While we can consider empathy at a thematic level throughout Saunders’ writing (including Bardo), it also plays a crucial structural role in his creative imaginary. Specifically, Saunders offers a keenly attuned sense of speech, with the tone of each story resting on its capacity to capture and reproduce both dialogue and ambient cultural

90

C. HAYES-BRADY

discourse with ringing accuracy. With Saunders’ career-long insistence on this compassionate imperative, it is useful to consider Lincoln in the Bardo as another iteration of the same paradigm, in which the work’s form and genre are subject to this ethical imaginary as much as the identities and histories of the characters are. Thus the novel is not so much a work of historical fiction as it is a work of transhistorical posthumanism, obliquely imagining the affairs of the world as observed from the highly subjective perspectives of those no longer bound to linear time. Like his engagements with the postmodern working class, the losers of the Bardo present a hypertemporal world where the great tides of history turn on the individual practice of empathy, where the power to articulate one’s truth— “everyone, we are dead” (Saunders 2017a, 296)—unlocks heaven and earth alike.

Notes 1. Saunders often depicts the practical, unsentimental aspects of the relationship between a parent or parent figure and a child who is sick or otherwise in need, as in “Pastoralia” (2000) and “I CAN SPEAK!™” (1999) and more obliquely through “Bounty” (1995), “Sea Oak” (1998) and “Winky” (1997). 2. Huebert (2017) observes that Saunders’ work “is less concerned with racial sensitivity or social justice and more focused on the question of what it might mean to unapologetically elide racial, cultural and ethnic difference over a massive historical period” (109), more interested in race as a secondary identity category that is subordinate to the confining systems of corporatism and capitalism. “Bounty” engages in a similar tendency, replacing racialized language with a metonymic vocabulary of commerce and eugenics in which subjugated populations are kept in physical isolation.

Bibliography Boddy, Kasia. 2017. “‘A Job to Do’: George Saunders on, and at, Work.” In George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, 1–22. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Del George, Dana. 2017. “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’ Short Stories.” In George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, 121–35. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Duquette, Elizabeth. 2013. “Rethinking American Exceptionalism.” Literature Compass 10 (6): 473–82.

5

“EVERYONE, WE ARE DEAD!”: (HI)STORY AND POWER …

91

Egan, Alexis M. 2016. “‘But I Was a Little Boy, and What Could I Do About It?’: Contemplating Children as Narrators in the Short Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 49 (1): 49–60. Finnegan, Cara A. 2005. “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (1): 31–57. Hayes-Brady, Clare. 2017. “Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom in the Short Fiction of George Saunders.” In George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, 23–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Huebert, David. 2017. “Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: ‘Pastoralia’ as Human Zoo.” In George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, 105–19. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hutcheon, Linda. 1996. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kelly, Adam. 2017. “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity.” In George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, 41–58. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McVeigh, Paul. 2017. “George Saunders on Trump, Lincoln and Impressing His Wife.” The Irish Times, October 18. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/george-saunders-on-lincoln-trump-and-impressing-his-wife-1. 3091866. Paulson, Steve. 2017. “Getting Out of Our Normal Crap: George Saunders on Writing and Transcendence.” LA Review of Books, May 22. https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-normal-crap-george-saunders-writingtranscendence/#!. Rando, David P. 2012. “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class.” Contemporary Literature 53 (3): 437–460. Saunders, George. 2017a. Lincoln in the Bardo. London: Bloomsbury. Saunders, George. 2017b. “What Writers Really Do When They Write.” The Guardian, March 4. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/ what-writers-really-do-when-they-write. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. 1997. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART II

Representations of the 20th-Century United States

CHAPTER 6

“We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed Rachael McLennan

Lamenting the difficulties of reviewing Joyce Carol Oates’s novel The Accursed (2013), Stephen King claims that “what I wish I could say is simply this: Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel: E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it. I wish I could tell you more” (King 2013). This claim is questionable on many grounds. King’s references to Doctorow and Dracula make it clear that there are literary precedents for the novel, so it is not, perhaps, as radical as he might suggest; Oates herself has written other novels similar to The Accursed, as discussed below. His remarks are also striking for their irony, and their lack of certainty. Throughout his review King comically bemoans the difficulties of describing the labyrinthine plot of this huge novel (it encompasses nearly 700 pages) without revealing too much to readers; this is why he wishes the excerpt above would suffice as the totality of his review. His claim that “I wish I could tell you more” is both true and false: King implies that

R. McLennan (B) School of Art, Media and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_6

95

96

R. MCLENNAN

he cannot tell readers more, suggesting that he is considerately refraining from divulging the novel’s secrets, but also that the novel defeats his powers to discuss it. Yet he does in fact enjoyably, and coherently, puzzle over its central interpretive dilemmas (he tells us more) for the remainder of the review. For King, these dilemmas primarily pertain to understanding a series of mysterious events, known subsequently as the Curse, which occur primarily in the years 1905–1906, affecting a number of inhabitants in Princeton, New Jersey. Numerous interpretations of these events are offered or hinted at through the novel, some of them supernatural. This means that a reader’s interpretation of the curse will have implications for their assessment of the novel’s genre (hence King’s uncertainty regarding the label “postmodern Gothic”), and King shows how his hypothesis about genre is contingent on his interpretation of the text: He is “more than half-convinced that the events related in ‘The Accursed’ really were of supernatural origin.” But then, he ultimately retreats from this and takes refuge in the text’s undecidability, contending that “[Oates] suggests that it’s quite all right to have it both ways; that ambiguity is, in fact, the human condition.” I read the novel rather differently. With some hesitation—this note, at least, I share with King, who declares that “I’ll keep most of Oates’s secrets, but she owes me (and anyone else faced with the task of discussing this novel) an apology for making the task so difficult”—I argue that The Accursed is better read first as a historical fiction which parodies historical fiction. It is a novel about writing historical fiction. As King’s review indicates, attempting to decipher the Curse is something of a fool’s errand (and all sorts of perilous journeys are undertaken in this novel). Indeed, and perhaps for this reason, the novel has attracted next to no attention from reviewers or critics, so that my reading is one of the only extended analyses it has received. When discussing genre, for example, King conjures explicitly and implicitly with the postmodern, Gothic, realism and the supernatural before settling with none of these and favoring ambiguity. Such indecisiveness suggests that The Accursed illustrates what Jerome De Groot calls the “intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction” (De Groot 2010, 2). I argue, too, that the novel’s ambiguities and open-endedness are less comfortingly human than King suggests. De Groot argues that some historical fiction endeavors to “question writing itself” (2) and The Accursed can be understood as doing just that; it is a deeply serious inquiry (one which is nonetheless often humorous, often playful), into the project of writing about the past. And its results are

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

97

largely unsettling. De Groot claims that “history is other. The present is familiar. The historian’s job is to explain the transition between the two states” (3) but The Accursed, in revealing the depressing endurance of humanity’s capacity for hate, and the persistence of systems of inequality in America, suggests that history is not other, but “same.” Oates suggests that there has been little or no transition between the dominant values of the Princeton of the first decade of the early twentieth century and those of the 1980s, when its narrator supposedly completes his tale—and there may be little transition between the 1980s and the early twenty-first century, when the novel was published, although here, just maybe, there are slightly more grounds for hope. My readings are grounded on a focus on the novel’s narrator, one of the few “knowable” (if hardly reliable) aspects of the novel that it is possible to discuss with some certainty. King’s review is notable for the qualities it shares with the novel (both are playful, for example) and particularly with its narrator: Both are self-conscious and thoughtful about their own roles, and both are disingenuous about the limits of their descriptive powers and what they choose to reveal and conceal. The narrator is self-proclaimed historian M. W. van Dyck II, who opens his narrative with an “Author’s Note” written in 1984, thus raising questions about whether this date is significant. It could be a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, sounding yet another generic note for Oates’s novel and contributing to the sense that its depiction of American culture and its analysis of the relationship of past to present are not optimistic. Another explanation is self-referential; Oates began writing the novel— which she appears to be comfortable labeling “Gothic historical” (Ciabatarri 2013)—in the early 1980s, so that it may also be productively read alongside her other generically similar novels of that decade, starting with Bellefleur (1980).1 Despite acknowledging that “there may be multiple, and competing, histories” (Oates 2013, 1), which might seem to be a gesture toward admitting the difficulties of writing history in the absence of grand narratives, van Dyck states that in his narrative, “histories” have been condensed to a single “history” and that he has collapsed ten years (1900–1910) into roughly 14 months in 1905–1906, “for purposes of aesthetic unity” (1). Not only do van Dyck’s acts of “condensing” result in a voluminous text, they also radically call into question his narrative’s status as “history.” This is not, though, because he wishes to embrace the subjectivity and provisionality of narrating history which might be characterized as “postmodern,” but precisely because he wishes

98

R. MCLENNAN

to shut down the possibilities for multiple interpretations. Nonetheless, he deliberately makes use of fictional and arguably postmodern strategies in the production of his narrative and draws readers’ attention to them; and this despite his articulation of the historian’s dilemma: “we can record, we can assemble facts meticulously and faithfully, but only to a degree can we interpret. And we cannot create” (180; emphasis in original). For example, he frequently relays material supposedly gained from his much-celebrated documentary sources in the form of dramatized scenes between his central protagonists, such as in the encounter which opens his narrative, between Woodrow Wilson and Yaeger Ruggles. In such scenes, van Dyck occupies a role more like the omniscient narrator of fiction, imagining and attributing thoughts, desires, and fears to individuals. Notably, his “chronicle” opens with a scene of “creation,” with the fantasy that van Dyck undertakes a journey, on carriage and horses, back in time to Princeton to the era he examines. Upon arrival, though, van Dyck can find no human figures. He realizes that “they are all dead, now – that is why no one is here. Except me” (6). Van Dyck’s carriage journey occupies a strange temporality; it is a journey into the future (to the point, effectively, from which he composes his narrative) but it is also a journey into the past. The fantasy carriage ride nicely illustrates van Dyck’s desire for proximity to the events he wishes to recount. Of course, it also illustrates the impossibility of achieving this proximity (“they are all dead”); hinting, perhaps, that his historical project (like all such projects?) is doomed to failure, because the past cannot be recreated, revisited, or captured entirely accurately. And (or, yet ) van Dyck has chosen—or cannot avoid—making fiction his vehicle for attempting just that (he claims his narrative “moves forward in the mimesis of a ‘fable’” [132]). It is tempting to suggest that van Dyck’s experience in the fantasy sequence also mirrors that of the captive reader, borne along by this text. His journey, like his task of narration itself, is something he finds both frightening and exciting, both desired and something over which he has only limited control (he is merely the passenger in the journey and cannot see the driver). The driver, despite van Dyck’s assumption that he is male, surely represents Oates, the author who is ultimately controlling van Dyck’s narrative. Indeed, Oates, too, is engaging in a return journey of sorts in constructing this novel, and not only because it involves reworking a text she began in the 1980s. The carriage journey foreshadows, or finds resonance with, the centrally important event of the Curse—the disappearance or abduction of Annabel Slade, who, on her wedding day, is

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

99

borne away from Princeton and possibly to a supernatural realm. This abduction/seduction plot, roughly corresponding to the “Death and the maiden” trope, is one Oates has revisited for various purposes on numerous occasions in her career, at least from her early short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966).2 Such revisiting is usually for the purposes of exploring one of the central concerns of her writing career: the dynamics of power and violence present in heterosexual relationships, and between women and men generally in patriarchal American culture.3 These power dynamics are thrown into stark relief by the workings of the Curse, and operative in (influential in) van Dyck’s writing about it. His contention that the journal of Annabel Slade’s mother “drifts onto pages of fretting about the wedding, of very little interest to History” (139) might make readers wonder what other sources and interpretations van Dyck might have ignored or dismissed because of this bias regarding what counts as “History.” Oates’s authorial preoccupations with constructions of gender in American culture are largely overlooked by King in his review. But the fact that she continually attends to the inequalities between men and women in America throughout her long writing career is not only a helpful indicator of what the novel might be attempting to explore, but also reveals that this is another enduring aspect of American history and culture, testifying to the novel’s largely pessimistic message about the possibilities of change. Van Dyck’s revelation, upon returning to the Princeton of his childhood, that he is the only one left, the living exception, is suggestive both of the duty or obligation he may feel to preserve his record and interpretation of events, and also of his sense of his own specialness and that of his task. This sense of specialness is expressed on numerous occasions in the text, particularly in his laborious discussions of the notebooks and letters he has been privy to, or acquired in constructing his tale, his acts of naming them, as well as his frequent (and unsubstantiated) contentions that he is the only person to have owned, read, or deciphered some of those records. These details seem primarily designed to justify the degree of proprietorship van Dyck wishes to exert over his chronicle, and his privileging of his own version of events over that of others. While this is problematic enough, these descriptions also reveal his obsessive interest in the events he recounts and in his act of writing (he fetishizes the textual and material traces of the events in lieu of the people he can no longer contact). This obsessive interest constitutes only one of many ways in which van Dyck unintentionally reveals himself as less reliable than he would wish; there

100

R. MCLENNAN

is a strong sense that he has been taken captive or seduced by his own chronicle (the events, the writing of it) just as Annabel Slade appears to be by her (possibly demon) bridegroom. Van Dyck’s desire to return to the scene of his chronicle (and, presumably, interact with its central figures, given his disappointment that “they are all dead” [6]) indicates his passionate investment in the story he tells, something he clearly declares in his Author’s Note. However, the nature of this investment is accounted for only evasively. Listing his “particular qualifications” for telling this tale (a point at which a reader might expect recitation of his credentials as a historian), he notes instead that “like several key individuals in this chronicle,” he grew up in Princeton during the events he describes, graduated from Princeton, and is from a good Princeton family (2). Van Dyck, then, believes that he is primarily— perhaps uniquely—qualified to tell this story because of the details of his identity and personal history, even though these very details compromise his abilities to meet his standard of objectivity. Nonetheless, he is concerned to prioritize his identity as “historian,” interspersing his narrative with a number of reflections about the historian’s task. These remarks (again, probably contrary to van Dyck’s intent) reveal that, while he is thoughtful about the difficulties of telling history, he is determined to either simplify or exploit these difficulties in order to tell, legitimate (and “condense” in the interests of) his history. Van Dyck, at least, does not want to “have it both ways” (King 2013); he is not keen to embrace ambiguity, unless obfuscation suits his needs. That van Dyck has a particular agenda in communicating his tale (that is, he is interested in achieving something more than simply documenting and attempting to explicate the Curse) is hinted at in the Author’s Note, in which he describes his former family home in Princeton: my family residence was that austere old French normandy stone mansion at 87 Hodge Road, now owned by strangers with a name ending in -stein who, it is said, have barbarously “gutted” the interior of the house and “renovated” it in a “more modern” style. (I apologize for this intercalation! it is not so much an emotional as it is an aesthetic and moral outburst I promise will not happen again) (Oates 2013, 2)

Despite his awareness that he should be “objective” (2), a standard he admits he finds it hard to maintain, Van Dyck’s “aesthetic and moral outburst” does much to give away his prejudices against that which is

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

101

“strange” and new (here meaning those he considers outsiders, presumably foreign, possibly Jewish, as evidenced by his disparaging references to “-stein” and “modern”). His nostalgia for his family home, expressed via his dislike of renovations, speaks to a desire to preserve the past, which can alternatively be expressed as a resistance to change (he regrets the passing of certain styles and conventions). It can be inferred that van Dyck mourns the passing of the circumstances in which his family was ranked among the “best” in Princeton, those families with the greatest social standing, among whom are the Slades. This also effectively means that he regrets the passing of an era of (certainly as he represents it within his chronicle) open and largely unquestioned exclusion of those deemed inferior—not white, male, Protestant, and middle class. In an important and perturbing exception to his stated desire to return to the past, though, it must be noted that van Dyck states unequivocally of his time at Princeton University that “if I had to repeat it again, I would hang myself” (479), suggesting that the many “unspeakable” traumas which haunt the text (use of this word is almost always invoked to allude to sexual scandal and/or crime) may affect him, too. His promise that his “intercalation” is singular is thoroughly belied in the remainder of his narrative, in which van Dyck frequently endeavors to “intercalate” insinuatingly or explicitly on individuals and events, often for the purposes of endorsing the attitudes he expresses here in his Author’s Note. Additionally, he discloses and withholds important pieces of information when he sees fit. These are often but not always in footnotes, and in parenthetical remarks in the main body of his narrative (which have the effect of drawing readers’ attention to van Dyck’s acts of selection and the values which influence them), rather than because it makes sense to do so according to the chronology of events he relates. Van Dyck’s Author’s Note, then, does much to install readerly skepticism about the reliability of his account. This is only further reinforced when he reveals, very belatedly, that his own parents feature in the narrative, as does he. He and his family feature in some of the novel’s most bizarre and dramatic events: His father, a professor at Princeton, develops an obsession with working out the source of the Curse, as his son later does (the son’s “chronicle” being ample evidence of this, finding an analogy in the father’s baffling “chart” of clues and correspondences). His father’s obsession culminates in a bizarre visitation from Sherlock Holmes, whom the professor idolizes and appears to believe is a real person. The text allows for both realistic and supernatural readings here. Perhaps van

102

R. MCLENNAN

Dyck’s father is seriously disturbed and unwell, subject to delusion. It is strongly suggested that van Dyck’s father may have been driven mad by a poisonous flower delivered to him by Josiah Slade, Annabel’s brother; but here, too, circumstances are enigmatic because the flower itself may be of supernatural origin. Or perhaps the “Sherlock Holmes” figure is one of a number of possibly demonic presences in the novel, themselves manifestations of the curse. The most unsettling effect of Professor van Dyck’s behavior is that he appears to believe his newborn son is the product of an encounter between his wife and a demon—he refers to the baby as ‘it ’ (324; emphasis in original) and denies his paternity (314). He is eventually convinced by “Holmes” to kill the baby and, if necessary, its mother—that is, to kill the narrator. He is prevented from doing so by Josiah, who unintentionally kills van Dyck Senior in the act of defending the baby and his mother Joanna. Such is van Dyck’s “objectivity” here that he recounts these events as if they have no personal connection to himself at all. In an earlier “intercalation” he uses his role as historian as a pretext for withholding more information: Of his own birth, he writes “(Yes, and for the record, too: I will say no more about this birth, or the unexpected pregnancy that preceded it. Where my objectivity as a historian is an issue, I must err on the side of caution)” (308). Later, though, he dispenses with caution in order to make a sensationalistic disclosure: “it is hard for me to write this chapter for, to be frank, as historians are so rarely frank, I am writing about my own dear departed father” (404; emphasis in original). Again, van Dyck amusingly reveals more than he intends—he means to suggest that historians may not often have recourse to confess personal details, but he suggests, too, that the historian’s project of accurately telling the past (being “frank”) is perhaps impossible. It seems obvious that the loss of his father, and his father’s belief that his son is not human, would affect Van Dyck personally, and have implications for his assessment of events, but at no point does he discuss this. Readers may have their own suspicions, however: It is surely possible that the chronicle’s concern with dead or missing children is directly related to van Dyck’s formative experiences. It is also important to consider how such experiences might affect van Dyck’s representation of Josiah Slade in particular—after all, this is the young man to whom van Dyck owes his life, but who is also responsible for his father’s death (and arguably, for his father’s delusions in the first place). These perilous circumstances surrounding van Dyck’s infancy are likely to be highly influential regarding

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

103

his conception of himself as fantastically (delightfully, terrifyingly) in thrall to “history” and his simultaneous desire to control the interpretation and telling of events. Even these lurid incidents and van Dyck’s nostalgia for the era he writes about do not tell the full story of why he is such a problematic narrator. The most significant feature of his narrative is the role of irony—but whether irony is intentional or accidental, or even whether it is present or absent in specific utterances, is often very difficult to determine. This ensures that it is extremely difficult to know for what purposes, and from what perspective, van Dyck is narrating particular events, making ambiguity in the text far from comfortable, as King’s review may imply. As Linda Hutcheon notes, irony can function as a weapon which endorses rather than challenges dominant values, although implicit in her observation is the fact that it is capable of doing both (1994, 10). In van Dyck’s narrative, it may even do both simultaneously. Among the most troubling (because undecidable) of these instances relates to the discussions of Woodrow Wilson (one of a number of “real” historical figures, along with Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, and Jack London, who appear in the text). Wilson is presented as racist and sexist, fond of recounting what from a twenty-first-century perspective (and surely, from that of the 1980s, too) are highly offensive stories and anecdotes in his speeches and expressing his deep resistance to women’s suffrage. At times it can seem as if van Dyck intends Wilson’s attitudes to be mocked and despised. One of the most likely such instances of this occurs when Wilson is first introduced to readers. His horror at learning he may have a mixed-race relative exceeds his horror at a recent lynching, which Yaeger Ruggles has visited him to discuss and agitate for Wilson to use his power to speak out against. On other occasions, though, van Dyck appears to share Wilson’s attitudes. For example, he laments the “flood” of “women, blacks and a quota-less quantity of Jews to the great university” in the 1980s (Oates 2013, 93) in a manner which suggests sympathy with Wilson’s refusal to contemplate the entry of African Americans to Princeton. Van Dyck can also be explicitly misogynist. He scoffs in a footnote at the notion (with regard to the famous celebratory remarks Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have made regarding Harriet Beecher Stowe) that “a female novelist, might help direct the course of history for the better,” and declares that “the historian is one who must expose and correct such misconceptions, in the service of authenticity” (153). (That he can choose to be explicit in this

104

R. MCLENNAN

way leads one to suspect that when van Dyck withholds comment, this might well also be deliberate). Van Dyck is also very explicit about his own views when concluding his narrative. His tale ends with the Curse seemingly conquered or undone, and with many of its victims, the supposed dead young members of the Slade family (Annabel, Josiah, Todd, Oriana) restored to life. He relates that Annabel and Josiah eventually join Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Home Colony and his chronicle concludes with their marriages. Van Dyck gives most attention to Annabel’s union; she marries Yaeger Ruggles, the man who raises with Wilson the possibility (appalling to Wilson) that they are related and for which presumption it seems Wilson has him removed from his employment at the university. (It would appear that up until this disclosure to Wilson, Ruggles has been passing as white). Van Dyck comments in a footnote which is the last direct “intercalation” of his own: “what is the historian to think? Is it the historian’s place to suggest disapproval of ‘race-mixing’? Or – was such radical behavior on the part of Annabel Slade but a prophecy of what disruptions to tradition lay ahead in the tumultuous twentieth-century, let alone the unfathomable twenty-first?” (648). Van Dyck is not debating whether “race-mixing” is to be disapproved of or not, only whether it is appropriate to voice his disapproval. His inconsistent and self-serving pattern of sometimes explicitly offering comment, sometimes only implying it, sometimes withholding it completely, can also be read as indicative of such indecision. Concluding his narrative, he retains the discriminatory attitudes present in his Author’s Note, the only difference being that, while in the Author’s Note such attitudes are disguised or contained in an aversion to “disruptions to tradition,” at the text’s conclusion van Dyck is frank in disclosing them. This suggests that van Dyck’s journey to the past has taught him little. Van Dyck’s narrative is not one in which his attitudes have undergone any meaningful scrutiny, challenge, or development. But perhaps that was never his aim, since he wishes to compare the past favorably to the present moment of his writing. Throughout his chronicle, he has been at pains to present a coherent, meaningful account of the Curse, even though as he recounts the final instances of its manifestation, he concedes his inability to make sense of them. In yet another of his parenthetical intercalations he laments: “before such mysteries, the historian must throw up his hands and trust to his material to communicate a tale, and a meaning, beyond his own ability to fathom” (624). His chronicle concludes with the supposed transcript of one of Winslow Slade’s sermons, found (or concealed

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

105

for) a long time after his death. In this, Slade asserts that the Curse is a punishment unleashed on his family and community for his sins. In his youth, he killed a young African American girl and allowed an innocent man to be hanged for the crime. This may appear to be another sign that the Curse works to expose the historic violences which underpin and facilitate white male supremacy in America. But in Winslow’s account, God reveals that his greatest sin was in attempting to hide his crimes, and henceforth God uses him as a vehicle to spread hate and dissension among the people among whom he lives (the God Winslow depicts is vengeful, evil). The Curse, then, is not meant to facilitate a reckoning with historical injustices, but to perpetuate them. This sermon is the final section in the novel, presented (in hysterical capitalized text) without comment, as if it renders van Dyck speechless. Indeed, as the narrative progresses, and the corpses and bizarre happenings accumulate, van Dyck is more forthcoming in asserting his failure to make sense of them, going so far as to admit, of one particularly baffling incident, that “no historian has ever satisfactorily explained it…and not I” (560). Van Dyck’s final footnote, then, can be seen as an admission of failure. He does not know what his narrative means, even as he wishes it to be read as the “history” (singular) of the events, and even as he asserts that the events he recounts have some bearing on the future (alluding, in fact, to the twenty-first century in which the novel is published). What, then, might this chronicle have to tell the twenty-first century? This requires considering the resolution of the Curse, and van Dyck’s claims for his chronicle’s relevance to the future. In virtually the only sustained critical appraisal the novel has received, Sherry R. Truffin labels Oates’s novel as an example of “Schoolhouse Gothic,” arguing that: works in this mode examine schooling in relationship to such central gothic preoccupations as the tyranny of history, the terrors of physical and mental confinement, reification, and miscreation. Considered together, they suggest that schools are haunted or cursed by persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class) and, ironically, by the Enlightenment itself, which was to rescue Western civilization from the darkness of the past but which had a dark side of its own, born of its compulsion to dissect, define and dominate nature and humanity alike. (Truffin 2016, 110)

Truffin’s identification of the “gothic preoccupations” found in Oates’s novel is valid, and her claim that the novel presents both capitalism and

106

R. MCLENNAN

socialism for scrutiny only to find them both wanting (“persistent power inequities”) is very useful. She argues that “although the novel concludes on a decidedly anti-capitalist note, Oates does not canonize the socialists who play a role in the tale” (121). Truffin notes that socialist ideals are also subject to critique via the depiction of Upton Sinclair in particular, who neglects the well-being of his wife and child in the pursuit of his socialist ideals, a dedication which is also presented as rooted in a belief in male superiority. He is happiest when his wife is a passive, adoring listener to his work, and is content to leave her to manage their povertystricken household while he gets on with his thinking and writing. However, Truffin’s focus on the “schooling” aspects of the novel risks skewing its concerns—it is difficult to read The Accursed and conclude that schooling is one of its primary interests, although Truffin’s work constitutes yet another instance where decisions about genre and interpretation of the text’s content are closely interlinked. Truffin’s focus on schooling leads her to understandably focus on Josiah Slade, a former Princeton student who is disenchanted with the university and much of what it represents. However, a reader of her article unfamiliar with The Accursed would be likely to receive the impression that he is the novel’s central character— once more, it is difficult to see how such an argument could be made. The attention given to Josiah also risks making too much of the “capitalism versus socialism” theme that Truffin detects. She does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that within the world of the fiction, all the information we receive about Josiah (and everyone else) is conveyed via the narrator, van Dyck. As such, it is thoroughly questionable. In a rare acknowledgment of the importance of the narrator, Truffin hypothesizes that the ending (and future) bestowed on Josiah (marriage, rejection of the dominant cultural values shared and disseminated by his family) may have something to do with “hero worship” on the part of van Dyck, “an unreliable narrator who owes Josiah his very life and may wish to remove his rescuer, ideologically and physically, from a town and university he regards as hopelessly compromised” (122). However, as I hope to have shown, van Dyck’s motivations and attitudes are more complex, less noble, and too inconsistent to bear this reading. It is also for this reason (van Dyck’s unreliability) that, while it is impossible to discuss the novel without considering—and making interpretations about—the events surrounding the Curse, it is more productive to focus on Oates’s concern with how stories about history are told.

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

107

When the Curse dispels, Annabel and Josiah Slade appear to repudiate their family history and what it stands for. The Slades are wealthy, and their family fortune is derived from the slave trade as well as from railroads and banking, making them thoroughly complicit in, and profiteers from, the inequalities and violences which permeate the American world van Dyck details. Annabel and Josiah’s decision to join the Colony would seem to suggest that the novel presents socialism as an important or favorable alternative to capitalism. Truffin’s reading seems to lean toward such a view in its claim that Josiah’s “alternative socialism” takes the form of replacing his “bourgeois rationalism” with a more “healthy rationalism” (122). But the situation is more complicated. It is not clear that the views of Woodrow Wilson the capitalist are subjected to any more or less critical irony than those of Upton Sinclair the socialist. If anything, there are suggestions that van Dyck is more ironic toward Sinclair because he wants to critique Sinclair’s views and show his hypocrisies, and that he withholds explicit ironic commentary on Wilson because van Dyck has more sympathy with Wilson’s views. The novel’s conclusion is far from utopian, so that it does not suggest that the “disruptions to tradition” (Oates 2013, 648) signaled by Annabel’s wedding represent a happy union for her, let alone functioning as a foreshadowing of changes in American society (whether understood as “disruptions” in van Dyck’s terms, or otherwise). There is no evidence that gender inequalities will be eradicated in the Colony the Slades join. In fact, it is noted that the marriages take place in a bid to counter unpleasant rumors about the behavior of its members, showing how life within the Colony is still influenced by the values of the world from which it is supposedly removed, as well as hinting that in the Colony, custom and convenience trump romantic attachment. There are suggestions that Annabel’s entrapped existence in the Bog Kingdom (where she resides following her abduction) bears some resemblance to the class revolution Sinclair desires (the evil rulers of the Bog Kingdom are its former servants). Any sense that the Colony may represent (hopes for) a more equal American culture in the future are therefore undercut on several counts. Most notably, van Dyck’s concluding remarks suggest that nobody else in the world of the novel follows the colonists’ lead: For the remainder of the Princeton inhabitants lucky enough to have survived the Curse, life resumes as usual. Most unsettling of all, though, are van Dyck’s assumptions, from his position of composing his Author’s Note in 1984, that his readers will not

108

R. MCLENNAN

blanch at his attitudes about race, class, ethnicity, and gender. This tells a depressing story about the progression of equality in American culture. His references to the twenty-first century only exacerbate the sense that the attitudes he reveals may not be out of place there either. The America depicted in the novel is one in which ruling groups work in their own interests and desperately, unsuccessfully try to bury and deny knowledge of their past bad actions. It is an America in which those groups, while being haunted by those actions, are likely to repeat them. This appears to tell a story of stasis rather than change. In this novel, no singular ideology—capitalism, socialism—is presented as redemptive or likely to bring positive change in the future and white, male supremacy is fundamental to all. Van Dyck’s claim that in the early twentieth century, Princetonians could not see that “beneath numerous evils, a single evil lay” (3) seems apt here, even as he shares this shortsightedness. There appears to be no alternative. This does not sound ambiguous, and it is not comforting about what it means to be human, despite King’s claims. It even casts doubt on the claims of Oates herself, who appears to suggest that the novel can be read more positively. She states that she returned to the novel in 2011 in the era of Obama’s Presidency, and points out that the inhabitants of her fictional world would have been unable to contemplate the existence of a nonwhite president (the implication being that things have changed for the better and the world of her novel does not correspond to twenty-first-century America [see Ciabatarri 2013]). This is not entirely convincing (although my own reading is undoubtedly influenced by reading and working on this novel in 2019). Yet all this may be to miss the point. It is crucial to remember, of course, that van Dyck the historian is himself a fiction. His dismissive remarks about female novelists and their powers to affect history serve to expose him as a poor historian who does indeed misjudge some more positive changes in the future. His comment functions metatextually to raise the question of whether Oates, a female novelist, can affect anything with this novel where he cannot; whether, in his terms, she “might help direct the course of history for the better” (153) in the writing of The Accursed. In some ways, the signs are not positive. If the anonymous carriage driver at the opening of the novel may function as a figure for Oates, there is another character who shares her name—Captain Oates, who also has the function of “steering” a vehicle: in this case, the ship on which Josiah travels to the South Pole in a bid to escape his past. Oates is not any more virtuous than anyone else in the novel, though, and subject to

6

“WE CANNOT CREATE”: THE LIMITS OF HISTORY …

109

the prejudices shared by most of the other characters—he is induced to allow Josiah on board by Josiah’s savings, accumulated through his family’s dubious enterprises (538). If these are figures for the author, it is not cheering that both are coded male; it seems that they may be largely playful textual “clues” to prompt further interpretive dilemmas for readers. There may, however, be more grounds for optimism when considering the function of irony in the text. Hutcheon notes that “irony isn’t irony until it is interpreted as such – at least by the intending ironist, if not the intended receiver. Someone attributes irony; someone makes irony happen” (1994, 6). The indeterminate presence of irony foregrounds the role of readers of the text, and more than that, it serves as a reminder that different readers will interpret the text differently. To contemplate the possibilities of change and progress, of learning from history, one has to go beyond the text to consider its readers, who are able to dissent from and challenge van Dyck’s views, thus rendering his attitudes “other” and potentially opening the way to create new transitions, new journeys between past, present, and future. This casts a more positive light on the undoubtedly ambivalent circumstances under which Sinclair is last encountered in the text. Immersed in his writing, he realizes that he has missed his train: “yet there is no reason for immediate alarm, for another train to New Jersey will come along in an hour or two; and Upton Sinclair will see to it that he does not miss that one” (Oates 2013, 640).

Notes 1. The other Oates novels relevant here are A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and The Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). 2. The trope of the kidnap/seduction of a young woman is also present in Bellefleur, and many of Oates’s novels focus on the mysterious disappearances of young women. 3. Oates’s first novel was published in 1964. From early in her career, critics have noticed her concern with exploring women’s experiences in America, and considered the preponderance of violence in her novels (a focus which, as Oates herself has pointed out, may well be gendered, as male authors are probably not as often called to explain why they address disturbing material in their novels). For some early critical responses to her work (and assessment of these), see Bender (1987) and Johnson (1987).

110

R. MCLENNAN

Bibliography Bender, Eileen Teper. 1987. Joyce Carol Oates, Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ciabatarri, Jane. 2013. “The Devil and Woodrow Wilson: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Daily Beast, March 19, 2013. https://www.thedailybeast. com/the-devil-and-woodrow-wilson-an-interview-with-joyce-carol-oates. De Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1994. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge. Johnson, Greg. 1987. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. King, Stephen. 2013. “Bride of Hades.” New York Times, March 14, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/the-accursed-byjoyce-carol-oates.html. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2013. The Accursed. New York: HarperCollins. Truffin, Sherry R. 2016. “Joyce Carol Oates Revisits the Schoolhouse Gothic.” In American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak, 110–128. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 7

“Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”: The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley Villy Karagouni

In his introduction to Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes asserts, via Saussure, that “semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these” and regard them as “systems of signification” (Barthes 1986, 9). Broadly adopting the interdisciplinary and associative framework of semiology thus defined, I focus in this essay on music as a system of historical and narrative signification that is woven into narrative structure and thematic development in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and Langley (2009). The novel’s narrator, Homer, undertakes a narrative presentation of history that is heavily inflected by selfnarrativization, meaning the ways in which he shapes his private life into a coherent story. Self-narrativization is the filter through which his narrative and those of other characters are presented and seen to intersect with real-life landmarks, that is, the kinds of events with which official

V. Karagouni (B) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_7

111

112

V. KARAGOUNI

historiography and professional historians are concerned. In alignment with a second wave of word-music studies engaged with “how the literary and the musical embed and are embedded within cultural history” (Weliver and Ellis 2013), this interdisciplinary chapter will explore the ways in which music, as a Barthesian “system of signification,” structures the interpenetrations of history and narrativization in Doctorow’s text. In word-music studies, researchers have explored the use of musical form in novelistic language (Shockley 2017) and the impact of music on novelistic characterization (Hooper 2012). Building on such work, this discussion focuses on music as a constitutive element of narrative development and structure in rich interaction with Doctorow’s novelistic historiography. Important links between the character of Homer and several different manifestations of music throughout the novel allow for closer examination of the interplay between different “systems of signification.” Through Homer’s association with music, Doctorow’s narrative brings together popular and highbrow musical styles, as well as their corresponding ideologies and walks of life; it provides the opportunity to explore the multilayered relationship of sound to the moving image; and it highlights the interplay between different forms of narrativization. In the narrative’s closing pages, it is revealed that Homer’s narrative has in fact been recorded in writing, with the help of several Braille typewriters. Moreover, it emerges that the written word as part of the historiographical act has come to replace Homer’s active engagement with music in his final years, as his hearing diminishes and eventually deteriorates altogether. Simultaneously, however, the centrality of music in Homer’s narrative is reasserted as he recounts his impassioned response to being encouraged to focus on the “music in words” as opposed to actual music playing, following a disappointing impromptu public performance: “[t]he thought of life without my music is intolerable to me” (Doctorow 2009, 202). Six pages later, both his life and his life’s narrative come to their end. Far from being merely a stylistic or allusive feature, then, music emerges as a pivotal narrative motif as well as an explicit intertext in Homer and Langley. The novel’s opening pages establish the function of music as a recurrent narrative element: a motif. Doctorow’s use of music in this manner corresponds to the composer Arnold Schoenberg’s definition of musical motif or “motive.” Schoenberg observes that “[t]he motive generally appears in a characteristic and impressive manner at the beginning of a piece”; a pivotal and “memorable” aspect of musical form, it is then

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

113

repeated and subjected to variation (Schoenberg 1967, 8). In Schoenberg’s structuralist reading of classical music compositions, “the motive” is identified as one of the basic building blocks of musical form (2). In just this way, music is to the whole structure of the literary narrative of Homer and Langley what a musical motif is to the overall form of a finished composition. It acts as a connective between the landmarks of twentiethcentury American history and the private history of Homer Collyer, the latter being recorded chronologically in writing by the character. US historical landmarks acquire narrative significance through the manner in which they come to have a direct impact on, and are incorporated into, the fraternal story of the brothers Homer and Langley. Thus, the Spanish Flu pandemic takes their parents’ lives; Langley’s Springfield rifle from his service in World War I is placed by Homer “on the fireplace mantel …the first piece in the collection of artifacts from our American life” (Doctorow 2009, 24); and World War II claims the life of their close friend, Harold Robileaux. Inseparable as the brothers’ private histories are, however, it is Homer’s perspective that structures, commands, and carries the narrative from beginning to end. This seems fitting, since Homer introduces himself as “the blind brother” (3), connoting the legendary and allegedly blind Greek epic poet of the same name (Beecroft 2011; KononenkoMoyle 1979).To narrate the historical always already subjectivizes it; consequently, the writing of history is akin to the writing of fiction, although of course the personal is also rendered historical through the medium of narrative. Congruently, Hayden White (1978) asserts that “history –the real world as it evolves in time –is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is familiar, form” (98). Music becomes part of this process of “mak[ing] sense” and familiarization in Homer’s intermingling of self-narrativization and historical narrative. While narrative can be broadly regarded as “the fundamental instrument of thought” and “indispensable to human cognition generally” (Turner 1996, 4–5), it must be remembered that it is also “a bewilderingly multiplicitous [way of thinking]” (Cobley 2014, 221). It is from these reference points that the following episode-based and chronological analysis seeks to illuminate the ways in which Homer’s narrative, strongly informed by music, synthesizes the personal and the historical.1 The novel opens with Homer recounting the progressive loss of his eyesight in his late teens and how it allowed him to focus on “my

114

V. KARAGOUNI

other capacities like my exceptional hearing, which I trained to a degree of alertness that was almost visual” (Doctorow 2009, 4). The almost uncanny quality of Homer’s hearing is also a vital ingredient of his pianoplaying prowess. “[C]omfortably enrolled in the West End Conservatory of Music,” Homer reveals that one of the “compensations” for his blindness was the fact that “[his] skill as a pianist rendered [his] blindness acceptable in the social world” (5). Being a talented pianist secures him a well-esteemed position within New York society, while his appropriately “Franz Lisztian hair” earns him the attention of young women (6). From the opening of the narrative, therefore, music plays a pivotal role in young Homer’s self-fashioning, enabling him to discover and understand his identity and place in early twentieth-century New York society. Young Homer’s chosen repertoire is focused on the Romantic Classical genre. His first heartbreak, caused by the deceitful behavior of Julia, one of the household’s maids, coincides with Homer growing increasingly “restless” about the same pieces he had learned to play when he could still read traditional scores (36). Finding musical Braille incomprehensible, he is happy to accept Langley’s gift, an upright player piano with “dozens of perforated paper scrolls on cylinders” that allows him to emulate and gradually master “any number of Schubert impromptus, Chopin etudes, Mozart sonatas” (36). Homer is content with staying at home, playing the piano for his brother and himself. His Romantic Classical repertoire becomes associated with domesticity, comfort, and the fraternal bond. The opportunity to reconnect with the sociocultural world, however, presents itself when Homer begins working as a piano accompanist for silent films and his repertoire undergoes further expansion, seeing as he is now expected to “improvise pieces according to the nature of the scene being shown” (38). Consequently, Homer must extricate himself from the precise technical demands required by Romantic Classical interpretation (McCrae 1974, 53) and move into the more free-flowing realm of spontaneous musical creation. As David Beckstead (2013) argues, the term improvisation is frequently, yet falsely, associated with the genre of jazz and usually meets with young music students’ apprehension; he goes on to suggest that improvisation be regarded instead as “a distinctive and creative cognitive activity” (69). The benefits Homer reaps from engaging with musical improvisation in the movie theater, however, exceed the realm of creative cognition. Playing piano there is Homer’s first job and as such it connects him to the socioeconomic, as well as cultural, domain. Even further, improvisation, as part of the mechanics of playing

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

115

music for silent film, enables Homer to develop a relationship with Mary Elizabeth Riordan. While Mary reciprocates Homer’s affection, the relationship remains strictly platonic. Speaking of himself as well as Langley, Homer reveals how rationality, protectiveness, and restraint came to prevail over desire: “we both knew we suffered a passion that would destroy this girl if we ever acted upon it. I had come dangerously close” (Doctorow 2009, 41). Mary’s affection for the Collyer brothers is evident in her behavior while staying at their house and later in her long correspondence with them. Mary, a music student herself, becomes Homer’s “movie eyes” (39), describing the moving image to him so he can shape the musical accompaniment accordingly: now a funny chase with people falling out of cars, she would say, or here comes the hero riding a horse at a gallop, or the firemen are sliding down a pole, or – and here she would lower her voice and touch my shoulder – the lovers are embracing and looking into each other’s eyes and the card says “I love you”. (38)

Mary is eventually allowed to live in the Collyer household as Homer’s piano student, free lessons being offered as a supplement to her small salary at the movie theater. The narrative importance of her character is explicitly linked with music: “[a]nd she understood as well as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe…[h]er gentle touch on the piano was something I should not have questioned. She was feeling her way through music as through life, a parentless child trying to regain a belief in a reasonable world” (40, 42). Mary and Homer stand united, if not in technical capacity (“I wouldn’t say Mary Riordan was an outstanding student of the piano” [39]), then in their shared understanding of music playing as a spiritual experience. Further, Mary is granted central importance in Homer’s private history. Such is the degree to which Homer sentimentalizes, romanticizes, and ultimately “deif[ies]” her that his account borders on hagiography: [s]he was a brave but wounded thing, legally an orphan. We were in loco parentis, and always would be. She had her own room up on the top floor next to Siobhan’s and I would think of her sleeping there, chaste and beautiful, and wonder if the Catholics were not right in deifying virginity

116

V. KARAGOUNI

and if Mary’s parents had not been wise in conferring upon her frail beauty the protective name of the mother of their God. (41)

It transpires that even the stoical Langley develops romantic feelings for Mary, as evinced by his awkward foray into “improvised theories of music” (40) to impress her. While Langley does display a keen but characteristically cerebral interest in music from a theoretical perspective at various points throughout the novel, his rhetorical expositions at this narrative juncture, prompted by Mary’s presence, are tinged with the emotive force of intended romantic conquest: [h]e would insist, for example, that when prehistoric man discovered that he could make sounds by singing or beating on something…his intention was to sound the vast emptiness of this strange world by saying “I am here, I am here!” Even your Bach, even your precious Mozart in his waistcoat and knee britches and silk stockings was doing no more than that, Langley said. (40)

In all, Mary acquires a fundamental role in the Collyer brothers’ fraternal narrative. It is a pivotal event in American history, however, that intervenes to separate them from each other, as silent films are rendered obsolete by the steady advent of the “talkies.” Homer reminisces that “when I was fired from my job at the little movie theater on Third Avenue – the talkies had come along, you see – Langley and I sat down and agreed there was no call to keep her with us anymore” (41–42). Even though the arrival of the “talkies” is only referenced in passing here, the advent of sound is a landmark for American culture as well as a consequential moment within Homer’s private history. According to the film historian James Wierzbicki (2009), the advent of sound in cinema was a gradual process that was met with plenty of resistance but, “[a]ll things considered, during the early 1920s the ‘talking picture’ gathered strength indeed” in response to audiences’ “well-defined appetite” and filmmakers’ corresponding willingness to deliver accordingly (87). As sound secures its place in the movie theater, Mary departs from Homer’s life to study at “the Sisters of Mercy Junior College in Westchester County” (Doctorow 2009, 42), eventually becoming a nun. Emblematic as she is of purity and innocence, old-fashioned manners and delicacy, it is poignant that Mary’s departure coincides with technological progress resoundingly securing its place at the movie theater. Still, this is a departure only in the

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

117

literal sense. Ever present in Homer’s thoughts from his late 20s until old age, Mary becomes a temporal motif whose enduring impact is rendered clear when Homer reveals that “[n]ot a night passes that [he does not] recall” the scene of her departure (43). Several decades later, Homer distances himself from the religious connotations of his fantasy of Mary – in reaction to her becoming a missionary nun – but preserves his idealized conception of her against his brother’s attempts to bring him back to reality. Later still, when Homer is an elderly man and learns of Mary’s tragic death from Langley’s newspaper (“raped and shot to death” in “a remote Central American village” [167]), the memories he treasures and “can summon […] up at will” are of Mary sitting next to him on the piano bench and talking him through a silent film’s plot (168). Strongly associated with music, this idealized version of Mary becomes an emotionally charged motif in Homer’s private history and memory. With Mary’s narrative significance thus established, the historical phenomenon of silent films with live musical accompaniment as rendered in Homer’s narrative invites closer inspection. In the following close reading, I explore musical composition for the moving image in general, as well as in reference to the silent movie genre in particular. My discussion draws on film theorist Michel Chion’s concepts of “empathetic” music, “audiovisual contract,” “added value,” and “value added by text,” while also considering Barthes’ framing of the notions of “signifier” and “signified.” When Mary, functioning as Homer’s “movie eyes” (39), describes each scene shown on the screen, the blind pianist must immediately grasp what the audience’s expectations will be and shape his accompaniment accordingly: “I had to improvise pieces according to the nature of the scene being shown. If it was a love scene I would play, say, Schumann’s Traumerei, if it was a fight scene, the fast movement of a furious late Beethoven, if soldiers were marching I’d march with them, and if there was a glorious finale I could improvise the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth” (38). Homer’s response corresponds to the first of two ways in which, according to Chion (1994), music reacts to the moving image, that is, empathetically, whereby “music can directly express its participation in the feeling of the scene” (8). This is the kind of music Homer strives to create in the silent movie theater.2 Naturally, when creating musical accompaniment for silent film, empathetic sound is a nonnegotiable necessity as there is no actual dialogue to guide the audience, except the occasional cards marking certain pivotal moments in the narrative: “and the card says ‘I love you’” (Doctorow 2009, 38). As soon as the

118

V. KARAGOUNI

“talkies” arrive, cinema becomes “vococentric,” a term Chion uses to suggest that “[the cinema] almost always privileges the voice” or, at the very least, language at large (1994, 5). The information that is being conveyed through language and helps the audience comprehend the intended message of the moving image is described by Chion with the phrase “value added by text” (5). “Value added by text” is precisely what Homer’s piano-playing must convey. When Mary assists him, the assumption is that the moving image can be “read” a certain way, just like any visual signifier, and then associated with a second signifier: an auditory one. Homer is aware of the fact that his accompaniment needs to empathize with the moving image which, as per Chion, means that his music must confirm and corroborate the tone established by the moving image. It is precisely because, according to Chion, the process of associating image and sound is based on cultural coding for the whole spectrum of human emotion that Homer knows how to create the correct correspondence: “obviously [empathetic music] participates in cultural codes” for human emotions such as “sadness” and “happiness” (1994, 8). Barthes’ discussion of “the nature of the signifier” works to illuminate further the mechanics of meaning creation involved in this narrative episode. Identifying music (or sound) as a signifier, Barthes (1986) identifies different types of signifiers, examines their nature, and suggests ways in which they can be grouped: the nature of the signifier suggests roughly the same remarks as that of the signified: it is purely a relatum, whose definition cannot be separated from that of the signified. The only difference is that the signifier is a mediator: some matter is necessary to it …This materiality of the signifier makes it once more necessary to distinguish clearly matter from substance: a substance can be immaterial (in the case of the substance of the content); therefore, all one can say is that the substance of the signifier is always material (sounds, objects, images). In semiology, where we shall have to deal with mixed systems in which different kinds of matter are involved (sound and image, object and writing, etc.), it may be appropriate to collect together all the signs, inasmuch as they are borne by one and the same matter, under the concept of the typical sign: the verbal sign, the graphic sign, the iconic sign, the gestural sign are all typical signs. (47; emphasis in original)

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

119

With this in mind, when thinking of Homer as a live musical accompanist for the silent film, it is clear that there are two signifiers representing “different kinds of matter,” that is, image and sound, which must work in synergy with one another so as to correspond to an “immaterial” and unified signified. In this narrative episode the signified can be perceived as a tone, a mood, or an atmosphere; importantly, it is already being partly established by the moving image, as the visuals can be, for example, soft or bombastic, romantic or frightful, sweeping or delicate. The already existing visual signifier is then empathetically linked with the auditory signifier – which is created by Homer on the spot – so as to complete the partly established signified. Thus, the audiovisual sign emerges complete and can be received by the audience as such. The creation of the audiovisual sign involves what Chion calls “the audiovisual contract” (1994, 9), which in turn involves the idea of “added value” contributed by sound. The concept of “the audiovisual contract” refers to the way in which the cinema audience is meant to perceive sound and image as one seamless entity, which is precisely what Homer’s job requires of him. In fact, however, “[t]he audiovisual relationship is not natural but rather a sort of symbolic pact to which the audio-spectator agrees when she or he considers the elements of sound and image to be participating in one and the same entity or world” (222). In other words, far from a neutral participant, music contributes its “added value” to the process of creating the complete sign. From this perspective, we may identify five levels being involved in the creation of the finished audiovisual sign in the narrative episode analyzed here. On the first level, there is the moving image on the screen as it exists without sound. On the second level, there is the language Mary uses to describe the moving image to Homer. These descriptions are meant to convey shared objective meaning based on shared cultural coding: “here comes the hero riding a horse at a gallop, or the firemen are sliding down a pole, or …the lovers are embracing” (Doctorow 2009, 38); thus, when Mary labels a scene as “funny” (“[n]ow a funny chase with people falling out of cars” [38]), it can be regarded less as an attempt to impose her own subjective judgment and more about imagining and conveying meaning based on shared cultural coding, such that it is appropriate to the scene for the cinema audience. The third level includes the representation of the moving image in Homer’s mind and the associations he makes. The fourth level involves the sound created by Homer to accompany the moving image in accordance with the tone, mood, or atmosphere the image

120

V. KARAGOUNI

is meant to set; operative here are the notions of “cultural coding,” “audiovisual contract,” “added value,” and “empathetic” music. It must be emphasized that the fact that Homer is able to create on-the-spot music that is deemed appropriate for each scene suggests that Chion’s notion of “cultural coding” is deeply ingrained and instantly accessible. On the fifth and final level, there is the finished product, namely the completed Barthesian sign, whereby a perceived unity between moving image and sound at the level of the signifier as per Chion’s “audiovisual contract” creates the expected tone, mood, or atmosphere at the level of the signified and is offered to the audience as such. The overarching thematic concerns of this chapter are particularized in this structuralist close reading as the episode examined is a narratively significant fragment of Homer’s history in which music features as narrative motif that links to broader cultural codes and historical contexts. In another chapter of Homer’s narrative, he forms an influential friendship with someone who provides him with an opportunity to learn about and connect with a pivotal aspect of 1920s American life in sociocultural terms. Harold Robileaux, the African American jazz cornet player from New Orleans, “a serious musician” and the grandson of Homer and Langley’s cook, is offered “a basement storage room” in the Collyer household (57). While Homer is aware of swing music, Harold offers him the opportunity to go one step further in his musical education: “I had heard swing on the radio and of course frequented the clubs where there was a dance orchestra, but Harold Robileaux’s hymnal improvisations in our basement were my introduction to Negro jazz” (57). Homer’s response is far removed from what Walter Kalaidjian (1993) has called “a somewhat decadent, bourgeois fascination” with this aspect of “black subculture” that was common during the Roaring Twenties (67). At the beginning of his stay with the Collyer brothers, the “very shy” Harold is heard improvising on hymns in his own room and is eventually “persuaded to come upstairs to the music room” to play with Homer (Doctorow 2009, 57). It is there and then that the latter comes to acknowledge, self-deprecatingly so, his inability to adapt to this wildly different stylistic, interpretive, and performative approach to playing music: I would never master that music myself, the stride piano, the blues, and that later development, boogie-woogie…We tried to play something together but it didn’t really work, I was too thick, I didn’t have the ear for what he could do, I could not compose as he could, taking a tune and

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

121

playing endless variations of it. He would try to get me to join in on this or that piece, he was a gentle fellow of endless patience, but I didn’t have it in me, that improvisatory gift, that spirit. (57–58)

Harold’s relationship with music improvisation and performance begins humbly with his hymnal experiments, creating a form of jazz inflected with the sounds of the black Southern church. In this, he is linked to Mary whose portrayal within Homer’s narrative is marked by strongly religious imagery and connotations. However, where Harold progresses and thrives within the realm of worldliness and cutting-edge culture, Mary retreats into, and remains enclosed within, the domain of innocence and “saintliness” (140). The fact that a prominent female character remains contained and unthreatening can be seen to exemplify a certain kind of gendered characterization. This argument can be further intensified by the fact that Mary’s aforementioned tragic death in middle age results from worldly violence and brutality (“raped and shot to death” [167]). By comparison, the key male character of Harold, while described as “very shy” (57), ventures freely into the world. Ultimately, however, Harold fares even worse than Mary. With male worldliness also entailing the threat of being enlisted in World War II, Harold is still youthful when he meets his own violent death, as will be discussed below. At this point in the narrative, however, Harold’s newfound and exciting worldliness is thoroughly unthreatening and accompanied by a refinement in his musical approach and a broadening of his sociocultural horizons: “he started to go out every evening to Harlem and eventually he got together with some other young musicians and they formed their own band” (58). It is within what Kalaidjian (1993) refers to as Harlem’s “cosmopolitan milieu” and climate of “cultural revolution” (75) that Harold is allowed to develop and manifest a more adventurous spirit, which is in turn reflected in his music. By participating in the interwar Harlem Renaissance, Harold allows for a narrative link to be created between Homer (and Langley), on the one hand, and modern African American cultural expression, on the other. The brothers welcome the fact that their house becomes a rehearsal space for the Harold Robileaux Five. This development bears important narrative significance. The quintet’s bombastic and fashionable music attracts passersby, whom Langley does not hesitate to invite into the house. Homer explains the significance of this event by linking it to ideas associated with Harold:

122

V. KARAGOUNI

that day when people came in from the street to hear the music of the Harold Robileaux Five may have been in the back of Langley’s mind when, some years later, he came up with the idea of a weekly tea dance. Or maybe he remembered how Harold spoke of playing at rent parties in people’s apartments in Harlem. (Doctorow 2009, 59)

The weekly tea dances prove to be a lucrative business idea. The guests happily dance along to the “several dozen popular music records” that, as Homer recounts, were all purchased by Langley at a music shop whose “proprietor was a virtual musicologist, with recordings of swing orchestras and crooners and songstresses that no other store had” (63). With Harold’s worldly influence clearly underpinning it, this new business idea becomes incorporated into the brothers’ personal history. Through his friendship with Harold, Homer learns that the most popular musical genre of the interwar era in the United States is swing and that musical events in people’s private residences occur regularly in Harlem. Music works as a narrative link yet again, showcasing the interpenetration between public and private history. Through the popularity of different jazz sub-genres in the United States between the wars, the brothers discover music’s intrinsic and valuable social capital as well as its economic profitability. After an intense period of success, the tea dances abruptly cease when the brothers are arrested over licensing issues. As for Harold, he returns to New Orleans and is enlisted when World War II erupts. With Harold at the center of it, the following episode showcases the illusory potential of music in the form of a disconcerting, albeit fleeting, convergence of past, present, and future. Homer reminisces that “[b]efore he was shipped overseas, Harold Robileaux had made one of those little Victory records that soldiers sent home in the mail so their family could hear their voice” or, in Harold’s case, his voice and his cornet (96). What is peculiar about Harold’s “V-record” is that he does not play anything triumphant or militaristic such as a “reveille” that would, in Homer’s words, “indicate his affiliation with the army” (98). Instead, his piece features “elegiac taps” (98), which leads Homer to consider that “maybe it was that solemnly reflective dirge, the mournful tones filling all our rooms over and over, as if Harold Robileaux was prophesying his own death, that made [Grandmamma Robileaux] admit to herself, after all, that her grandson was gone” (98). At the time when Homer, Langley, and Mrs. Robileaux are listening to Harold’s V-record, they already know (and have known for some time) that Harold died

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

123

at the front. In spite of this knowledge of a concrete and irreversible fact, listening to the record incites a strange convergence between the permanently lost past, namely when Harold was still alive and playing his cornet to capture its sound in the V-record; the present time at this juncture in Homer’s narrative, that is, when the Collyer brothers and his grandmother are listening to Harold’s piece; and the future implied in the foreshadowing and “prophesying” nature of the somber recording, when considering the perspective of the (then) still alive Harold with regard to his own fate. The “heartbreaking sound” (98) of the piece is aligned not to the actual time and context of Harold’s playing which, according to Homer, could presumably be associated with something more uplifting, energetic, and militaristic, but to the time when the piece is being listened to by those who love and mourn him. In the midst of such temporal interpenetrations and with synchronic time privileged over diachronic, Grandmamma Robileaux temporarily forgets her grandson has died in the war. According to Homer, it is clear that she “[is] made to suffer his death twice” (98), with “the mournful tones” (98) of the recording eventually prevailing over the fallacious vivacity of Harold’s presence, which is conveyed solely through sound’s illusory potential. These observations can be taken further if Chion’s definition of “empathetic” music is revisited at this point and supplemented with its opposite, that is, “anempathetic” music. Even though Chion’s terminology is specifically created to describe music composed for the moving image, it is applicable to the overall emotional context of a scene or episode that we can figuratively see, through imagination, when processing a literary narrative.3 According to Chion, the second kind of response music can have with regard to the moving image or, in this case, the overall emotional context of a scene, is “conspicuous indifference to the situation” (1994, 8) and therefore detachment from what is being depicted. This second “anempathetic” kind of music can actually “reinforce” the emotion it is supposed to be disregarding (8). At first, it may appear that Harold’s music in the episode just analyzed works both empathetically and anempathetically. As seen earlier, Homer suggests that the music heard on the V-record is jarring, which is to say anempathetic, against the backdrop of Harold’s own spatiotemporal context at the time of recording: It does not “indicate his affiliation with the army” and there is no “reveille” (Doctorow 2009, 98). This observation can be taken further when considering Harold’s own voice, before he lets his cornet have the last word, as it were; for the somber music he plays is also incongruous with the positive

124

V. KARAGOUNI

and hopeful tone of his verbal message to his loved ones: “[h]e was well, he said, and excited to have been promoted to tech sergeant” (97). This rationale suggests that Harold’s musical piece is empathetic toward the spatiotemporal parameters in place when the recording is being played and listened to by his mourning friends and grandmother, suggestive of his posthumous future and their present. Of course, it could equally be posited that Harold is actually suffering at the time of playing his piece and opts, consciously or not, to express this suffering through music as opposed to words. While this argument would not contradict the “prophesying” quality Homer detected in the recording, it would be incompatible with Homer’s observation about the piece’s disconnection from Harold’s own space and time. Regardless of interpretive angle toward this particular issue, it is clear that music creates intersections and interpenetrations between past, present, and future; it participates in the characters’ particular feelings and the scene’s broader emotional context, thus further corroborating its narrative and historical significance. Mourning for Harold causes music to cease and silence to reign supreme: “Grandmamma’s grief filled the house. It was silent, monumental” (99). Congruently, the end of World War II causes Homer to experience a sense of emptiness and purposelessness of such proportions that he finds himself uninterested in music: “[e]ven my music had lost its appeal” (101). Yet the Collyer household begins to be filled with sound again, albeit mechanical sound, courtesy of the typewriters Langley starts collecting. Homer recalls that one of them had been “a Smith-Corona that had been fitted with keys in Braille” (118) and it was this model that he used to write his narrative. As Langley attempts to figure out the properties of each typewriter, Homer remarks that “there was a new music in my ears of key clacks and bell dings and slamming platens” (118). The mechanical sound of the typewriters punctuates the part of Homer’s narrative that relates to the occupation of the Collyer household by crime boss Vincent and his entourage of gangsters. The “clacking and platen banging” of typing may be comforting and musical to Homer’s ears but it proves so infuriating to Vincent that Langley’s typewriter ends up violently destroyed by Vincent’s son; Homer comments that “[he] heard it come apart with a silvery shatter, like a piece of china” (122). These everyday sounds – a typewriter hard at work, a typewriter being broken – contribute an element of musique concrète to the thematic motif of music in Doctorow’s novel. While the term musique concrète was defined by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948 as an attempt to “collect concrete sounds, wherever

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

125

they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing,” early examples of the process are traceable in the work of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov as early as the 1930s (De Reydellet 1996, 10; Wedgewood 1983, 113). Homer’s awareness of the concept can therefore be assumed, even if it is not explicitly highlighted. In narrative terms, the musique concrète of everyday sounds fills the gap between the period spent in the silence of grief and the moment when Homer properly resumes his piano-playing. He does so begrudgingly at first, in order to please Langley, who has embarked on an interesting experiment: “I was to play the piano while he painted what he heard. The theory was that his painting would be an act of translation. I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound” (Doctorow 2009, 132). A direct inversion of the process of composing for the moving image through Homer’s job as musical accompanist in the movie theater, this experiment sees Homer improvising on the piano so that his brother can translate sounds into visuals. The ultimate aim of Langley’s experiment is to enable his brother to “see sound, or hear paint” (132), and Homer manages to hide his dissatisfaction with his brother’s foray into a form of synesthesia. This awkward phase is followed by a brief but “blessed” (133) period in Homer’s life, during which he begins experimenting with original composition. At this point, the two brothers are immersed in their overlapping experiments (music and painting) with Langley eventually buying a tape recording machine that enables Homer to listen back to his compositions. As Homer puts it epigrammatically, “neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier than at this time” (134). Nostalgic for these recordings and the joyous time of their creation, the elderly Homer wishes he could listen to them again, before reminding himself that his hearing has deteriorated and he should therefore be “grateful to have this typewriter” (134). With old age and gradual physical deterioration, the activities of composing, playing, and listening to music cease to be accessible to Homer; moreover, even the musique concrète of typing begins to fade in his ears. What remains now is the musicality of the written word. In their old age, Homer and Langley become increasingly withdrawn from American society which in turn becomes increasingly hostile toward them, a stance displayed most strongly by representatives of the law and public services but also individuals, such as Homer and Langley’s

126

V. KARAGOUNI

neighbors. It is particularly poignant therefore that Homer’s final connection with the social world involves a European, the French journalist Jacqueline Roux. She is referred to as Homer’s “muse” time and again, from the opening to the closing pages of the novel, further alluding to Homer’s namesake, the allegedly blind Greek bard. Toward the end of his life and with his hearing increasingly deteriorating, Homer meets Jacqueline by chance, having left the confines of his house for a walk. Afterward he describes her to Langley as “a woman out in the world” (190); indeed, she is Homer’s last link to the outside world. Jacqueline’s particular thematic and symbolic importance in the novel is rendered evident when Homer reveals that it was in fact she who suggested that writing could replace music playing: In her room I confess to my misery, a blind man growing deaf. A generous conversation ensues – practical, as if this is a problem to be solved. Why not write, then, she says. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. I am not persuaded. You understand, Mr. Homer? You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know – words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them. (202)

When Homer persistently questions the musicality of his language even though he concedes to the musicality of Jacqueline’s native tongue, his muse keeps challenging his perspective. Further, she is the one who suggests to Homer that his life’s narrative is worthy of being recorded in writing, of becoming a work of history. It is tempting to imagine both Doctorow the novelist and his fictional protagonist at the receiving end of Jacqueline’s exhortation. Homer confesses that “in [his] weakened state [he is] not sure if she ever returned as she said she would, or if [he] only needed the thought of her to begin this writing” (201). Further confusion arises when Homer expresses gratitude about the fact that Langley also encouraged him “to write in lieu of [his] music” (203) and wonders whether this could be linked or even attributed to the influence of Jacqueline’s perspective on his increasing physical frailty: “[i]t is she for whom I write. My muse.” (204). Whether through Jacqueline herself or his recollection of her, whether solely through her influence or that of Langley and her combined, Homer does decide to become narrator and historian and thereby

7

“KEY CLACKS AND BELL DINGS AND SLAMMING PLATENS” …

127

immerse himself in the process of creating and “hearing” a different kind of music in his mind: music written in words. Nothing less than the genesis and development of Doctorow’s novel can therefore be traced back to this double association of music with the written word and the social world, with self-narrativization and historicity. In Homer’s private construction of the past, the thematic motif of music undergoes a series of variations that are themselves associated with pivotal narrative junctures. In the closing pages of his narrative, with the social world reduced to a distant memory and only his brother’s touch to remind him of a reality outside his own, Homer reveals the extent to which the music of the written word has gained importance in (and for) his survival: “[w]riting happens to coincide with my compensatory desire to stay alive” (204–205). As the impetus behind narration and personal history; as the thematic motif that binds together key narrative developments; as a link between past, present, and future; as a bridge between private and American history; and ultimately as a life-sustaining practice, music in Homer and Langley emerges as an element of central narrative and historical significance.

Notes 1. The degree to which Doctorow drew on the lives of the real Collyer brothers to construct his characters is not of concern here. My aim is not to discuss where Homer’s historicity ends and his fictionality begins but rather to explore the interplay of historical and personal fragments in the selfnarrativization of a fictional character by following the thematic motif of music across the text. 2. The second kind of response Chion identifies, “anempathetic” music, will be addressed later on. 3. Since Chion’s definitions are centered on the way music responds to film narrative, such an expansion seems justified in the context of my argument.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1986. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. Beckstead, David. 2013. “Improvisation: Thinking and Playing Music.” Music Educators Journal 99 (3): 69–74. Beecroft, Alexander. 2011. “Blindness and Literacy in the ‘Lives’ of Homer.” The Classical Quarterly 61 (1): 1–18.

128

V. KARAGOUNI

Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Cobley, Paul. 2014. Narrative. London: Routledge. De Reydellet, Jean. 1996. “Pierre Schaeffer, 1910–1995: The Founder of ‘Musique Concrète’.” Computer Music Journal 20 (2): 10–11. Doctorow, E. L. 2009. Homer and Langley. London: Abacus. Hooper, Emma. 2012. “Hear Me: How Intratextual Musical Association Develops Literary Characters.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 14 (2): 180–96. Kalaidjian, Walter. 1993. American Culture Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press. Kononenko-Moyle, Natalie. 1979. “Homer, Milton, and A¸sik Veysel: The Legend of the Blind Bard.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3/4 (2): 520–29. McCrae, Elizabeth. 1974. “The Piano Music.” Music Educators Journal 61 (2): 53–57. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. London: Faber. Shockley, Alan. 2017. Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel. London: Routledge. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Wedgewood, Richard B. 1983. “Dziga Vertov’s ‘Enthusiasm’: Musique Concrète in 1930.” College Music Symposium 23 (2): 113–21. Weliver, Phyllis, and Katherine Ellis, eds. 2013. Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Wierzbicki, James. 2009. Film Music: A History. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers Aimee Pozorski

My scholarly work on futurity and its focus on the figure of the child dates back to 2002, when I simultaneously began working on a dissertation on figures of infanticide in modernist and contemporary American literature and became pregnant. Not too often since then have my life and work become so inextricably bound, but it happened again recently, within the last five years, when I turned to the bestselling contemporary American novels considered here: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015). In May 2016, I traveled to Europe, which, of course, still bears many traces of the history of Nazi occupation. I was in Amsterdam staying in a hotel just around the corner from the flat where Anne Frank went into hiding. We could hear the church bells chime every hour, day and night – the same church bells that Frank heard and which comforted her. The line to the Anne Frank museum snakes around the corner at all hours of the day; teenagers can be seen taking selfies by her statue, which – however problematic – shows the connection that people from all over the world

A. Pozorski (B) Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_8

129

130

A. POZORSKI

continue to feel toward this young girl. As The Nightingale tells us, France and Germany were not the only European countries affected by the Nazi agenda: “the real horror was happening elsewhere in Europe, in Belgium and Holland and Poland” (Hannah 2015, 24). My visit to Amsterdam was highly overdetermined: I had gone to watch my son play soccer in a tournament in Belgium, even though parents were not allowed to travel with the team. Just before we bought tickets, the coordinated bombings in Brussels took place. Since the tournament was in Bassevelde, everything was still scheduled, but everyone was on edge. Midway through the trip, the US government published a fresh warning about terror attacks at sporting events, ratcheting up the tensions even higher. Buffeted by memories of wars past and atrocities present, all I could hear was Hannah’s line, “The war. Again” (Hannah 2015, 10). Hannah’s The Nightingale, like its predecessor Doerr’s Pulitzer Prizewinning All the Light We Cannot See, traces families forever affected by the history of World War II and the Holocaust, each finding hope for the future through the figure of a child. Structured similarly in the sense that both weave in and out of time, from present to past and back again, they offer new life as an answer to a fragmented history that now extends over 50 years. When Hannah’s novel ends with the revelation of a pregnancy, the two surviving protagonists, Vianne and Antoine, reflect that the baby “will be our new beginning” (2015, 397) – one that will become a physical manifestation of a past necessary to remember. This focus on historical and personal memory as emphasized by the figure of the child is reinforced with each respective author’s commitment to historical detail, suggesting, particularly in the case of Doerr, painstaking research into actual historical characters in order to revisit the “true history” of the Holocaust and its effect on individual lives. Recently, scholars of the Holocaust have noted this emergence of “third-generation survivors,” who – in part because they are a generation removed from the actual event – draw on archival research in their fictional works. Such well-known critics as Josh Lambert, Avinoam J. Patt, and Victoria Aarons have recently engaged this phenomenon in the work of contemporary Jewish American authors. Aarons’ collection, Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2016), asks similar questions as a whole, especially Avi Patt’s individual contribution. Elsewhere, Lambert (2011) succinctly asks: “since when

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

131

did multilingual archival research become a required skill for young Jewish novelists?” While these writers focus understandably on the weight of the archive for Jewish writers, in this essay I develop connections between such work and Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Hannah’s The Nightingale – novels grounded in historical research, a process both authors emphasize in their book tours. What does it mean, I ask, for non-Jewish authors – one from the Midwest; the other from the West Coast – to pursue the Holocaust as the topic of their fiction, fiction that depends upon the scholarly enterprise of the past and a hope for sustained memory of the Holocaust in the future? Through close readings of the novels’ achronological representations of time and the figures of a vulnerable child, I argue that these twenty-first-century American bestsellers reflect a cultural and collective trauma we have yet to confront – trauma that grows both out of willful ignorance during the early parts of the Nazi genocide and a failure adequately to help refugees upon the war’s end. By proposing the child as a new beginning, we also see in them, to borrow from Jeffrey C. Alexander, new forms of “moral responsibility” (2012, 1) – actual embodiments of our need to protect the future, not only from genocide, but also from climate change, anti-immigration policy in the United States and abroad, and cultural and political amnesia, to name only a few of the many threats of our present day.

Archive Fever Given the archival commitment of the fictional works of Doerr and Hannah, I begin with the paradoxical idea of the archive itself as emphasized by Jacques Derrida at a London colloquium in 1994 entitled “Memory: The Question of the Archives.” Connoting mastery, order, and precision, on the one hand, and simultaneously unanticipated, unpredictable discoveries, on the other, the archive seems to be an exemplary figure for historical fiction that captures a traumatic past: deeply rooted in a precise historical moment and particular place, these fictions also carry unanticipated interpretations, sometimes even betraying meanings beyond motif or intent. In his remarks, Derrida begins with the notion that archive comes from arkh¯e, meaning “commencement” and “commandment,” embodying two, sometimes conflicting, ideas in one: “the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence – physical, historical, or ontological principle – but also according to the law, there

132

A. POZORSKI

where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given” (1995, 1; emphasis in original). If we are to think about beginnings or commencement from the psychoanalytic or deconstructive point of view, we might think about this as the place of the unexpected, the accident; however, as Derrida suggests, the other connotation of archive is the precise opposite: it is a place of authority “from which order is given” (1). Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s model of the unconscious, Derrida goes on to say that “there is no archive fever without the threat of the death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (19). The desire to go back to, or into, the archive, the desire to preserve, in other words, comes from knowledge of a threat from the inside and outside, the dual threats of aggression and destruction, which can be understood in terms of personal memory but also in terms of historical or collective memory as well. Derrida’s musings may seem rather philosophical, but he is never more practical, nor more relevant, than when he discusses the problems of the current day. This is clear when he brings Freud’s theories into the twentieth century, proposing that “if Freud suffered from mal d’archive …he is not without his place, simultaneously, in the archive fever or disorder we are experiencing today, concerning its lightest symptoms or the great holocaustic tragedies of our modern history and historiography: concerning all the detestable revisionisms, as well as the most legitimate, necessary, and courageous rewritings of history” (90). Like Lacan, Derrida sees the ways in which Freud’s theories of the unconscious anticipated the traumas to come as well as the emergence of revisionists who would argue the Holocaust did not take place. On the other hand, however, as Derrida explains, there is also future possibility in the archive, new and productive ways to understand history. History, like the archive that embodies it, is indeed a double-edged sword. The archive is a place of commencement – beginnings and ends – and, so too, it is a place of sickness and necessary passion. For Derrida, “we are mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute of en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness …It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away” (91). While twenty-first-century authors who have spent so much time in the archives might deny such a claim, the literature that they write proves otherwise. Such texts as The Nightingale and All The Light We Cannot See began in the archives and yet they still cannot master or grasp the horror

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

133

of the Holocaust, not even from the vantage point of 50 years or more. It is their surprising connotative and metaphorical quality – a quality I will define below as “figurative” – that somehow speaks beyond the archive, and even beyond the text, to make a claim on the reader. Derrida ends his remarks by revealing: “we will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he may have burned …Burned without him, without remains and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, without even an ash” (101). In this case, the “he” refers to Freud, and the authors he engages, but the question remains with us today. If, as Derrida declares, “the secret is the very ash of the archive” and literature unknowingly carries the secret, we may turn our attention to more contemporary literary works to see the ways they capture history, or fail to capture history, to see the ways they engage with the burned ash of the twentieth century and beyond, literal and figurative ash, and simultaneously point the way to the future.

Archive Fiction The title of Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See, refers not only to the literal light that goes unseen by one of the children at its center, the French girl, Marie-Laure, but to the darkness of night in the middle of a war zone, to the darkness – at times – of humanity, the future of possibility, the coal mines where the father of the other central child, Werner, dies, the science of brain energy, physics, geology as noted in the radio broadcasts Werner hears as a child: “the brain is locked in total darkness, of course children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world of light?” (Doerr 2014, 48). The question is at once metaphysical and metafictional: How has Doerr created a book about light in the darkness of his own brain, in the darkness of the past? We may say his archive fever produced such a text, not only in the sense that he went back to the fixed and orderly past, but also because he has created something of the future in a story that continues into 2014 with a child from a new generation playing a game, Warlords, on the computer against a competitor inside the game

134

A. POZORSKI

and when he dies within the game saying, “but I can always begin again” (528). The narrative threads in All the Light We Cannot See – generations connected through war and time – took many years to assemble. According to Alexandra Alter (2014), Doerr started with a single scene: “a trapped boy listens to a girl tell him a story over the radio. He eventually developed the two main characters, Werner, a German orphan who gets swept up in the Nazi movement, and Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who flees Paris with her father, a museum locksmith who’s hiding a diamond from Nazi looters.” He conducted research in such far away places as Germany and France, including St. Malo, the French port city where the novel is set; he studied diaries and letters written during the war (Alter 2014). Perhaps because of the creative combination of affecting story and striking character development, alongside intense knowledge of the past, the novel struck a chord with both the general public and literary critics when it first appeared. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of the year (Alter 2014). Scribner originally printed 600,000 of the book copies and, as of December 26, 2014, the end of the year that the book was published, Scribner reprinted it 25 more times, resulting in seeing 920,000 copies into print (Alter 2014). In 2015, All the Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (Doerr, n.d.). As a teacher of contemporary world literature for the past 20 years, All the Light and The Nightingale strike me as sharing important characteristics with key novels from the previous century that I regularly teach, qualities that appeal both to New York Times readers, for example, and academics who seek to find meaning in them for the purposes of teaching and scholarly writing. When we think about significant contemporary works, we see a global tradition in fiction emerge with novels including Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) from India; Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl (2006) from Peru; J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) from South Africa; Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993) from Canada; and Ida Fink’s short story collection A Scrap of Time (1987) from Poland. In this essay, I want to focus on three primary qualities shared by all of these books and exemplified in All the Light We Cannot See: (1) the figure of the vulnerable child; (2) a commitment to representing traumatic history; and (3) telling the well-researched parts of the narrative out of order, or achronologically, as if to show how history itself has become scrambled by trauma. In all of these cases, I see

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

135

these shared qualities as inseparable and used in the service of the “commencement” part of the archive: it is a place where interpretation may commence, where representations and connotations become excessive in the sense that they exceed the careful boundaries of authority and social order and in the sense that they call upon the reader to become involved in the narrative itself. There is one quality associated with the figure of the vulnerable child, however, that reveals a shift in this tradition after 9/11, namely that in such works as Doerr’s and Hannah’s, rather than ending with the life of a child in ashes – as in so many instances and found in Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Holocaust (1975), for example – the narrative ends instead with a new generation, a new life: a figure who looks forward to a new century in the wake of all the deaths of the previous. In the case of the Doerr novel, the figures of the vulnerable child are a blind girl and ultimately, a partially deaf boy. One is well-off and the other a coal miner’s son; one is associated with the arts – music, sculpture, literature – while the other is associated with science and technology. However, in both cases, their vulnerability is palpable – the emotions we feel for them account, in part, for the novel’s success. And we might also consider here, on second reading, the little girl in the red cape, who haunts the text like a specter. By “figure,” I mean metaphor, a turn of phrase that has a larger meaning. That larger meaning, I would argue, points to the vulnerability we all feel – for ourselves, or our own children – in the age of genocide, terrorism, and mass shootings: the sounds of gunfire and bombs resonate because we are still, at some level, afraid. These fictional figures point up a contemporary cultural obsession about the vulnerability we feel even though – or precisely because – statistically, we are almost certainly safer than ever. This is perhaps best exemplified not through Marie or Werner, but rather the Viennese girl in the red hood – as the red of her cape stands out against the gray backdrop; we know she is significant from the first moment we meet her, a remnant from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood who seems doomed from the moment she meets the duplicitous wolf. This young girl, like Little Red Riding Hood, haunts the text from that first moment on: a victimized ghost of the past linked to Etienne’s World War I ghosts and the ghost of Frederick’s upstairs neighbor, Frau Schwartzenberger, the German Jewish woman Frederick and his mother meet in the lift who is ultimately ejected from her home.

136

A. POZORSKI

As Werner listens to the radio: “a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six or seven years old, small for her age …The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip” (Doerr 2014, 366). As in a famous scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), perhaps a deliberate callback to the classic film, this redheaded girl in the deep red cape stands brightly against a stark, gray-blue-gray backdrop; the color of her cape is associated with danger, bloodshed, and bravery. (Somewhat uncannily, even Spielberg’s girl in the red coat has connections with the archive in her resemblance to Roma Ligocka, known in the Kraków ghetto for her red coat. Unlike the girl in Spielberg’s movie and Doerr’s novel, however, Ligocka survived the Holocaust, publishing her memoir, The Girl in the Red Coat, in 2002.) To see the girl engaged in play, in any case, is what opens Werner’s soul. The repetition of the plosive sounds featured in such words as “pendulums,” “pumping,” “play,” and “grip” mimics the throbbing of a heart, emphasizing our life source and its simultaneous strength and vulnerability. Just a few pages later, however, we learn that this Jewish girl’s life has been cut short: when he enters a room after following the sound of a voice, he “sees, hung on the doorknob, a maroon square of velvet, hood attached, a child’s cape, and at exactly that moment …there is a single shot, then a woman’s scream, then more shots” (368). The velvet attached to the door seems to function as a red flag; we are worried, as Werner is, about what lies on the other side of the door. Approaching the closet in this war-torn space, his worst fears are confirmed: “on the floor is a woman, one arm swept backward as if she has been refused a dance, and inside the closet is not a radio but a child sitting on her bottom with a bullet through her head. Her moon eyes are open and moist and her mouth is stretched back in an oval of surprise and it is the girl from the swings and she cannot be over seven years old” (368). The string of conjunctions in the form of “and” in that last sentence makes the moment seem endless, a string of clauses trying to account for the fact of this small child’s death. We know her youth haunts Werner as he repeats the same information from two pages before: “she cannot be over seven years old” (366, 368). Grappling with her death results in an attempt to find the light; the voice from the radio he has been listening to comes back to him at this moment, if only to say, “so really, children,

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

137

mathematically, all of light is invisible” (369; emphasis in original). On first reading, it seems like an address to children: all of light is invisible, mathematically. But there is another way to read it too, as if to say that really, children, as well as all of light, are invisible: a provocative means of rendering the girl in the maroon cape as surviving eternally in and as the light. Sandor Goodhart has argued, using the girl in the red cape as evidence for his claim, that the novel is spiritual, if not strictly historical. He argues that there “is no formal discussion of God here. But it is nonetheless an attempt to be a spiritual book, a ‘vessel of grace,’ so to speak, not unlike Marie-Laure herself. And to that extent, it seems to me, we may ask about the redemptive status of such a narrative of grace, of such a happy ending, and proceed either to praise the book or reject it on that basis” (Goodhart 2015, 8). In other words, for Goodhart, it seems like a contradiction to have the happy, complete, redemptive ending of a novel that also contains references to the murder of 6 million Jews, many of them children. This is the most viable criticism of the novel that I have seen to date, a legitimate question about the novel’s contemporary status. Do we see a future represented here? If so, that future appears to come at the cost of forgetting the murdered children like the little girl in the red cape – a girl who, wearing a deliberately bold color of warning, nevertheless attempts to draw our attention to the innocent children who remain endangered in our midst. It is in this very figure of the unnamed girl in the red cape that we can see the novel’s larger commitment to depicting traumatic history. This may seem obvious. But it is rather striking that, in 2014, Doerr’s text is so committed to returning to the years of World War II. And he is not alone in this. I want to call this novel a Holocaust text, but it is not – or it only is in a way similar to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), another post-9/11 American novel that looks back to World War II – because the victim of the Holocaust is mentioned three brief times and then flits away. In Doerr’s book, the clearest Holocaust victim with a face is Frau Schwartzenberger, a woman we meet only in passing, but there are many other faceless bodies passing before Werner as he makes his way through Germany, Poland, and France: the living bodies stacked against the dead bodies, the smell of smoke and ash infiltrating the landscape. On the surface, this is about a history between Germany and France we may not forget, but it is also about Russia and Germany, rape, pillaging, starvation, fear of child murder, and the trauma that we

138

A. POZORSKI

have inherited from the history of World War II, and looking farther back, through Etienne, from World War I. The children in this novel, although they often occupy different spaces, are joined by history as well as an important intertext, Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). This choice is not a random accident. To the contrary, the work – as unlikely as it seems – resonates with Doerr’s World War II novel: the feeling of being confined, the thrill of scientific inquiry and discovery (in keeping with the mentions of Darwin earlier in this novel), the descent into madness and the reflections, above all, about humanity. When Marie reads what Werner believes is the final sentence of the novel, it resonates with him as he listens on the other side of the city, not because he has read the novel too, but because of his similar experiences: “thus to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, ‘that which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?’ Only two men now have the right answer: Captain Nemo and myself” (Doerr 2014, 449). The two men, in Werner’s case, are Volkheimer and Werner himself – they alone are close to death, but also within sight of light, of life. They, for all those days in the hotel, under the rubble, are trapped between two worlds. The same is true for Marie trapped where she is in the attic. They are bound not only by the shared text but also by the shared experience articulated, uncannily, in a literary novel (Verne’s) that predates them. The cacophony of voices in the novel is rendered increasingly alienating as a result of its nonlinear chronology, a narrative device used to reflect the experience of traumatic time. Just as traumatic memories do not present themselves in order, the chapters in this book do not occur in linear fashion. Like William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), the chapters are arranged by date, but out of order, eventually catching up to the present three quarters of the way through. Time is a slippery thing, the novel tells us, and it mimics that in its own construction. Human memory does not take place in chronological order but emerges from triggers and then circles around a subject or image that might be bothering us. The same is true for the arrangement of chapters in this book: they are recursive, like human memory, designed to reflect not history but thought. The novel’s multiple perspectives bound up with the alienating timeline refuse to allow the archive to tell a single story. It is like Roy’s The God of Small Things, a novel about the effects of postcolonial rule in India, which

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

139

begins with an epigraph from John Berger: “never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one” (Roy 1997, n.p.). This reflects the values of the contemporary tradition not to let the only story be the one told by the victors. At first, it seems like Doerr’s novel will have chapters that alternate simply between Marie and Werner, but then as it progresses, so does the cast of consciousnesses: the most provocative is the perspective of Major von Rumpel, an antagonist in every way whom we nevertheless follow on his journey to find the Sea of Flames. He is sick with cancer, and we empathize with that, too. On the one hand, this illness may reflect shared humanity (the desperation people were brought to under the Nazis); or it may work as a figure for his own diseased nature and infected value system, a synecdoche for the pillaging Nazi party at large. Ultimately, however, Doerr brings separate perspectives back together to show how other characters are connected to the fates of the two children we meet early on. For example, the leaflets conveying an urgent message in French cover the streets and the beach and join all who see them fall, communicating that we are not so separate as we think we are. But there is one thing I find different about this post-9/11 text in the sense that it offers a kind of reparative hope in the end. When I started researching contemporary global literature in 1998, I discovered a “nonreparative” tradition: in the words of Jahan Ramazani (1994), the works were expected to “reopen wounds of loss” (xi). And yet texts published after 2001 seem to do the opposite: if we are not given happy endings in contemporary literature, then at least we have a sense of closure through commitment to family and the hope that future generations bring. One sees this in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007), with the children who make up stories about a fictional character named “Bill Lawton” to try to come to terms with the reality of the terrorist, bin Laden. The same linguistic fluidity can be seen in Doerr’s novel, one that reflects on the relationship between language and creativity in speech in a late section entitled “Visitor.” Lives can change, this novel shows in such interludes as “Visitor,” through misreadings of intent and tone, nuanced translations from French to German, or German to French, French to English, and back again. For example, toward the end of the novel, Marie-Laure meets Werner’s sister Jutta and her son Max many years later; Jutta reveals Werner has died, but the future can be grasped through Max, who speaks German and struggles with French. In the midst of a touching walk through their past

140

A. POZORSKI

with the war, Max comes in to break up the nostalgia. He stops outside and “stumbles through something unintelligible in French. Francis [Marie Laure’s assistant] laughs and says ‘No, no behind as in the back of us, not behind as in derrière’” (Doerr 2014, 516). Marie-Laure says, “it is the obliviousness of our children that saves us” (516). The playfulness of this moment – a moment that turns on the difference between “behind” as in past and “behind” as in derrière – not only shows the importance of linguistic flexibility, but also calls our attention to the vagaries of language, one cultural institution, I would argue, that we trust for stability more than we ought. Then again, as with the commencement and commandment of the archive, the multiple meanings found within Doerr’s own figurative language reflect a new turn in literature, from the nonreparative to the sense of a future that the children may bring. The section’s new turn in content can also be seen in its new formal turn. As Doerr has explained, “this was a gesture of friendliness, maybe. It’s like I’m saying to the reader, ‘I know this is going to be more lyrical than maybe 70 percent of American readers want to see, but here’s a bunch of white space for you to recover from that lyricism’” (quoted in Maslin, 2014). The unlikely format – one that features noticeable white space on the pages meant to serve as a relief from the dense and lyrical passages that characterize Doerr’s style – also rejects the standard narrative, novelistic form. At once, again, we see the interplay between commencement and command – pointing the way to the future in demanding a new form necessary for recovering from the lyrical nature of trauma prose. Following immediately on the heels of All the Light We Cannot See is Hannah’s The Nightingale, a novel similar in its intricate sense of history, its focus on the traumatic history of World War II, and its deep commitment to the figure of the child offered as hope for a new future. In fact, perhaps even more than the Doerr novel, The Nightingale exemplifies a new gesture toward “futurity” emerging in post-9/11 literature that features children, on the one hand, and the relationship between the future and what I refer to as the “figure of the vulnerable child” that is so pervasive in recent novels particularly about World War II. In so doing, I hope that we not only gain a deeper understanding of Hannah’s novel, but also of a tradition of novels published in the United States recently – especially those focused on the intersection between traumatic history and the figure of the child, ultimately leading us to a discussion of how the language of literature singularly gives us access to history and time itself.

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

141

We know that The Nightingale is interested in both time and children because it opens with a dedication looking simultaneously to the past and the future: “And to Kaylee Nova Hannah, the newest star in our world: Welcome baby girl” (Hannah 2015, n.p.). Such a touching dedication seems to inspire or to underwrite the novel’s own investment in intergenerational conflict and the future hope that a new generation brings. In this way, The Nightingale works on two levels: 1) by considering the effects of World War II, the novel – like many twenty-first-century novels – takes up what I refer to as “the problem of history” and the irreparable, repeated traumas of the twentieth century; and 2) by considering the personal relationships between parents and their children, the novel also looks to the future and the hope invested in the next generation. The novel ends, after all, with the realization that “every man saved came home to create a family” – and it is in these families produced in the wreckage of war that The Nightingale ultimately finds hope reflecting, or echoing, the novel’s apparent mantra: “The war. Again” (10). These two fragments occur very early in the novel (chapter 2) in reference to the effects that war has had on three generations: Vianne and Isabelle watched their father descend into alcoholism after World War I and the death of their mother; Vianne and Isabelle themselves – and their husband and lover, respectively – must navigate the terrain of World War II; and Vianne’s daughter Sophie, Vianne’s adopted son Ari, and her postWorld War II son Julien find themselves affected by the perpetual return of war. With the line, “a generation of men were going off to war. Again,” the repetition of the word “again” as a single word sentence underscores the novel’s (and characters’) horror at the repetition of war (18). The best hope for finding a way out of the cycle seems to be the children – the newest generation – as seen in the singing performance of Sophie and Ari at the end of World War II. But what about other wars after World War II? Why have so many contemporary novelists writing after 2001 returned to exceedingly wellresearched events that took place from 1938 to 1945? The Nightingale in particular is based on the story of Countess Andrée Eugénie Adrienne de Jongh, a member of the Belgian Resistance during World War II who organized the Comet line (Le Réseau Comète) for escaped Allied soldiers and airmen. The involved and complex process of researching and writing this book – even though Hannah had already produced more than 20 novels before this one – meant the author needed to ask for more time from her publisher to finish. As Jessica Strawser (2017) explains,

142

A. POZORSKI

“she was writing something different …more research-intensive …sweeping and …in-depth than anything she’d written before – a World War II–era tale of two French sisters with very different approaches to living under Nazi occupation. But halfway through the manuscript, it became clear her usual timeline wasn’t going to cut it.” Ultimately, the book spent 45 weeks on the NPR Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List and 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (Strawser 2017). According to Strawser (2017), “it was named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon, Goodreads, Library Journal, BuzzFeed and The Week, snagging the People’s Choice Award and Audiobook of the Year Award on the way. As of this writing, the novel has more than 35,000 customer reviews on Amazon with a full 5-star average, and a Hollywood adaptation is in development with TriStar Pictures.” Who are the novel’s children and why do they matter to our understanding of the work overall? On the surface, this appears to be a historical text celebrating the work of one heroine, the eponymous “Nightingale,” Isabelle Rossignol (as Countess Andrée Eugénie Adrienne de Jongh) who saved over 115 men by leading them from Nazi-occupied France through the Pyrenees on an escape route to Spain. However, Hannah could have chosen any variety of ways to tell this story. That she chooses to let Isabelle fade into the background in order to have her sister serve as the primary focus of the novel seems significant. Although the story of the Nightingale is Isabelle’s story, it also becomes Vianne’s story: her stillbirths, suggesting the impossibility of a future generation; her survival in their small French community; her adoption of the Jewish baby, Ari; her work to save 19 Jewish children during the war; and her status as a rape survivor who brings into the world the next generation in the form of Julien. Clearly, Isabelle is a vulnerable child in her own right – but what of the others? She, too, is witness to many child victims along her path to resistance, as revealed in what appear to be little throwaway moments that add up significantly in the novel such as: “Isabelle saw a toddler in soiled nappies standing by a dead woman, crying” (46). What are we to make of all these crying, vulnerable children? What is their status within this novel about French resistance during the war? For the rest of this section, I will focus on the representation of children from the perspective of Vianne, the sister who sees herself as the antithesis of a hero trailing only loss in her wake. Take, for example, this early passage describing Vianne’s reaction to her stillbirths, as reflected through the image of a rocking chair: “for years that empty rocker had

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

143

mocked them. The miscarriage years, as she thought of them now. Desolation in a land of plenty. Three lost lives in four years; tiny thread heartbeats, blue hands. And then, miraculously: a baby who survived. Sophie. There were sad little ghosts caught in the wood grain of that chair, but there were good memories, too” (16). The fragmented sentences here, the references to death in such delicate images as “thread heartbeats” and “blue hands,” point largely to haunting, ghostlike deaths of babies who never quite were: the “sad little ghosts” embedded in the chair itself. But ultimately, as with the novel overall, there is a baby who lives, Sophie, whose name means “the wise one,” the one who will continue. We also see a dead baby, as Vianne does, in the arms of a refugee fleeing Paris early in the novel. As with Doerr’s figure of the girl in the maroon cape, the refugee mother and her child seem like a gratuitous detail, a figure that does not fit into the logic of the book but exists outside of it, taking on a life of its own. Hannah writes: The young mother made a moaning sound and tightened her hold on the baby, who was so quiet – and his tiny fist so blue – that Vianne gasped. The baby was dead. Vianne knew about the kind of talon grief that wouldn’t let go; she had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone. (53)

The one sentence paragraph, “the baby was dead,” echoes the ending of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). The end of this moment reinforces a refusal of hope or comfort in the face of the loss of an infant, but there exist many more surprisingly hopeful moments throughout the rest of the book. For example, child figures are often linked with creative acts, such as when Vianne describes the experience of making a scarf for Sophie: “with only the creaking of the house for company, she focused on the pale blue yarn and the way the knitting needles dove in and out of the soft strands, creating every moment something that hadn’t existed before. It calmed her nerves, this once-ordinary morning ritual” (118). The needles, like an author’s pen, have the power to call something into being. Personified as “diving in and out,” the needles could be dolphins on the blue yarn, creating something out of nothing. Later, when the novel narrates the murder of another child, Sarah, Sophie’s friend and the daughter of Vianne’s friend Rachel, the death seems gratuitous and unfair. Killed in an ambush, also apparently by

144

A. POZORSKI

Nazis, we learn from Vianne’s perspective as she pulls Sarah into her arms that “the girl’s chest was riddled with bullet holes. Blood bubbled up, spilled over, oozing …Vianne wrenched off her shawl and pressed it to the wounds” (258). Again, the plosive sounds echo the popping sounds of the gunshots: “blood,” “bubbled,” “up,” “spilled,” and “pressed” reinforce the violence of the shooting. The shawl used to help wrap the child recalls Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” (1980), another surreal, haunting, poetic scene of a young child’s death. Finally, we have the impending birth of Julien, the new baby, by novel’s end, to – it appears, even though he is the product of a rape – counteract the death and destruction that took place during the course of the book overall. When Vianne tells her husband Antoine about the new baby, he says, “so we choose to see miracles” (397). It is his way, Vianne believes, of communicating that he knows the truth about Julien’s origins, when he continues: “I mean forget the past, V. …This baby will be our new beginning” (397). Here a baby signifies the future – not only new beginnings, but also remembering; Julien in this way becomes a figure for memory as well as for new life itself. A form of the verb to “remember” is repeated three times on this page, and that is no accident. The existence of Julien reminds the couple of the need to hold on to memory.

Archive Future This renewed emphasis on futurity is seen in new work by Cathy Caruth, a key theoretician of trauma and literary reference, who conceives of the post-traumatic event in Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) – the title itself calling attention to rebuilding after the world we know has turned to ash. Caruth goes back to Freud’s discussion of the child’s game – of the accidents in language – that he discusses as a salve to World War I war neurosis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In a book about World War I, she argues, why is Freud so distracted by a child’s game, about the accidental naming of the game: fort/da (there, here, the child says, in order to self-soothe after the disappearance of his mother)? In so doing, Caruth underlines Freud’s “enigmatic move in the theory of trauma from the drive for death to the drive to life, from the reformulating of life around the witness to death to the possibility of witnessing and making history in creative acts of life” (2013, 5).

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

145

In returning to Beyond the Pleasure Principle after the events of 9/11, in other words, Caruth’s focus turns not to the problem of traumatic survival in the wake of war but rather to the possibilities that art brings, the act of “making history” through creativity, such as child’s play, language, literature, and art. More striking still is the temporality of this creative making, as Caruth speculates that “stories of trauma cannot be limited to catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers …after the end, in a time that comes to us from the other shore, from the other side of the disaster” (92). Here I read Caruth as saying that trauma leaves in its wake not simply wholesale destruction, what she calls “catastrophe,” but also language or creation that comes not simply, but paradoxically, from the future, “from the other side of disaster” (92). In reading after 9/11 especially, I have seen this return through the figure of the child, but I have also seen an appeal toward creation in the future, a sentiment very different than the critical afterlife of Theodor Adorno’s proclamation about the barbarism of poetry after Auschwitz. In response to the post-World War II literary tradition that illuminates the destructive forces of history and the cyclical nature of the traumatic response, such post-9/11 thinkers as Caruth have recently begun to see the literary tradition through a different lens, through the possibilities of the future. Amir Eshel has recently explored works that make available the “open, future, possible …in an era that has witnessed upheaval on an unprecedented scale and that doubts the very notion that we can affect tomorrow” (2013, 4). Importantly, Eshel reads the figurative language of literary fiction as expressions of futurity. I believe that, while trauma theory has evolved into the twenty-first century, beyond the fall of the Twin Towers, it incorporates a theory of the future as well. A recent example is Alexander’s Trauma: A Social Theory (2012), where he writes: “however torturous the trauma process, it can allow collectivities to define new forms of moral responsibility and to redirect the course of political action” (30; emphasis added). While I am less interested in trauma as a social discourse than as a guide for reading literature, I share Alexander’s focus on the new – especially new forms of moral responsibility, as exemplified by the infant figure Julien –in literature written after 9/11. As in The Nightingale’s dedication, even the acknowledgments focus on the future offered by giving birth when Hannah writes: “this book was a labor of love, and like a woman in labor, I often felt overwhelmed

146

A. POZORSKI

and desperate in that please-help-me-this-can’t-be-what-I-signed-up-forgive-me-drugs kind of way” (2015, 439). In comparing the writing of the book to the labor of giving birth, she reveals her investment in children; given her dedication, it seems clear she has experience with both writing difficult novels and giving birth. As such, the mother’s perspective seems singular here; the book is feminist not only in the sense that it presents the Nightingale as a hero who waged war behind the scenes, but also because it presents mothers as heroes who help one another and one another’s children. Is there a message about war, generations, infants, and history in the fact that the novel is framed by a relationship between Vianne, the surviving sister, and her son, Julien, the product of her rape by an SS soldier? Of Julien and his relationship to the future, Vianne says: “you brought me back to life, Julien. When I held you, after all that ugliness, I could breathe again. I could love your father again” (438). As these novels make clear, although the Nazi Holocaust is not the first genocide in history, with its use of propaganda, machines, schedules, and mass communication, institutional forces such as the government and even language itself emerged as deeply tainted and suspicious. The same can be said for the law, which unfairly tries innocents and, as we know after the war, was not adequate in the face of trials against war criminals. How do you find reparation in the court of law for six million dead? One of the places, I would argue, is in the archive – if not in archive fever, the archive du mal, then in the archive that allows us to see history anew, to see a future in the past, with the literary language that comes out of research. We can find reparation, in other words, in imagination, through imaginative, bestselling novels offering literary language that exceeds the boundaries imposed by institutions: novels that create images that stay with us interminably, not simply because they are easy to master, but precisely for the opposite reason – because they elude our grasp and promise meaning just beyond our reach.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, ed. 2016. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. New York: Polity.

8

ARCHIVE FUTURE: TRAUMA AND THE CHILD …

147

Alter, Alexandra. 2014. “Literary Jackpot, Against the Odds.” New York Times, December 26, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/ books/anthonys-doerrs-all-the-light-we-cannot-see-hits-it-big.html. Caruth, Cathy. 2013. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doerr, Anthony. 2014. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner. Doerr, Anthony. n.d. “All the Light We Cannot See.” Author website. http:// anthonydoerr.com/books/all-the-light-we-cannot-see/. Eshel, Amir. 2013. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodhart, Sandor. 2015. “The Blind Girl and the White-haired Boy: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and the Limits of Holocaust Fiction.” Unpublished Essay, Purdue University. Hannah, Kristin. 2015. The Nightingale. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lambert, Josh. 2011. “Archive Fever.” Tablet, May 31, 2011. https://www. tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/68568/archive-fever. Maslin, Janet. 2014. “Light Found in Darkness of Wartime.” New York Times, April 28, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/books/allthe-light-we-cannot-see-by-anthony-doerr.html. Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Penguin. Strawser, Jessica. 2017. “New Territory: The Nightingale Author Kristin Hannah Discusses her New Alaska-Set Novel.” Writer’s Digest, December 21, 2017. https://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/interviews/ new-territory-the-nightingale-author-kristin-hannah-discusses-her-new-alaskaset-novel.

CHAPTER 9

Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction Ruth Maxey

Introduction: Containing the Korean War in Fiction For Josephine Park, Korean War novels attempt to contain the conflict of 1950–1953 within narrative boundaries, “but …the war threatens to erupt out of these constraints” (2015, 457). Park argues that this messy, complex, misunderstood war – both civil conflict and Cold War geopolitical struggle – “has eluded the generations that followed” (468). If the Korean War cannot be satisfactorily represented, this has not deterred various US novelists from returning to it in works of fiction produced since 2000, including Ha Jin’s War Trash (2004), Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite (2009), Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), and Robert Olmstead’s The Coldest Night (2012). Such novels follow earlier American literary responses such as Richard Kim’s The Martyred (1964), a classic fictional account of the Korean War; Chaim Potok’s I am the Clay (1992); and Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998).

R. Maxey (B) Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_9

149

150

R. MAXEY

This chapter will examine two recent US narratives about the conflict: Philip Roth’s short campus novel Indignation (2008) and Changrae Lee’s much lengthier and largely Korea-based novel The Surrendered (2010). Situating them within a wider context of Korean War fiction by US writers, it will explore the diverse literary strategies used by Roth and Lee to portray this ostensibly unrepresentable war and its aftermath. Both writers claim the conflict by writing about it through specific ethno-racial lenses, variously employing Jewish, Irish, and Korean American perspectives. And both narratives refer to this historical event repeatedly and recursively.1 Yet Roth and Lee spend remarkably little time depicting the war itself. Instead, their novels betray a basic uncertainty over how to engage with the conflict and specifically with the Korean combat zone. Roth belonged to a generation that came of age in the 1950s, while Lee’s family history connects directly to the Korean War.2 But unlike the earlier novels by Kim, Potok, and Choi, for instance – each of which educates the non-Korean reader about the so-called forgotten war in a sometimes didactic manner (compare Park 2015, 461) – both Roth and Lee evoke the conflict as a largely absent presence. They achieve this through such techniques as prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, metonymy, and experimental narration, handling their exophoric subject with caution and detachment. Anticipating Morrison’s Home, the conflict is used largely as a framing device instead. As Choi puts it when discussing Kim’s novel, “The Martyred is no more ‘about’ the Korean War than Antigone is ‘about’ the civil war in Thebes …Though this is a novel of war, Kim steers clear of combat” (quoted in Kim 2011, xiv–xv). Roth and Lee deploy the war as a starting point for stories that are either largely domestic and national – Indignation is rooted, for the most part, in US soil – or transnational. Hence much of The Surrendered takes place in post-conflict Korea, while relying on the United States and Italy as gravitational forces. Lee draws on the events of 1950–1953 to tell a wide-ranging tale of US expatriation, imperialism, humanitarianism, and the Korean orphans desperate to be adopted into white American families. The initial critical reception of Indignation was mixed: commentators viewed it as too short (Hanks 2008; Kakutani 2008; Kelly 2008), thematically familiar (Cheuse 2008; Tayler 2008), and schematic (Wolcott 2008), but also as a memorably vivid and angry parable (Charles 2008; Hanks 2008) which, among Roth’s late novels, “ventures farthest into the unknowable” (Gates 2008). Responding to The Surrendered, reviewers applauded the ambition of Lee’s novel (Kakutani 2010; Rafferty 2010),

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

151

while also regarding it as a kind of impressive failure: portentously written, repetitive, overlong and improbable (Boddy 2010; Rifkind 2010; Robson 2010), and full of unanswered questions (Churchwell 2010). Many early reviews had little to say about the novels’ treatment of the Korean War, especially Indignation. Offering the first sustained critical comparison of these two novels, my chapter will draw on more recent scholarly opinion to examine what kinds of usable past these writers create through their Korean War novels as they bid to represent this major mid-twentiethcentury conflict.

Indignation as Jewish American War Memorial Indignation begins and ends with the war. Through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Marcus Messner, it opens with a particular spatiotemporal reference: “about two and a half months after the welltrained divisions of North Korea, armed by Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark…” (Roth 2009, 1). On the next page, Marcus’s father fears that his son will “be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield” (2), a terror directly linked to the fate of Marcus’s cousins, Abe and Dave, who were killed during World War II. Mr. Messner becomes “crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world” (8; emphasis added): a vision universalized through Roth’s use of the second-person pronoun. In these early examples of prolepsis and foreshadowing, the specter of Korea already haunts Indignation, even as the war is ostensibly forgotten, in line with later US public amnesia about it, amid Marcus’s turbulent departure from his family in Newark, New Jersey, and voyage of discovery into middle America: his first year at the fictionalized Winesburg College in Ohio. Thus Roth vividly, if briefly, evokes the conflict and suggests it as an example of what he has elsewhere termed “the terror of the unforeseen” which “the science of history hides” (Roth 2004, 114; compare Royal 2009, 131). For Marcus and his father, the Korean War may go on for years; and for the reader, there is a further layer of dramatic irony here since this Cold War conflict in Asia was succeeded by the much lengthier

152

R. MAXEY

Vietnam War and a succession of other US wars fought overseas, while the Korean peninsula still remains divided. The devastating conflict in Korea is by no means over (Hsu 2013, 33; Hong 2015, 601; Yoo 2018). Within Roth’s novel, however, the war of 1950–1953 does not take center stage. Perhaps this reflects the ease with which US civilians go on with their lives thousands of miles away from Korea or indeed the Pacific, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan (compare Kim and Nguyen 2015, 64; Yoo 2018). The novel’s emphasis on college life – which recalls Choi’s The Foreign Student, albeit in a different temporal and geographical order – also mirrors Marcus’s own desire to push the Korean War to the back of his mind. The conflict remains at an imagined level for much of the novel: a long way away geographically and pictured inside Marcus’s head rather than experienced directly, at least until the brief, chilling, penultimate section, “Out from Under,” where his death in Korea at just 19 is revealed. Korea may remain remote for most of Indignation, yet the threat of conscription still drives Marcus’s choices and poisons the attitudes of his father, a kosher butcher, toward his only child. Throughout Marcus’s time at Winesburg, moreover, the young protagonist is consumed by his obsession with causality: the iron chain of cause and effect that will lead to Korea and either death or survival. He employs a circular, syllogistic reasoning vis-à-vis the Korean War. Thus his goal of ending up as class valedictorian and the greater safety this will confer – by “maneuvering from the Transportation Corps into military intelligence” (Roth 2009, 43) – leads him to reject invitations to join either of the two fraternities for which he is eligible as a Jewish student. His desire to masturbate in the college library as he fantasizes about Olivia Hutton, a fellow student, is “quelled by my fear that if I did so, I might get caught …be expelled from school, and wind up a rifleman in Korea” (47). During the novel’s quasi-theatrical set-piece confrontation with Dean Hawes Caudwell, another watchful figure of paternalistic authority, Marcus is convinced that “I am going to be asked to leave Winesburg …Thrown out, drafted, sent to Korea, and killed” (88, 107–108). Yet this does not prevent him from being passionately, dangerously disputatious, a stance that leads him – with grim irony and inevitability – to the exact fate he seeks to avoid. When he sings the Chinese national anthem inwardly during his meeting with the Dean, he succeeds in keeping images of the Korean conflict alive. It is both intriguing and paradoxical that Marcus uses this national anthem as his own cri de guerre: a means of contesting the white Christian

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

153

norms of Winesburg and middle America in general. After all, Chinese soldiers are the preeminent adversary in the Korean War which pitted the United States against China. And there are surely contemporary parallels to be drawn between Roth’s novel and the world stage in 2008, the year of the novel’s publication, when China was regarded as a rising global superpower and formidable rival to the United States (compare Darda 2015, 90). But instead of reinscribing a long-standing American Sinophobia – as, for example, Morrison does in Home 3 – Roth gives Marcus a more complex and subversive position toward China, thus reflecting the protagonist’s own ambiguous role in relation to dominant values. China is both bold hero, invoked to talismanic effect by Marcus, and terrifying antagonist on the ground: an erstwhile ally (in World War II)-turneddeadly foe. Chinese Communist ideologues reject organized religion and central to Indignation is its celebration of atheistic freedom and attack on American Protestantism or “the beliefs with which youngsters were indoctrinated as a matter of course deep in the heart of America” (Roth 2009, 81). After all, it is Marcus’s refusal to meet the chapel attendance requirement at Winesburg that results in his expulsion and conscription. This probing of Christian dominance can also be traced back to Kim’s The Martyred. The appeal of this earlier, Korean American novel to Roth – whose endorsement is included on the back of the 2011 Penguin reissue of the text – may well concern Kim’s sustained interrogation of the Korean Church and the links that he traces between war, propaganda, and institutionalized belief systems. Kim’s interest in theodicy also anticipates the ideas examined in Roth’s later novel Nemesis (2010). Through his non-believer protagonist, Captain Lee, Kim Others and defamiliarizes Christianity, particularly through the device of distancing possessive pronouns and the use of the lower case for “God”: for example, “your god” and “their god” (Kim 2011, 61, 140). In Indignation, Roth achieves a similar effect when Marcus rants furiously about “their chapel …their Virgin Mary …some stupid god …ass-kissing hymns …putrefied primitive superstition! …The disgrace of religion, the immaturity and ignorance and shame of it all! Lunatic piety about nothing” (Roth 2009, 112, 193, 230). Anticipating Indignation, The Martyred argues, both vehemently and at times angrily, that the Christian faith should never be a given and that its doctrines must remain open to interpretation and contestation. And yet – despite the complexity of the novel’s differing secular

154

R. MAXEY

and theological positions – theism remains a crucial notion in The Martyred. Kim’s characters are also much more embedded in, and trapped by, the conflict than the characters in Indignation, even though Marcus is ultimately imprisoned by the Korean War and his own body dying in battle. Although it would be reductive to see Marcus purely in terms of Rothian self-portraiture, there are obvious autobiographical parallels with the author’s own life through Marcus’s generation, class, ethnoreligious background, fearsome intelligence, atheistic beliefs, and move from Newark to a college in the Christian American heartland (compare McCrum 2008). I would argue that Roth’s knowledge of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps classes – compulsory for male undergraduates in the early 1950s – is experiential and that he bases Marcus’s fear of the draft and likely death in combat on his own lived understanding. After all, these moments of terror feel as real and closely observed as his dissection of the prudish sexual mores and tyrannically enforced culture of Protestant religious observance that governed US college life in the midtwentieth century. That Roth did not see active service in the Korean War, however, makes Indignation something of a thought experiment: a “what-if?” scenario, albeit according to a less intricately developed framework than his earlier, counter-historical novel The Plot Against America (2004). Where the prospect of death in Korea is raised, Roth’s novel recalls the testimonial urgency of The Martyred and Choi’s The Foreign Student . It also adumbrates Lee’s The Surrendered through its use of a graphic, gritty language. Images of butchery and animal slaughter from Marcus’s earlier life provide metonymic parallels with the Korean War through linked, extended, corporeal metaphors of blood, death, and humane versus inhumane killing, suggesting that “the world is a slaughterhouse” (Wolcott 2008). Thus, when Marcus considers the fatal involvement of his older cousins in World War II, he segues into the best strategy for avoiding death in Korea by visualizing the tools of his father’s trade as a butcher: “I envisioned my father’s knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be” (Roth 2009, 35). Blood becomes a triangulated, masculinist image: the blood/bloodlines/consanguinity of the Messners, a family of butchers; the hematic flow produced by animal slaughter; and the spilling of human blood in war. Returning to Roth’s critique of American Protestantism, the author also effects an intriguing slippage between

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

155

organized religion, often used historically to justify conflict; butchery; and warfare when Marcus tells himself to “treat their chapel as part of the job you have to do to get through this place as valedictorian – treat it the way you treat eviscerating chickens” (112). Some way into Indignation, the reader is informed that Marcus is telling his story from a morphine-induced state, close to physical death, convinced that he has already died. Linking back to the idea of a thought experiment, Roth makes striking use of this relatively unusual and highly unreliable narrative voice, rendered still more impossible through the historically retrospective vision it contains.4 Criticized in an interview over the ambiguity of Marcus’s voice as not quite alive/not quite dead, Roth defended his narrator by arguing that “in the morphine sleep he doesn’t know where he is, so he imagines he’s dead… If it’s ambiguous, that’s OK” (McCrum 2008). The metafictional device of a dead (or nearly dead) narrator is not of course limited to Roth (Power 2007). Nor is the employment of an atypical narrative voice to explore challenging and provocative ideas. But experimental narration in a historical novel of this kind, which is already questioning war, religion, and the prevailing social and political ideologies of the 1950s, adds an extra layer of subversion, existential inquiry, and epistemological critique (compare Royal 2009, 132). Such a technique – similar to Lee’s multiple temporal frameworks in The Surrendered or Morrison’s mysterious “you” narratee in Home – is a very deliberate authorial choice in that it requires a greater degree of active readerly engagement with the historical material Roth is recovering and exploring. Why does Roth kill Marcus and highlight just one year of his life? This may relate to the author’s fascination with how history affects individual lives. As he put it, “people prepare for life in a certain way and have certain expectations of the difficulties that come with those lives, then they get blindsided by the present moment; history comes in at them in ways for which there is no preparation” (quoted in Alvarez 2004). The Korean War resulted in more than four million casualties (Cumings 2010, 35), yet – occurring between two much larger conflicts – it is still too easily overlooked outside North and South Korea. Indignation is Roth’s bid to address this neglect by giving literary expression to a key historical event of his youth: “our midcentury war” (Roth 2009, 227), which killed too many American men of his generation, a number estimated at 36,940 (Cumings 2010, 35) in a classed system of conscription where

156

R. MAXEY

“the draft …gobbl[ed] up eighteen-and-a-half-, nineteen-, and twentyyear-olds without college deferments” (Roth 2009, 207). Roth’s notion of the war as a voracious machine consuming young American men without money or privilege anticipates The Surrendered, where Hector Brennan, a young Irish American man from a blue-collar background, becomes the main representative of the US army in Korea.5 In Indignation, Roth’s focus on Marcus’s first real period away from home highlights his youth all the more. His fervent refusal to compromise can be traced to his immaturity but his anti-authoritarian, nonconformist principles become catastrophic in a time of war. Roth presents death as an inevitability in a century of warfare and a society that will not tolerate individualism and difference: as we have seen, Marcus’s fate was already foreshadowed in the kosher butcher’s shop. The fact that the protagonist is not yet 20 when he dies makes this loss of life even more shocking. And that sense of shock is heightened by the reader’s exposure to Marcus’s most intimate thoughts in the intense, stream-ofconsciousness, morphine-induced, analeptic monologue, “Under Morphine” – or “Roth’s near-suffocating reliance on Marcus’s point of view” (Gooblar 2017, 61) – which comprises most of the novel. The intensity of this narrative structure arises from the sense of inescapability, both formally and thematically, that it produces through an absence of chapters in one long segment spanning more than 200 pages. We are forced to engage with Marcus’s story in all its gory detail. Here is a brilliant man on the cusp of adulthood with so much left to experience. Through the novel’s makeshift epitaph – “that was it for the butcher’s son, dead three months short of his twentieth birthday – Marcus Messner, 1932–1952” (Roth 2009, 231) – the protagonist becomes a means to memorialize the many young casualties of US conflicts and particularly those Jewish American men cut off in their prime in a modern nation repeatedly at war: hence Roth’s allusions to the Messner cousins as young victims of World War II. In this regard, Indignation serves as a war memorial and mnemonic site that secures a historical place for Jewish American overseas service in the World Wars as well as Korea. As he does throughout his œuvre, Roth crucially expands US cultural memory to include Jewish experience. Where the action actually shifts to Korea, however, Roth is notably brief (compare Cumings 2010, 68–69). Apparently unsqueamish about the grim realities of war, he records the gruesome injuries that result over just two pages, thus containing them within Park’s “narrative boundaries”

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

157

(2015, 457). Recalling the novel’s extended metaphors of blood and butchery, an “anonymous heterodiegetic narrator” (Royal 2009, 133), detached and collective, relates the specificities of Marcus’s death from “bayonet wounds that had all but severed one leg from his torso and hacked his intestines and genitals to bits …shortly after dawn on March 31, 1952” (Roth 2009, 225–26). Roth eschews circumlocution in this unflinching image where Marcus, the reluctant butcher, becomes an animal for slaughter as though in vengeance for the human killing of nonhuman animals (compare Royal 2009, 133). Its overtones of castration (Duban 2012, 154) suggest the destruction of manhood inflicted by this war. Those overtones can also be linked in a circular fashion to Marcus’s sexual awakening earlier in the novel: the fellatio offered by Olivia as they sit outside the town cemetery, a portent of death, in the car loaned to Marcus by his joyless roommate, Elwyn. His prized 1940 LaSalle Touring Sedan, on a campus where “only a few seniors had families who could provide for a car or its upkeep” (Roth 2009, 48), brings together eros and thanatos when Elwyn is later killed in this very car, following a collision with a train and foreshadowing Marcus’s own premature demise. The connection between this sex act and Marcus’s later mutilation suggests that he is somehow being punished for his own somber, repressive response to Olivia’s free-spirited sexual behavior and that his own earlier, imagined connection between sexual expression (masturbation), college expulsion, and conscription as a “rifleman in Korea” (47) is truer than he could ever have guessed.

The Surrendered: Foregrounding Korean Suffering The Surrendered is the most ambitious of Lee’s novels in terms of its historical and geographical scope. As with such earlier works as Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999), he is unafraid to tackle challenging material: namely, torture, murder, and rape in war-torn Korea and 1930s China. But although Lee uses Hector, a white American G.I., to render the grim horrors of combat in Korea, a great deal of the narrative takes place at a white American-run orphanage in its immediate wake. Crucially, “the intervening period …the three years of the Korean War …remains a curious blank” (Park 2016, 117). Like Roth, Lee uses the conflict as a starting point to explore wider issues: the rules of war, the problem of civilian casualties, and a society devastated by civil war. The

158

R. MAXEY

Surrendered is strongly exophoric, relying upon the reader’s knowledge of actual events outside the frame of the narrative. Thus Lee does not discuss the trajectory of the Korean War or the Japanese occupation of Manchuria or indeed Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1905 to 1945 (compare Park 2016, 130). At the same time, he does reveal Japanese atrocities, following the invasion of Manchuria, through the fate of Sylvie Binet and her parents. Beyond the Korean War, Lee alludes to the Trojan War through the naming of Hector, who hails from Ilion, New York, and possesses a supernatural ability to withstand the very real physical effects inflicted upon others in the novel by conflict, violence, fire, and illness. Dorian Gray-like, he remains beautiful no matter how degraded he feels inside. Lee also returns repeatedly to the Battle of Solferino in northern Italy in 1859 which led to the founding of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and later to the Geneva Conventions as part of International Humanitarian Law. Solferino is the endpoint of the novel’s present-day journey with Henri Dunant – the Swiss businessman whose work at Solferino inaugurated the Red Cross – cited both indirectly and explicitly. The implied presence of Homer’s Iliad suggests the epic ambitions of Lee’s novel, while the Red Cross theme forces one to consider how much the rules of war have really changed following the establishment of the Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross also represents more in The Surrendered, becoming a beacon of hope through a copy of Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino (1862), passed between characters as a treasured heirloom and talisman, and through the related pilgrimages to Solferino, first by Sylvie and her parents in 1934 and then by Hector and June Han in 1986. Through Solferino as both physical destination and ethical inspiration for Dunant’s historical account, the Red Cross thus becomes another framing device. Via the material object of Dunant’s memoir, Lee argues for the continuing importance of books themselves. As an intertext for Lee, A Memory of Solferino is another memorialization of war in literary form whose “harrowing, difficult content” (Lee 2010, 250) could describe that of The Surrendered. It is also a physical artifact symbolizing love, handed down from her parents to Sylvie and then to June, a teenage girl at this point and now obsessed with Sylvie. The book later brings “a strange kind of intimacy” (250) between June and her son, Nicholas, in New York. As a sense-making narrativization of the horrors of conflict, A Memory of

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

159

Solferino offers a usable past for Lee’s characters: a means of comprehending the wars they have lived through. But the book does not enjoy a straightforward reception or fate in The Surrendered. Initially, for Hector, the descriptions [of the Battle of Solferino] matched any number of his memories from the [Korean] war, and as much as they pained him – an icy clawing at his lungs, puncturing his breath – the feeling soon gave way to a numbing pause. It was a pause not of reflection or reckoning but of a pure self-erasure in which he felt that he had died, or, better, had never existed; that as such he had not had an effect on anything or anyone, going either forward or back… (141)

Later, however, Hector angrily criticizes the book in an argument with Sylvie where he accuses her of abandonment, dismissing Dunant’s account as “worthless …a lie. It’s changed nothing and never will” (416), while June regards it as a pathetic consolation prize – “the thin volume …covered in blue cloth, the one of the long-ago battle in the long-ago war” (435) – when she realizes that Sylvie and her husband, the Reverend Ames Tanner, will not be adopting her when they return to the United States. A Memory of Solferino thus becomes a portent of bad luck: June steals it from Sylvie before replacing it; Sylvie dies after giving it to June; the volume just about survives the fire that kills Sylvie; and Nicholas, having stolen it from his mother, also meets a premature death; the book then falls into the hands of a Mr. Ripley-esque arriviste posing as Nicholas in Italy, who ignorantly disdains it as “some stupid book about an old battle up north, in Lombardy” (372) before Hector forces him to return the treasured book to a dying June, for whom “the book represents another example of her characteristic tendency to mediate human intimacy through a relationship to objects” (Hsu 2013, 31). By presenting Dunant’s memoir in this way, Lee suggests the later failure of the Geneva Conventions, exposing the absence of any ethical rules of war through the horrific “Japanese …treatment of noncombatants” (Lee 2010, 189). Yet the book is also a symbol of hope and redemption, lovingly dedicated to June by Sylvie and then by June to Nicholas. In the love triangle between June, Sylvie, and Hector, “the circulating copy …is, as an object of desire, a metonym for Sylvie” (Park 2016, 128). Just as Roth does, so Lee interrogates Christianity as an institution in The Surrendered. He does this through his evocation of white American

160

R. MAXEY

missionaries in China and then Korea. Recalling the critique of Protestantism in Indignation and The Martyred, Lee suggests that such missions are doomed: the Tanners are both killed in Korea and as in The Martyred, Korean churches are destroyed; the burning-down of the makeshift chapel that Hector has constructed in Korea suggests a purely pyrrhic success on his part and that Western attempts to rebuild Korea after 1953 are flawed and even futile. The questioning of Protestant Christianity in Korea thus becomes part of Lee’s wider anti-imperialist critique in the novel. And although white American characters are killed, Korean suffering and death are particularly emphasized with June’s slaughtered family serving as a synecdoche for the Korean lives destroyed by the war. Each child at the orphanage embodies similar familial loss. It is Koreans who must rebuild their bleak, unforgiving, shattered country, “their own wrecked house” (Lee 2010, 121), and who face the loss of so many of their fellow countrymen and women. In his consideration of death, then, Lee offers a particular kind of tribute. He honors the Korean victims of the civil war, rather than the American or European ones traditionally privileged in Western accounts of foreign wars (compare Maxey 2019, 114n76). That American accounts of the Korean War, including fictional ones, erase multiple Korean deaths (see Hong 2015, 602) – and insistently return to US soil – is exemplified by Roth’s focus in Indignation and also by Morrison who mentioned only non-Korean casualties when discussing Home and its bid to capture “a horrible war you didn’t call a war where 58,000 people died” (quoted in Brockes 2012). Her figure forms a stark contrast with the estimated four million casualties overall (Cumings 2010, 35). As Christine Hong puts it, “few Americans know the scope and scale of the ruin that Korea experienced” (2012, 100). In The Surrendered, Lee contests such accounts of the Korean War when, for example, Hector reflects on the “them” versus “us” body count resulting from “a war both too cold and too hot that managed to erase fifty thousand of his kind and over a million of theirs” (Lee 2010, 99). This key point applies to other US military campaigns in Asia – the Vietnam War, for example – and forms an important part of Lee’s wider response to colonization in Asia: Japan vis-à-vis China and Korea, and US paternalism through the image of white American adoptions of Korean children, thousands of whom were adopted by US families between the end of the Korean War and the Seoul Olympics in 1988 (Kim 1997, 180).

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

161

Depicted as orphans in Lee’s novel – thus recalling Kim Sin Gyu, the boy in Potok’s I am the Clay, and reflecting a long-standing Western cultural fascination with such parentless figures (Blakemore 2014) – these young Koreans are crucial to the story Lee wants to tell. By writing Korea into America through the theme of adoption, the United States becomes a character in the novel’s Korean sections as, for instance, when we learn that “five children [from the orphanage] – all young ones, between the ages of three and five – had been sent to America a few weeks earlier to be placed with families in Washington and Oregon” (Lee 2010, 156). Lee implicitly critiques this transcultural, transracial adoption as a carefully choreographed, commodified process of white rescue, where children at the orphanage are photographed for prospective adopters so as to appear “lively and happy but in the grip of privation…” (157; compare Nelson 2006, 91). Expected to engage in this tightly controlled exchange by “look[ing] happy and friendly for her file” (Lee 2010, 158), June refuses, although such lack of cooperation comes from her desire for a different kind of adoption: by Sylvie Tanner rather than an unknown American family. Lee examines international adoption from the perspective of vulnerable and powerless children of color awaiting a different life rather than from the point of view of their white, privileged, adoptive parents (compare Nelson 2006, 102–3; Hübinette 2006, 141). When a white American couple does appear at the orphanage – the homely Mr. and Mrs. Stolz – racialized rescue fantasies and US exceptionalism certainly play out as they adopt six Korean orphans and promise “a whole new joyous life” at their farm in Oregon (Lee 2010, 389). Their well-meaning, innocent parochialism, betrayed by their belief that trauma can be managed through transcultural adoption, is embodied by the image of the couple as “two smiling folk dolls, their cheeks round and pink” (387). Lee paints them as children, too, in a sense. At the same time, their eagerness to adopt feels moving rather than imperialistic when they show humility in the face of Korean suffering, admitting to June that they “can’t imagine what you’ve gone through already. What you’ve had to live through and see” (389). And although Lee questions this circuit of international, transracial adoption, he stops short of examining any such adoptions in practice. Thus June is never adopted, the Tanners refuse to adopt, many of the children in the orphanage seem destined to remain there, and the actual adoptions made by Mr. and Mrs. Stolz take place offstage. The reader never learns how

162

R. MAXEY

they unfold. As Josephine Park makes clear, moreover, Lee also rejects the popular stereotype of Korean orphans as passive victims (2016, 109– 12). The interconnection between Korea and the United States through a Christian rescue mission (compare Kim 2006) reflects the status of Lee’s novel as transnational American fiction. Thus The Surrendered engages significantly with an ancestral homeland in Asia and moves between Korea, China, the United States, and Italy, looking at America from the outside. By ending the present-day narrative in Italy in 1986 and then closing with a return to the pivotal early war scene in Korea in 1950 that opened the novel, Lee rejects US exceptionalism. His return to Korea may be read, moreover, as a response to loss. As an American-born writer, he tries to recover and imaginatively reconstruct early 1950s Korea in The Surrendered, but it is a “lost” land to him in multiple ways: historically, ancestrally, and emotionally (compare Hall 1990, 226). This irrecoverable past is symbolized by the orphanage since it cannot represent traditional Korean culture, but rather a temporary, liminal, intermediate space, “a world unto itself” (Lee 2010, 326), much like Lee’s syncretic novel. This may also explain why – despite honoring June and the Korean civilians devastated by the conflict – Lee appears more comfortable with white, rather than Korean, characters at the orphanage. The older Korean women who work there remain unnamed, faceless “aunties” and, with the exception of June, it is Sylvie, Ames Tanner, and Hector who take center stage, thus suggesting distinct limits to Lee’s anti-imperialist position. The Surrendered examines corporeality in relentless, obsessive fashion, recalling Indignation, I am the Clay, and The Foreign Student. Such other novels show that US writers chronicling this conflict feel a duty to be as candid and unflinching as possible. The Surrendered focuses with impressive honesty on food and hunger; blood; vomit; the loss of limbs and other body parts through accidents, torture and amputation; drug and alcohol addiction; sexual need; and pain and illness, which is terminal stomach cancer in June’s case. Palliative medicine can only keep her physical agony temporarily at bay. In a sense, these details remind us of the common humanity of all of Lee’s characters, whatever their ethnoracial and cultural background. The author’s graphic descriptions of what the body actually does, particularly “the sensuousness of ill bodies” (Lee 2013, ix) – and the notion that there should be no embargo on which bodily fluids are discussed – link Lee to Roth, whose Swiftian saeva indignatio shocks the reader into questioning social mores through a fearless exposé of the human body.

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

163

For Lee, the details of bodily behavior are principally used to explore war and its traumatic aftermath, with the body and its needs becoming an index of human nature. Thus Sylvie’s opium addiction – while clearly a response to the impact of her parents’ brutal murder at the hands of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in 1934 – also betrays an inability to resist her own physical impulses. That Lee makes Sylvie an opium addict6 suggests imperialism – the British weaponizing of the drug as an instrument of colonial control in nineteenth-century China – and Sylvie as a victim of Western imperialism, although it is an American narcotic, too, since she first consumes it in Seattle. The choice of opium also situates The Surrendered in a nineteenth-century European literary lineage, recalling A Memory of Solferino and, more specifically, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Lee writes about Sylvie’s opium habit in a mostly understated manner but her drug-taking is still transmuted into the memorable, aesthetically pleasing image of “a perfect line …tattooing the nook” of her heel, the “pin-dot of red” (Lee 2010, 144) almost a kind of pointillist art. This image is forbidden and sensual, part of Hector’s desire for a beautiful married woman. But the addiction destroys Sylvie’s physical health, leading to her mental and moral demise as much as the fire that finally destroys her in body. And it presages June’s later reliance on “drugs to alleviate her physical pain” (Amfreville 2013, 6). After all, The Surrendered is also a powerful cancer narrative that portrays in unsparing detail “the excruciatingly banal surrenders and palliatives of a cancer death” (Boddy 2010). The disease is personified as a punitive alter ego and likened to a kind of malign migration and settlement with the mind’s battle against the body another kind of war through “the besiegement of [June’s]…insides” (Lee 2010, 462; compare Page 2017, 75). June fights harder against her physical self than either Hector or Sylvie, her powers of endurance part of Lee’s wider homage to Korean civilians who survived and to a specifically Korean suffering. Lee’s mysterious title reflects ideas of physical frailty – Sylvie succumbing to opium addiction and sexual need, Hector to self-pity, June to her inevitable death – and also namelessness, timelessness, and anonymity, thus suggesting the universality and enormity of conflict. It implies, too, that – like Roth – Lee owes an intertextual debt to Kim’s The Martyred, since his title contains striking echoes of this earlier novel and Korean War urtext. Unlike Indignation, however, Lee mostly uses a third-person narrative voice, both omniscient and closed, taking The Surrendered back into the territory of nineteenth-century European fiction, especially epic

164

R. MAXEY

novels telling panoramic stories of many lives. Like The Foreign Student and Indignation, Lee’s narrative is recursive – it begins and ends with the same scene – and similarly suggests the inescapability of the past, drawing on analepsis throughout. Lee also writes in a kind of historic present where past events unfold toward an anticipated conclusion (compare Currie 2006, 29): a form of past tense prolepsis or looking ahead in the past, for instance, through references to the fire which eventually kills the Tanners. Going further and further back in time provides relief from some of the more horrific scenes but also means that Lee’s reader can never get too comfortable in any one moment. This is fitting given his troubling subject matter. Such a technique also relates to the novel’s interest in trauma in that “a traumatic event repeats itself in the form of flashes or unconnected images that fail to form a cohesive narrative sequence” (Amfreville 2013, 9). The novel thus rejects too neat or linear a temporal frame.

Conclusion: Forging a Usable Past Contra Josephine Park, I would argue that the Korean War of 1950– 1953 is as infinitely representable as any conflict – hence the wealth of literary responses to it. At the same time, Roth and Lee appear reluctant to depict the combat itself, instead focusing respectively on events leading up to conscription and on the aftermath of this international conflict, with Lee drawn to Korean civilian experience to a greater extent than that of US soldiers, thus challenging the emphasis of “many classic [US] ‘war novels’” (Rowe 2011, 813). Roth’s taboo-free, intensely physical, antinomian novel emphasizes our common humanity and the connection between human and non-human animals. In Indignation, the Korean War principally acts as an entry point into 1950s America and a vehicle to test ideas of individual and collective identity as Roth exposes the ugliness and hypocrisy of the era. Marcus may oppose some dominant American norms, yet (or because of this?) he still represents the United States overseas in its first major Cold War conflict. But Roth’s use of prolepsis – where “the future is predetermined, literally already written, and lying in wait” (Currie 2006, 49) – creates a sense of distance and detachment, and when the horror of Marcus’s death in Korea is directly addressed, the author can only bear to confront it – and the grief inflicted upon Mr. and Mrs. Messner – fleetingly. He refuses to join Marcus on the alien battlefield for long, preferring the comfort of a known familial universe (Jewish) and college world (Christian, Anglo). As Steven Belletto

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

165

argues of Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959), “the Korean War is everywhere and nowhere” (2015, 60). At the same time, both writers use the war to excavate hidden history and forge a usable past with Lee and Roth honoring and commemorating multiple things. Lee produces an epic novel in order to do justice to this “forgotten” war, paying tribute to the toughness of postwar survivors, especially those orphans struggling for a future; the Korean losses in this conflict; and through the materiality of A Memory of Solferino as physical object, the enduring power of books and the urgent moral need to follow the rules of war. This is a Korean War novel about other conflicts (compare Page 2017, 72) where the author deliberately goes further and further back – to Japanese atrocities in Manchuria and the battlefields of nineteenth-century Europe – in a richly palimpsestic, anti-imperialist text which performs a kind of ethical witnessing to the gruesome horrors of war (Amfreville 2013, 11). As Daniel Y. Kim and Viet Thanh Nguyen argue, “the novel gives the lie to the humanitarian justification that has been used by the United States to intervene in Korea and elsewhere – illustrating how such altruism is nearly always Janus faced …saving orphans but also creating them” (2015, 63–64). By contrast, Roth venerates the heroism of a lost generation of young Jewish Americans who died overseas in World War II and Korea, as well as the heroic labors of his working-class forebears. As a Jewish American mnemonic site – to kosher butchery as well as military service – Roth puts his own spin on the well-recognized territory of 1950s America and its stifling social conformity. Both writers make their own original creative contribution to an important body of fiction that serves to remind readers of a deeply disturbing legacy arising from the events of 1950– 1953: decades of continuous US warfare overseas or “the narrative logic of permanent war” (Darda 2015, 82). If the conflict in Korea is not over – and “the United States still stations nearly thirty thousand troops in South Korea” (Hong 2012, 100) – then American writers must continue to tackle this material in their novels.

Notes 1. By “historical event,” I allude to the periodization of the Korean War as taking place from 1950 to 1953; as Christine Hong points out, however, the ongoing conflict between North and South Korea actually “resists neat

166

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

R. MAXEY

temporal demarcation and recognition” (2015, 601), which may explain why writers encounter difficulties in representing it. Lee’s father lost two siblings – a sister and younger brother – during the Korean War, his brother perishing under similar circumstances to June Han’s in The Surrendered (Fassler 2011). Morrison’s protagonist Frank Money, an African American soldier in a newly desegregated US army, fights an apparently homogeneous, dehumanized Asian enemy, variously referred to as “Mongolians,” “gooks,” and “Chinks” (Morrison 2016, 93, 98). Thus Marcus, speaking close to death in the early 1950s, reflects on “the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little Midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two” (Roth 2009, 52; emphasis added). He may be geographically removed by this stage, but he cannot occupy the historical distance to know that 1950s mores would be superseded by 1960s liberalism. That knowledge is more convincingly provided by the omniscient third-person narrator of Roth’s playful, metafictional, invented “Historical Note” that concludes Indignation. On Roth’s difficulties in finding “an appropriate voice” for Marcus, see Cowley (2008) and compare Charles (2008) and Duban (2012, 146). As Aldama puts it, “that the near-dead Marcus narrates reminds us that an author can do in fiction what is ontologically impossible in the real world” (2011, 215n2). Again compare Home where it is poor black men like Frank and his two closest friends, Mike and Stuff, who become US casualties of the war in Korea; and see also Aldama (2011, 208). Other critics have identified the drug as morphine or heroin (see, for instance, Amfreville 2013, 3; Hsu 2013, 29; Page 2017, 83); since Lee speaks specifically of “tincture of opium” (2010, 215), I refer to it accordingly.

Bibliography Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2011. “Putting a Finger on That Hollow Emptiness in Roth’s Indignation.” Philip Roth Studies 7 (2): 205–17. Alvarez, Al. 2004. “The Long Road Home.” Guardian, September 11, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/11/fiction.philiproth. Amfreville, Marc. 2013. “The Burning Book.” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 2 (1–2): 1–13. Belletto, Steven. 2015. “The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel.” American Literature 87 (1): 51–77.

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

167

Blakemore, Erin. 2014. “Our Obsession with Orphans: A Short History from Jane Eyre to Annie.” JSTOR Daily, December 17, 2014. https://daily.jstor. org/our-obsession-with-orphans. Boddy, Kasia. 2010. “The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee: Review.” Daily Telegraph, May 10, 2010. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ bookreviews/7686285/The-Surrendered-by-Chang-rae-Lee-review.html. Brockes, Emma. 2012. “Toni Morrison: ‘I Want to Feel What I Feel’.” Guardian, April 13, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/ apr/13/toni-morrison-home-son-love. Charles, Ron. 2008. “Dead Right.” Washington Post, September 14, 2008. Weblink no longer available. Cheuse, Alan. 2008. “Philip Roth’s ‘Indignation’ on Familiar Turf.” San Francisco Chronicle, September 21, 2008. https://www.sfgate.com/books/ article/Philip-Roth-s-Indignation-on-familiar-turf-3193797.php. Choi, Susan. 2011. “Foreword.” In The Martyred by Richard E. Kim, xiii–xvi. New York: Penguin. Churchwell, Sarah. 2010. “The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee.” Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/19/the-surrenderedchang-rae-lee. Cowley, Jason. 2008. “Outrage from Beyond the Grave.” Observer, September 14, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/14/fiction. Cumings, Bruce. 2010. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library. Currie, Mark. 2006. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Darda, Joseph. 2015. “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War.” American Literature 87 (1): 79–105. Duban, James. 2012. “‘That Butcher, Imagination’: Arthur Koestler and the Bisociated Narration of Philip Roth’s Indignation.” Philip Roth Studies 8 (2): 145–160. Fassler, Joe. 2011. “Why Novel-Writing Is Like Spelunking: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee.” The Atlantic, March 1, 2011. https://www.theatlantic. com/entertainment/archive/2011/03/why-novel-writing-is-like-spelunkingan-interview-with-chang-rae-lee/71843/. Gates, David. 2008. “The Student of Desire.” New York Times, September 19, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/Gates-t. html. Gooblar, David. 2017. “‘There Is Some Shit I Will Not Eat’: Indignation in Indignation and Its Film Adaptation.” Philip Roth Studies 13 (2): 51–62. Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–37. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

168

R. MAXEY

Hanks, Robert. 2008. “Ruffian on the Stair.” New Statesman, September 18, 2008. https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/09/roth-marcusindignation-father. Hong, Christine. 2012. “Pyongyang Lost: Counterintelligence and Other Fictions of the Forgotten War.” In American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment, edited by Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam, 97–115. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Hong, Christine. 2015. “The Unending Korean War.” Positions: Asia Critique 23 (4): 597–617. Hsu, Stephanie. 2013. “The Ontology of Disability in Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 7 (1): 19–35. Hübinette, Tobias. 2006. “From Orphan Trains to Babylifts: Colonial Trafficking, Empire Building, and Social Engineering.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, 139–290. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Kakutani, Michiko. 2008. “A Dead Man Tells of His Too Short Life.” New York Times, September 16, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/ books/17kakutani.html. Kakutani, Michiko. 2010. “Lives Scarred by Horrors of Korean War.” New York Times, March 9, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/books/ 09book.html. Kelly, Stuart. 2008. “Entitled to a Sense of Indignation.” Scotsman, September 21, 2008. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-reviewentitled-to-a-sense-of-indignation-1-1437572. Kim, Daniel Y., and Viet Thanh Nguyen. 2015. “The Literature of the Korean War and Vietnam War.” In The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim, 59–72. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Elaine H. 1997. “Korean American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 156–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Jae Ran. 2006. “Scattered Seeds: The Christian Influence on Korean Adoption.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, 151–62. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Kim, Richard E. 2011. The Martyred. New York: Penguin. Lee, Chang-rae. 2010. The Surrendered. London: Abacus. Lee, James Kyung-Jin. 2013. “Illness, Disability, and the Beautiful Life.” Amerasia Journal 39 (1): ix–xvii. Maxey, Ruth. 2019. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

9

CREATING A USABLE PAST: WRITING THE KOREAN WAR …

169

McCrum, Robert. 2008. “The Story of My Lives.” Guardian, September 21, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/21/philiproth. fiction. Morrison, Toni. 2016. Home. London: Vintage. Nelson, Kim Park. 2006. “Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, 49–56. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Page, Amanda M. 2017. Understanding Chang-rae Lee. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Park, Josephine. 2015. “The Forgotten War in Korea.” In The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, edited by Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song, 454–68. New York: Cambridge University Press. Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. 2016. Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Power, Chris. 2007. “Stories Told from Beyond the Grave Can Kill a Novel.” Guardian, July 12, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/ 2007/jul/12/storiestoldfrombeyondtheg. Rafferty, Terrence. 2010. “The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee.” New York Times, March 14, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/ Rafferty-t.html. Rifkind, Donna. 2010. “Book review: ‘The Surrendered’ by Chang-rae Lee.” Washington Post, March 9, 2010. Weblink no longer available. Robson, Leo. 2010. “The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee.” Observer, May 23, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/23/chang-raelee-the-surrendered. Roth, Philip. 2004. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip. 2009. Indignation. London: Vintage. Rowe, John Carlos. 2011. “US novels and US wars.” In The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss, 813–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royal, Derek Parker. 2009. “What to Make of Roth’s Indignation; Or, Serious in the Fifties.” Philip Roth Studies 5 (1): 129–37. Tayler, Christopher. 2008. “The Relentless Unforeseen.” Guardian, September 20, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/philiproth. fiction. Wolcott, James. 2008. “The Fatal Handjob.” New Republic, October 22, 2008. https://newrepublic.com/article/61249/the-fatal-handjob. Yoo, Jae Eun. 2018. “Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’ After 9/11: Indignation and Home.” Orbis Litterarum 73 (3): 213–24.

CHAPTER 10

Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer Debra Shostak

The US war in Vietnam has become the stuff of legend insofar as it defines a moment of national rupture. The tragedies and mishaps of US involvement in the war colored the ideologies and political actions in the nation thereafter and divided American memory into consciousness, however nostalgic and illusory, of a distinct before Vietnam and after. It is therefore no surprise when fictional representations of the war illuminate a conceptual shift regarding “America” itself as an idea and national practice. In particular, American fictions about Vietnam are ripe to expose how the masculinist ideology supporting the war – such as confidence in the supremacy of American power and a paternalistic global politics – was

Portions of this chapter appear in my book, Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel (2020) and are reproduced here by permission of Bloomsbury Academic. I wish also to thank Ruth Maxey for her attentive editing and superb suggestions for revision. D. Shostak (B) The College of Wooster, Emerita, Wooster, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_10

171

172

D. SHOSTAK

at least for some decades undermined by the American failure to “win” this war. Some postwar novels specifically figure the deflation of patriarchal ideology, a condition that might be called post-patriarchal, in relation to post-traumatic stories of absent fathers. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), for example, tells of a daughter fruitlessly seeking the story of her father, killed in Vietnam, whom she never met. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994) details the post-traumatic violence and memory of a war veteran whose pathology is rooted in his father’s absences. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathizer (2015), however, moves beyond the narrowly North American figuration of memory and identity to take in alternative perspectives on the post-patriarchal condition. Among other critiques, the novel uncovers a powerful ideological subtext regarding how the system of masculine authority in the United States depends on the invisible power of whiteness. Nguyen’s novel accomplishes this aim by repudiating the familial and cultural authority of a white Western father of a racially hybridized son, as the “bastard” son seeks to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American point of view, turning the father’s tools against him. In the discourse of the United States, the name “Vietnam” is a fraught, overdetermined signifier denoting a real place erased into myth in the memory of its Western interlopers. It not only marks a time of ideological contradiction and change within American cultural consciousness but also conjures a war that Americans have seen as their trauma, often making them oblivious to the ethics of their presence in Southeast Asia or the suffering and objectification of the Vietnamese as individuals and a people. “Vietnam” has typically been, in the American mind, a concept rather than simply the name of a nation or geographical entity – the site and figure of a national trauma that disrupts history.1 By situating his narrative within the story of the Vietnam War, framed by the effective absence of a positive paternal figure, Nguyen raises a fundamental question about the inscription of history within a patriarchal system of codes for its construction. Like it or not, the notional authority of the father remains embedded in the construction of history, shaping the present and future through acts of patriarchal fiat, creation, and ordering, and thus controlling ongoing narratives of the past. To provide some context, it is worth noting how such valuation of the father’s presence in fiction has altered significantly in the last few decades. In a

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

173

Lacanian reading tracing back to the Odyssey, Robert Con Davis asserts that “the fact of paternal absence” is “an originary feature of every narrative” (1981, 8; emphasis in original). Davis notes that, in his function as the Name-of-the-Father, the father institutes the law that binds desire and narrative (11, 13), so that the father’s desired return not only restores order but also brings narrative to a close. Just two decades later, however, Ellen G. Friedman (2002), celebrating emergent female power, constructs the concept of the “post-patriarchal” to trace the shift, especially among women writers, toward depicting fathers who move from a position of inaccessibility and incorporeality – traits that support patriarchal authority – toward a normalizing embodiment that strips them of their mystifying power. Their absences “hardly register” (697) and the children of a disempowered father “move on without him – having registered only an ordinary, rather than an unrecoupable, loss” (697). The consequences of such a shift for the telling of historical stories are substantial. When fiction takes on a contested, irrecoverable history, such as that of the Vietnam War, it illuminates how, without a paternal authority grounding the past, fixing it within a (master) narrative, a quasi-historical discourse may tend toward suspension and irresolution.2 Put differently, the search for the recovery of history may come down to a search for an absent father. Fathers who remain distant, unknown, unreadable, or dead may represent historiography as a permanently unfinished project. But they may also open up a space for a revisionary history. Because Vietnam and its war designate in the US consciousness a site of American trauma, their representations may be usefully explored in relation to Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “post-memory” as an analogue to the construction of historical narrative. Hirsch developed the concept to explain how family members of Holocaust survivors participate in the unspeakable, traumatic past of those who suffered. Hirsch proposes “postmemory” as a concept “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection [… and] equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination” (Hirsch 1992–1993, 8–9). Post-memory is the process by which children fabricate “memories” of their parents’ traumatized lives, constructed out of the tatters of stories they hear or infer and the mute objects remaining in their parents’ possession. Material objects, such as photographs, and textualized remains, such as letters or diaries, possess a paradoxical presence: They have a history that implies the present tense of

174

D. SHOSTAK

possession, use, and value, as well as the past tense marking a possessor’s absence. Within a post-patriarchal context, offspring assemble the past out of its fragments, crafting post-memories within which they seek either to recover or conceal an absent father’s memory. The phrase “father’s memory” is rightly ambiguous: A son or daughter may desire to remember the father or re-experience the memories the father experienced; or, to the contrary, to expunge not only the memories belonging to the father but also the very memory of the father’s existence. Recognizing the authority of the father over one’s history, a narrative may fail to replace the father’s story – or choose not to do so – finally suspending itself over an absence. In the three novels mentioned above by Mason, O’Brien, and Nguyen, absent fathers are seductively, teasingly, misleadingly presented – or represented – in relation to a range of objects. At times the textualized objects are real, material things, such as the photograph, letters, and diary of her father that Mason’s protagonist finds, or the catalogue of magic tricks that reminds O’Brien’s protagonist of his father; at other times, the “objects” are more abstract, such as allusions to books or music, signifiers of a cultural or mediated discourse that sponsors the father’s authority. Nguyen relies especially on the latter such objects. Insofar as an individual actively “makes” post-memory to recapture the story of a life, the contested process stands for historiographic reconstruction of moments of past traumas. Thus the most important feature of The Sympathizer is the angle from which it assembles the puzzle of postpatriarchal, post-traumatic post-memory, introducing racial and cultural difference into the perspective shaping individual and collective remembering in the United States. In highlighting a range of cultural texts from which its narrator constitutes historical memory, The Sympathizer casts light on an assumption buried within much contemporary US writing: How familial configurations, tropes, and narrative trajectories assume that American whiteness constructs the identities and opportunities of the characters. Nguyen opens his novel in the voice of his first-person narrator: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds […] I am simply able to see any issue from both sides” (Nguyen 2015, 1). The narrator’s act of simultaneous self-identification and disguise establishes principal features of the novel. First is his fundamental unreliability; nameless throughout, he is referred to only as “the Captain,” whose narration is presented as a confession to

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

175

an unnamed Commandant. Second are the figurative patterns – images of doubleness and duplicity and the riddle of sameness versus otherness – altogether, a multilayered set of binaries that construct the subjectivity of the narrator and the split, racially hybridized world he inhabits. His fragmentation and duality are traceable to his origins as an Americaneducated, Eurasian “bastard” – a name many have called him since his childhood (19) – and figuratively embody the contested history of twentieth-century Vietnam. Nguyen’s narrator brings forward the problem of veracious storytelling, specifically of the history of the war in Vietnam and the narrator’s place within it; his task is urgent since he occupies the position of “other” relative to those who have told the story before. Nguyen’s project is to pry the untold Vietnamese story of the war, a history to which the Vietnamese rightfully refer as the American War, out of American fiction and culture of the postwar period. He aims to provide, as he told an interviewer, an “intervention” in the limited “American point of view,” to show “non-Western characters” with “the same kind of flawed subjectivities that are normally reserved in the West for the West,” and to suggest “that the Vietnamese people bear a great deal of responsibility for what happened in Vietnam” (Nguyen 2016, 66). He resituates the story of the war within Vietnam – to fill the absent center created by the Western evacuation of “Vietnam” into an abstraction. He does so by inventing an interstitial protagonist/narrator, the “illegitimate,” “half-breed” (Nguyen 2015, 20) son of a white French Catholic missionary and a Vietnamese woman he raped when she was 13. The father’s absence from his son is wholly volitional, the product of moral blindness and bigotry. The Captain’s mixed origins, narrative and ethnic positions, and national bifurcation – he is a Communist mole working for a South Vietnamese General – allegorize the contested history Nguyen explores, shaped by such oppositions as West versus East, North versus South, personal confession versus national history, dialogic versus monologic storytelling, guilt versus innocence. By presenting the French priest’s failure to recognize the narrator as his son, echoed discursively in the narrator’s refusal to name himself within his narrative, Nguyen figuratively uncovers an ontological and ethical problem at the heart of the historical problem. Recognition acknowledges the authority and agency of the other; failure to recognize the other practices violence upon individuals as well as peoples. “All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered,” the narrator remarks (222; emphasis in original). Without such recognition, an agent of storytelling cannot begin to represent the other as anything but

176

D. SHOSTAK

a narcissistic projection of the storyteller’s fantasies and histories. “The unseen,” he says, “is almost always underlined with the unsaid” (147). Because the problem of representation is for Nguyen at the core of the violence perpetrated against the Vietnamese, in both personal and cultural terms, it is his central concern in constructing the post-memory of The Sympathizer. He manifests this concern generally through the novel’s thick texture of allusion to Western high and popular culture, within which the narrator rewrites history through irony and parody. In particular, he develops a lengthy, narratively disruptive set piece dedicated to the making of a film that refers unmistakably to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), the vivid, controversial, best-known postwar cinematic “representation” of the Vietnam War; he also develops extended, if more subtle, allusions to the work of such writers as Graham Greene and William Faulkner. Nguyen’s fictionalized historiography thus offers a kind of displaced oedipal patricide against the narrator’s father and the paternalistic Western culture for which he stands – as revenge against and reparation for misrepresentation and lack of recognition, and for consigning the Captain irrevocably to illegitimacy, made literal in his role as the child of an unmarried woman. The novel also rebukes the West for its stranglehold on historical explanation by placing the narrator in relation to a range of surrogate father figures who at once dominate and fail him. Nguyen’s project becomes nothing less than repudiation of the Western history that overwrites Vietnamese history, much as the narrator eventually repudiates both the father surrogates and the father who, having raped his mother, is too ethically compromised and self-unaware to recognize his biracial son – and for whom the fact of the son’s being biracial alone would make him a “bastard.” Although Nguyen begins with some measure of melancholic longing within the narrator’s response to his lack of paternal recognition, his project is finally defiant: to rewrite a history that disowns the white, Western father’s narrative. Like the neo-historical fiction about which Elodie Rousselot writes, Nguyen’s novel enters into a critical project on historical representation, engaging in a “simultaneous attempt and refusal to render the past accurately” (2014, 4; emphasis in original). At the risk of essentializing Nguyen’s position as a Vietnamese American writer, however, I suggest that his project departs in important ways from that of neo-historical fiction. As Rousselot describes it, the genre tends toward “exoticizing strategies” (11) that, often crafted of a sham nostalgia, satisfy “our desire for

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

177

a past that is a source of cultural otherness and that is available for consumption,” while at once undermining its own tropes, “by presenting history’s perceived otherness as a deliberate fabrication of the present” (11). This powerful analysis of the genre’s contradictions is nevertheless premised on distance – temporal, geographical, and regarding subject position – specifically, on distance between the writer or reader and the subject matter, as implied by the locution, “our desire for a past.” “Our” identifies the consumer of the story, as distinct from the other who features in it. Nguyen, however, enters into a dialogue with exoticizing stories of the past that bear on his self-representation. He “writes back” to orientalizing American representations of the Vietnamese and the war, from a time nearly within his living memory; he arrived in the United States in 1975 at the age of four with his refugee parents, not long after Saigon fell. Like other ethnic writers before him, he seeks his own past, not that of a hypothetical other. Nguyen’s project is explained more fully by the postmodern mode of historiographic metafiction laid out in the 1980s by Linda Hutcheon. Her premise is that such fiction “suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past [… is] to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (1988, 110), by emphasizing that “its enunciative situation – text, producer, receiver, historical, and social context – reinstalls a kind of (very problematic) communal project” (115). Because “we know the past […] only through its textualized remains” (119), Hutcheon argues, historiographic metafiction incorporates “the textualized past into the text of the present” through parody, overtly confronting the “past of literature [… and] historiography” (118). In accordance with Hutcheon’s description, The Sympathizer’s reflexive form – ironic, selfaware regarding its textualized acts of representation, replete with allusions to Western culture – lies in tension with its textures of verisimilitude, its placement within the here and now (or then) of Vietnamese and Western history. Nguyen heightens his effects by exploiting the tensions between opposing genres: a spy tale, which conceals, and a confession, which discloses,3 foregrounding the discourse throughout. The unreliable firstperson narrator engages in dialogic address to his confessor, a Commandant with the power to free him from his incarceration in a Communist reeducation camp if only he can tell his story right. The Commandant, a punishing authority figure, performs as a surrogate father shadowing the Captain’s story. Indeed, the Captain sees the Commandant as a “diligent

178

D. SHOSTAK

editor” wielding a “blue pencil,” “always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add” (Nguyen 2015, 308) – like a father wielding the law over and censoring the son’s discourse. This aspect of the Captain’s storytelling – his awareness of an audience with the power of life or death over the narrating subject – leads to his insight: “not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death […] I cannot help but wonder, writing this confession, whether I own my own representation or whether you, my confessor, do” (194). It is no surprise that Nguyen begins the novel with the narrator asserting the doubleness and duplicity of his voice and subjectivity; for him, “the best kind of truth [is] the one that meant at least two things” (121). How better to ensure his subversive play? As a spy or mole, his task is to hide “in plain sight” – “where everyone can see him and where he can see everything” (174). But where he himself is never truly seen – an ironically fitting condition for a nameless “bastard” unrecognized by his father and bullied into abjection by surrogate fathers. Among the things the narrator hides in plain sight are his cultural allusions, which mark his doubled and duplicitous position by creating ambiguities between the story he tells and the audience to whom he relates it.4 In his simultaneously literal and figurative role as double agent, the narrator is trapped between two opposing authority figures who function as father surrogates. In addition to the Communist Commandant who demands the “confession” we read, and whom the Captain addresses as his interlocutor on the novel’s first page, is his South Vietnamese counterpart: the General whom the Captain overtly serves. The latter confirms his symbolic role as a father double when, in anger, the General gives the narrator “the same look my father usually gave me” (290) and then stuns him by calling him “a bastard” (291). The General has exploited the narrator because of his US education as “the officer most fluent in American culture” (7). The narrator thus supplies points of reference within his account of his service to the General, studding his narrative with dozens of Western allusions “high” and “low” – the currency of his education into the father’s culture. Pop culture references proliferate in the narrator’s discourse – the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Janis Joplin, for example. At times he overtly repurposes such references, as when he claims to hear Vietnamese memories within a rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s hit song, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” as sung by the General’s daughter. He alludes also to the

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

179

canon of American and European writers – T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Raymond Chandler, Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola, Karl Marx, Georg Hegel, John Milton, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, and Sigmund Freud. Movie references, too, abound, to Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943), James Bond, John Wayne, Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Federico Fellini, and, sardonically, to the Hollywood stereotypes of Asians, Charlie Chan and Hop Sing. With each reference, the narrator speaks knowingly about – but also, back to – the paternalistic culture that dominated and repudiated him. Many of the narrator’s knowing citations may at first seem appreciative, but within the context of the frame narrative according to which his discourse constitutes a “confession” to the Communist Commandant, his knowledge of artifacts of Western culture is ironic, one source of his need to be reeducated. As historiographic metafiction, The Sympathizer “uses and abuses […] intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony” (Hutcheon 1988, 118). The indeterminate, dual positioning of the narrator’s voice leaves the reader uncertain as to his tone in any given allusion as, for example, when the Commandant rebukes him for “prefer[ring] foreign intellectuals and culture over our native traditions” (Nguyen 2015, 312) and for failing to cite Vietnamese poets, or Ho Chi Minh, or even “a folk saying or a proverb” (313) – suggesting that his allegiance lies with Western culture. Yet at times an apparently ironizing perspective appears explicitly in the confessional voice of the narrative. His apostrophe to American life, for example, inventories its “supermarkets,” “superhighways,” “supersonic Jets,” “Superman,” and “Super Bowl,” concluding, “was there ever a country that coined so many ‘super’ terms from the federal bank of its narcissism [?]” (29). Still, is he telling his interlocutor what he wants to hear? Making sincere recompense? Conveying his own sardonic view? How does allusion represent his own subjectivity within his contradictory political contexts? Or disguise it? The novel refuses to answer these questions definitively because the construction of the narrator’s subjectivity and perspective answers Nguyen’s political purposes only by remaining indeterminate, forever elusive and uncategorizable. A case in point, and a significant reference point for The Sympathizer, is Greene’s Vietnam novel The Quiet American, published in 1955, when the colonialist French were deeply embroiled in the country’s conflicts and the Americans were stumbling into the fray. When, on his return to

180

D. SHOSTAK

the United States after his escape from Saigon at the end of the war, Nguyen’s narrator visits a professor with whom he studied, the professor recalls that his “thesis on The Quiet American […] was one of the best undergraduate theses I’ve ever read” (100). The reader never learns what the narrator’s academic reading of Greene’s work was, however, reinforcing his indeterminate position within his own discourse – a man of (at least) two minds. Yet, from outside the diegesis, The Sympathizer stands as Nguyen’s thesis on The Quiet American, turning it inside out.5 Nguyen directs Greene’s cynicism and occasionally hallucinatory violence back against this literary “father.” The Quiet American is narrated by an English journalist, Thomas Fowler, who repeatedly asserts his political neutrality, that he is “not engagé” (Greene 1996, 96). He sees “the job of a reporter” to be no more than “to expose and record” (88). But his narrative secret, revealed at the end of the tale, is an act of engaged partisan politics intentionally fatal to another man – like Nguyen’s narrator, he is asked to choose sides. Greene makes Fowler somewhat alert to a Vietnamese perspective independent of Western interests – he argues, for example, that “they don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want” (94). But the novel’s most vivid and troublesome representation of the Vietnamese lies in Fowler’s conception of his lover, the young woman Phuong, which betrays an Orientalizing construction of her as a delicate, diaphanous beauty – “small and breakable and unlike our women” (156; emphasis added) – demurely lighting his opium pipe, and so ignorant of the West that she thinks the Statue of Liberty is in London. Greene uses Phuong as a romanticized pawn, possessing little agency, within the game of sexual power Fowler plays with the “quiet American,” the CIA agent Alden Pyle. She is the object of Girardian triangular desire between the two men; the passing of her between them allegorizes the conflict between European and American colonializing ambitions regarding Vietnam.6 From the standpoint of Nguyen’s nuanced post colonial position, however, Phuong could readily stand for the objectification, misrecognition, and misrepresentation of the Vietnamese colonial subject. In a severe act of parodic reappropriation, Nguyen heightens Greene’s objectification of the Vietnamese woman by turning it into an act of rape. Arguably a figure for misrepresentation, rape appears literally in the novel’s diegesis in a pair of mirroring plots. The first is the crux of the confession’s plot, the narrator’s most horrifying, suppressed secret regarding his duplicity and complicity in the torture and rape of a

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

181

Communist agent – in a Fowler-like act of fatal betrayal. The second, selfconsciously narrated by the Captain to show his exploitation by Western powers, appears in relation to his involvement as a consultant in making a movie whose description satirically riffs on Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s film represents Vietnam as a heart of darkness from a wholly American perspective; the Vietnamese are dehumanized, voiceless savages earning the audience’s horror. Nguyen “misreads” Coppola’s powerful Western text by constructing its narrative climax as a symbolic act of screen rape. The Captain elects to assist “the Auteur” – a Coppola alter ego acting as yet another authoritarian father figure – in bringing Vietnamese “authenticity” to his war film, titled The Hamlet.7 The Captain enters eagerly into his role as consultant despite warning signs he ignores from the Auteur, who makes such remarks as “authenticity [does not beat] imagination” (Nguyen 2015, 129) and “I researched your country […] I think I know something about you people” (130). The episode is lengthy and inserted such that at least one reviewer found his viewing “pleasure […] interrupted” (Hoy 2015, 685). In my view, however, narrative disruption is precisely Nguyen’s point, signaling formally how the film, like Hollywood in general, misrepresents the other in acts that call for disruptive reparative measures. Nguyen’s historical re-presentation, comprising the novel as a whole, succeeds through irony and parody, often depending on his maintaining distance on the narrator’s predicament. The narrator’s efforts at reparation therefore fail within the storyworld. Naively believing that he can steer the Auteur toward authentic representation, the Captain argues that the script provides no speaking parts for the Vietnamese and that even the scripted screams, the only sounds permitted the dehumanized Vietnamese, are wrong (Nguyen 2015, 130); the Auteur replies, “no one gives a shit” (133). Yet the Auteur summons the narrator to work with his Vietnamese refugee extras. The narrator explains his assignment to the South Vietnamese General: “we cannot represent ourselves […] Hollywood represents us. So we must do what we can to ensure that we are represented well” (144). The Captain is deluded about his agency, however. He enters the absurdly ersatz world of filmmaking, the Philippines substituting for Vietnam, the set “a complete reproduction of a Central Highlands hamlet down to the outhouse” (150), with a temple that the “special effects guys” (151) cannot wait to blow up, the fake village threatened by a North Vietnamese leader named King Cong (with

182

D. SHOSTAK

a C). The lead Asian actor uses a shampoo named “Sheen” (158), alluding to Coppola’s lead actor, Martin Sheen; the main actress’s first name is “Asia” (159); and the Auteur calls the Captain a “sellout” (163). The narrator is anything but “an infiltrator into a work of propaganda” launched by Hollywood, which functions as “the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization” (172). Instead, the missile reaches its target; Hollywood’s discourse prevails. The narrator’s self-deception at last becomes clear to him in two ways. First, he belatedly realizes that an “accidental” explosion, which nearly kills him on a set he has sentimentally associated with his Vietnamese origins, may have been the Auteur’s intentional act against him – and therefore symbolically against those origins. Second, when he finally views the completed movie at a Bangkok theater, he observes his betrayal in two dimensions. Extradiegetically, he discovers that his name does not appear in its credits. He remains as unrecognized and unrepresented as does the Vietnamese perspective he hoped to insert subversively into the film; the Auteur “murder[ed] me in fiction, obliterating me utterly” (289). Furthermore, the diegesis of the movie climaxes with the rape scene he had counseled against. As with the lengthy episode about filming appearing within Nguyen’s narrative, the rape creates a static moment in the film’s narrative, stilling the raucous audience’s response to the rest of the spectacle as they gaze in horror at bloody close-ups of the screaming actress – whose first name, recall, is Asia. The narrator observes the pernicious effects of the misrepresentation he could not avert: watching the Vietnamese refugee actors performing as “half-naked” Viet Cong rapists, “the only possible feeling burning in one’s gut was the desire for their utter extinction” (287). Nguyen’s irony is that the rapists look just like the narrator and the other audience members, as if to suggest that the extinction they desire is their own. The film scene the narrator cannot suppress parallels the one most repressed in his memory and confession: the rape, by three policemen, of a female Communist agent whom the narrator has failed in enacting his role as double agent. Under torture in an interrogation room bearing the dark euphemism of “the movie theater” (347) – Nguyen’s parody of how murderous misrepresentation is performed – the narrator summons a memory that he has alluded to glancingly since page 9: The agent under interrogation by the police crams into her mouth an incriminating list of names, including the narrator’s, and the latter retains his cover only by not acknowledging her. That the names of her compatriots are the goal of the

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

183

torture underscores how representation depends on recognition. Nguyen exaggerates the allegory – and his bitter revision of Greene’s Phuong – when, asked for her name just before the rape begins, she replies, “my surname is Viet and my given name is Nam” (350), a pointedly reflexive echo of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s documentary film exposing misrepresentations of Vietnamese women.8 In guilt and shame, the narrator reinforces the analogy: “I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, […] given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south” (361). Once, as it must, the repressed returns, the Captain must learn to welcome doubleness and anonymity. No wonder Nguyen gives him no name in the text, as his condition, like that of his country, escapes recognition. Indeed, naming is a significant motif in The Sympathizer, emphasized overtly in the narrator’s habit of withholding not only his name, but also those of many of the players around him. He refers to both main and secondary characters in his confession only by a descriptor or the character’s official position: the crapulent major, the grizzled captain, the affectless lieutenant, the General, the Commandant, the Commissar, and the Auteur. Nguyen thus achieves another layer of ironic ambiguity. The names – titles, ranks, and connotative modifiers – are dehumanizing in their impersonality. In this sense, the narrator reenacts his father’s refusal to recognize him, placing him in the position of a subject denying subjectivity to others, taking on the father’s authority to name – or not. At the same time, however, when the narrator refers to the titles of his “superiors” – the father-substitute officers and the Auteur – their personal anonymity betokens the ideological force, even violence, wielded by members of the dominant classes; their namelessness registers their power over him, as if these figures are like gods whose names are too powerful to speak. The narrator’s withholding of some names makes it all the more obvious when he does bestow names, heavy with significance in their Western resonances, on his fellow characters – most notably, his two friends who enter during their youth into a brotherly pact with him. The two friends mirror the narrator’s split self. Man, the narrator’s Communist contact, turns out to be the faceless man who is the Viet Cong Commissar determining the narrator’s reeducation, in tandem with the Commandant. Man is “manly” in his nihilistic stoicism, but it is a manhood hard won. He has – again invoking the novel’s motif – been burned beyond

184

D. SHOSTAK

recognition by napalm, making him horrifying to his family, his facelessness analogous to the narrator’s namelessness. He also remains unrecognized by Bon, their mutual friend committed to South Vietnam, now his enemy, who is also in the reeducation camp. Man conveys his suffering when he tells the narrator regarding Bon, “I dream that he will recognize me despite myself, even if, in recognizing me, he would only want to kill me” (333). Bon, for his part, is nearly destroyed by losing his wife and son as they escape Saigon. In addition to the obvious French denotation of his name as “the good,” “Bon” also summons another relevant allusion: Charles Bon, a prototype in American literature for racial doubleness, misrecognition, and misrepresentation. The figure of miscegenation in Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Bon is a son, like the Captain, desperately excluded from the father’s recognition, placed in enmity to his own brother, and rendered by his position permanently unreadable within the narrative that attempts to uncover his story.9 In both novels, Bon is a signifier naming a trauma of American history. He epitomizes a history without representation, forever untold, unspeakable. Charles Bon is, like the narrator, a “bastard,” conceived of a white man’s exploitation of a woman of color whom he sees as his subordinate. The French Catholic priest, a religious “father” whose monstrous seduction of the narrator’s young mother – buying her cheaply with “honeycolored perfume” (39) and ladyfingers – makes him a father in the flesh, does little to support the child or mother. He treats them like cast-offs, giving the mother “gray beef bones […] from his leftovers” (135) for soup, sending the child no more than a box of chocolate-covered biscuits at Christmas. The only direct communication the father has with his son is a two-sentence letter, when the narrator is at college in the United States, to announce his mother’s death at 34 from tuberculosis, a letter mostly flaunting his own largesse: “she is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone” (153; emphasis in original). As a boy, the narrator is just one among many boys the priest teaches; he never calls his son by name, addressing him in class only as “you” (342; emphasis in original). Mainly, the priest purveys the Western, specifically Christian, law of the father. He teaches his son “about guilt” (206), especially “Original Sin,” about which he speaks “at every Mass” (103), and he beats all the children: “my father never showed any regret […] Since all were guilty of Original Sin, even punishment wrongly given was in some way just” (246). The ironies of the father’s unrepentant allusions to original sin are not lost on the reader, since he is a merciless rapist. From his perspective, however, the

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

185

language of original sin must conjure the boy’s origins, detached from the priest’s culpability to focus solely on the child’s mixed race, not his conception in sexual violence. Like Charles Bon in Faulkner’s tale, Nguyen’s narrator as a child wishes most for his father to recognize him – metaphorically to bestow the name he has withheld from him. He confesses that, “when I was growing up, I fantasized that one day he would stand before the congregation and say, Here is my son that you may know him. Let him come before you that you should recognize him and love him as I love him […] I’d have been happy if he would just visit and eat with us and call me son in secret” (270). Failing either public or private recognition, the narrator continues with a complementary, oedipal revenge fantasy: “I fantasized about a lightning bolt, a mad elephant, a fatal disease, an angel descending behind him at the pulpit and blowing a trumpet in his ear to call him back to his Maker” (270). He repeats the fantasy of patricide several times in his confessional narrative; after his mother’s death, “I had written to Man that if God really did exist, my mother would be alive and my father would not. How I wish he were dead! In fact, he died not long after I returned” to Vietnam (248–49; emphasis in original). What the narrator has not fully realized in this instance is the power of his own words, the intentional relationship possible between representation and reality, how speech can be an act. During the climactic interrogation scene, when the Commissar has been unmasked as the faceless Man, his former friend, he learns that the coincidence of his letter to Man and the subsequent death of his father was not inadvertent. Man took his expressed wish as a request and killed the Captain’s father with “a bullet in the head, listening to his assassin’s confession” (359) – an act tangled with further ironies of guilt and original sin, as the agent whom the narrator later abandons to be raped and tortured has arranged the assassination. When the Captain realizes that his Communist interlocutor might see the death of the colonizing father – the man who spawned a “bastard” and a bastardized country, both of whom he repudiated – as a “just sentence,” he notes reflexively, punningly, that a “just sentence […] was all that I had ever wanted to write” (359). In Nguyen’s return to the power of signifying as the foundation of recognition, and thus of representation that might rewrite history, he brings the narrator back toward his urgent project. It is in part a project of revenge. In a disguised allusion to a fellow Asian American writer, Nguyen repeats the line that opens Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman,”

186

D. SHOSTAK

the chapter that begins her novel The Woman Warrior (1976): “you must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you” (Nguyen 2015, 208; Kingston 1977, 3). Kingston’s prohibition concerns a family’s suppression of an independent-minded young Chinese woman’s story. Nguyen repurposes the line when the narrator’s mother at last reveals to him the secret of his paternity. But just as Kingston’s narrator avenges her aunt by telling her story anyway, Nguyen’s narrator takes discursive revenge. He follows the proscriptive line with “your father is … She said his name” (Nguyen 2015, 208; ellipsis in original). The narrator does not speak his father’s name. He does not fill his ellipsis, thus occluding the name from his discourse and banning it from the Commandant’s – and the reader’s – knowledge. He erases the father’s story in namelessness, as his has been erased – denying him the name that, within the patriarchal tradition, represents lineage and a genealogical imperative. Yet this erasure enacts only a small personal revenge that does not truly rewrite history. Nguyen conjures Marx’s dualistic view of historical representation when, during the narrator’s desperate plea to escape his project of agonizing reeducation, he imagines alternatives: “if history had never happened, neither as farce nor as tragedy, if the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born” (354). But these alternatives are impossible. The novel ends indeterminately, the project of historical rectification incomplete. Nguyen shifts from ethical to existential revelation. He does this by way of a “just sentence,” the novel’s ultimate joke – literally and figuratively. Asked by Man the Commissar at the climax of his tormenting reeducation the question “what is more precious than independence and freedom?” (360), the narrator, after completely breaking down, realizes that the answer is “nothing” (368).10 He comes to see this as a “punch line” (370) confirming the inescapable, paradoxical doubleness of meaning, and implicitly, of himself – as, after this revelation, he refers to himself as “we” (376), the pronominal two-in-one. “[N]othing is more precious than independence and freedom” (375) can be read in two opposing ways – that there exists no value or state in the world more dear than those two; or, nihilistically, that the recognition of “nothing” – of negativity, the state of absence – is more precious than those values. In the essential undecidability of language – the only material of representation to hand – the narrator faces an existential fact: “when he looked into the mirror and saw the void he understood the meaning of nothing” (375). But he also sees that laughter is the only, best response to the deconstruction embodied in “nothing” (378).

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

187

Just such indeterminacy enables Nguyen’s critical distance and his non-teleological critique of misrepresentation. The bastard, born of a Westerner’s rape of an Asian innocent, becomes the figure of historical signification itself, in all its duplicity. In this sense, his appearance repudiates the father who conceived him and the father’s culture, which conceived him. There remain in Nguyen’s novel no traces of longing for a patriarch to reorder the fallen world. In its reflexive strategies, The Sympathizer’s postmodern art follows Hutcheon’s description: It “is not so much ambiguous as doubled and contradictory” and “move[s] away from representation […] by installing it materially and subverting it” (1988, 119). In failing to construct his alternative Vietnamese history, however, the narrator allows Nguyen to construct his own, shedding – and shredding – the master narrative of Western cultural appropriation by speaking subversively in its language and redeploying its tropes. Although the history he recovers is fundamentally the narrative of misrepresentation, the narrator still concludes with conviction: “we will have nothing to leave to anyone except these words, our best attempt to represent ourselves against all those who sought to represent us” (Nguyen 2015, 380).

Notes 1. To avoid distraction, I will omit the quotation marks indicating that the term “Vietnam” is contested, with the expectation that the context of my discussion will clarify whether its local denotation is abstract or concrete. 2. The resonances of the “post-patriarchal” condition continue to complicate this picture of postwar American masculinity, as I argue at length in Fictive Fathers. 3. Nguyen’s choice of form is resonant; as he noted to an interviewer, “the confession is a literary form that became, under communism, a political form” (quoted in Seaman 2016, 8). The notion of confession, of course, also invokes the Catholic devotional practice, in an ironic allusion to the vicious hypocrisy of the narrator’s priest-father. 4. In perhaps the most incisive review of the novel, Grayson Clary asserts, “each citation is revenge, asymmetric, on the Westerners who don’t see a Westerner in him” (Clary 2015, 2). 5. Clary notes that Nguyen’s novel is “an enciphering of Greene’s novel” and that, in fact, Nguyen makes The Quiet American “a spoiled referent,” in that The Sympathizer “uses and abuses Greene’s tropes,” making it difficult “to use [Greene’s] vision to imagine Vietnam” (3). Given Nguyen’s own position as a Professor of English, American Studies, and Ethnicity

188

D. SHOSTAK

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, this episode also serves as an inside joke about academic reading. In defining “the rival’s position within the system to which he belongs, in relation to both subject and object” of desire, Girard’s insight is that “rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it ” (Girard 1977: 145; emphasis in original). Although Nguyen’s use of the term “hamlet” is accurate terminology to name the small village, it also conjures other points of reference. Most obvious is Shakespeare’s play, which also raises the question of patricide and oedipal conflict; at further remove but still intriguing is Faulkner’s 1940 novel The Hamlet, an allusion that not only hints at other connections to that writer of American dysfunction and devastation, but also, more specifically, introduces class warfare with a kind of grotesque black comedy. I wish to thank Carolyn Durham for pointing out Nguyen’s allusion to Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). Nguyen thus turns another allusion on its head when Man hopelessly desires Bon’s recognition, making Bon the subject rather than object of repudiation. “Nothing” is arguably a revelatory endpoint for King Lear as well, and it seems likely that Shakespeare provides yet another reference point within Nguyen’s deeply allusive texture.

Bibliography Clary, Grayson. 2015. “Spy vs. History: Review of The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen.” The New Inquiry, May 1. https://thenewinquiry.com/spyvs-history/. Davis, Robert C. 1981. “Critical Introduction: The Discourse of the Father.” In The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, edited by Robert Con Davis, 1–25. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Friedman, Ellen G. 2002. “Postpatriarchal Endings in Recent US Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 48 (3): 693–712. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Greene, Graham. 1996. The Quiet American. Edited by John Clark Pratt. New York: Penguin. Hirsch, Marianne. 1992–1993. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory.” Discourse 15 (2): 3–29. Hoy, Pat C., II. 2015. “Spying with Sympathy and Love: Review of The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen.” Sewanee Review 123 (4): 685–90.

10

PATERNITY, HISTORY, AND MISREPRESENTATION …

189

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1977. The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2015. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2016. “A Novel Intervention: Remembering the Vietnam War: Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen.” World Policy Journal 33 (3): 65– 71. Rousselot, Elodie. 2014. “Introduction: Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction.” In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary NeoHistorical Fiction, edited by Elodie Rousselot, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seaman, Donna. 2016. “The Booklist Carnegie Medal Interview, Fiction: Viet Thanh Nguyen.” Booklist 112 (19/20): 8–9.

CHAPTER 11

Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and the Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman Rebecca Martin

When the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped Patricia Hearst in February 1974, the cadre became a fixture in the American public eye. Hearst was the granddaughter of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, and her family’s name was already well known (Graebner 2008, 1). Her capture was shocking to the American public and the sense of scandal that it instigated was heightened by Hearst’s apparent collaboration with SLA activities. Hearst took on a code name, Tania, and participated in the robbery of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco (Graebner 2008, 24). Images of Tania, brandishing a sawn-off M1 rifle, circulated widely. When the SLA’s safe house in Los Angeles burned down in a police standoff, Hearst fled to the North with William and Emily Harris. The subsequent year came to be known as Patty Hearst’s “lost year” – a time during which the historical record is murky (Graebner 2008, 30–31). Despite her participation in SLA activities, Hearst denied culpability for her actions. Her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, told the jury that she had been

R. Martin (B) Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_11

191

192

R. MARTIN

brainwashed in the same manner that a prisoner of war might have been (Graebner 2008, 51). In a signed affidavit, Hearst wrote that it was only upon being reunited with her parents and siblings that she realized that she had been “living in a fantasy world whose terrors could be resolved by merely returning to her family or consulting the law offices” (Hearst 1975). The dichotomy between Patty Hearst the American heiress and Patty Hearst the violent revolutionary fascinated onlookers at the time. As Joan Didion (2006) writes in “The Girl of the Golden West,” “the image of Patricia Campbell Hearst on the FBI ‘wanted’ fliers was… schematic evidence that even a golden girl could be pinned in the beam of history” (583). Although the events surrounding Hearst’s capture propelled her to public notoriety, she herself considers her involvement with the SLA to have been a terrible fantasy: an excursion from reality that remains as incomprehensible to her after the fact as it was to onlookers at the time. Susan Choi’s 2003 novel American Woman reimagines Patty Hearst’s “lost year” from the perspective of Wendy Yoshimura: a Japanese American radical who was arrested at the same time as Hearst. The pair had been living in hiding together in a small apartment when they were apprehended by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (Graebner 2008, 48). Yoshimura was wanted on charges unrelated to Hearst’s capture or the activities of the SLA; she had conspired “to bomb a Berkeley naval building” in an act of protest against the Vietnam War (Yeh 2010, 191). In Choi’s rendering, Hearst is fictionalized as “Pauline” and Wendy Yoshimura as “Jenny Shimada.” Like the real Yoshimura, who is a talented watercolorist, Jenny is an adept painter who is forced into hiding after participation in the execution of a violent act of protest. In American Woman, Jenny and Pauline have been outwardly defined by their place in, or absence from, American history and public consciousness. Pauline, who was captured by the SLA for the “totemic power” of her wealth and pedigree (Choi 2003, 316), is hypervisible to the American public. Conversely, Jenny’s experience is one of erasure. As a Japanese American woman, she is frequently confronted by racist misinterpretations of her identity, including from members of the political left with whom she aligns ideologically. Furthermore, the significance of her family’s experience to American history – in particular, her parents’ internment during the Second World War – is downplayed or not mentioned by the pundits of her time. While she has drawn attention to herself through her participation in a bombing, this act of radical violence has compelled her to secrecy. Throughout the novel, Choi dramatizes the construction of

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

193

American public consciousness and the historical record through Jenny’s, and others’, attention to media outlets such as radio and newspaper articles. Within the space of this public record, Pauline is broadly visible yet ultimately unknowable and Jenny’s experiences are passed over. Despite the public’s fascination with Pauline in American Woman, Choi emphasizes Jenny’s experience of this time by reimagining the “lost year” from her perspective. While aspects of American Woman reflect reality, Jenny and Pauline are not intended to be perfect analogues for Wendy and Patty. In particular, Choi takes liberties in imagining intimacy between these two women. When Jenny meets Pauline in hiding, both characters’ connection to history and the broader public have been temporarily put on hold; they are cut off from family and society and live in a continuous present, without reference to past or future. Within this space, Choi imagines an erotic intimacy between these characters that is barely available to their own perception and too amorphous to be known to official narratives. While the duo talk ceaselessly when they are together, the nature of their relationship is never articulated. The imperceptibility of this relationship might be seen through the lens of what the poet and scholar Adrienne Rich (1980) termed “compulsory heterosexuality,” or the expectation that all women are heterosexual and most prominently defined through their relationships with men as well as the institutions, such as marriage, that formalize those relationships (633). Despite the intensity of Jenny and Pauline’s connection, nothing tangible ever comes of it and it ultimately ends in betrayal. When Jenny and Pauline are finally captured, their connection evaporates as though, like Hearst’s conception of her time with the SLA, it had been a detour from reality. Jenny and Pauline’s partnership is a queer one that exists against the grain of what Elizabeth Freeman (2010) has called “chrononormativity,” or the oppressive logic by which only moments of sequential, productive value come to be recognized in renderings of time. Freeman posits that “performance, affect, and even sex itself, through the work they do with time and history might be knowledge practices” and that these kinds of knowledge practices can “jam whatever looks like the inevitable” (173; emphasis in original). In depicting an intimacy between Jenny and Pauline that deviates from the patterns of compulsory heterosexuality and chrononormativity, Choi imagines a version of events that would be inaccessible to conventional historical renderings. American Woman dramatizes the ways in which public narratives are formed through what is

194

R. MARTIN

available to the record, while simultaneously reminding us of what cannot be conveyed in this context. In revising Patricia Hearst’s “lost year” in the context of a queer relationship that is never formally acknowledged, Choi figures this time itself as being queer: a diversion from the historic record that points to the ways in which bodies are sites of knowledge production with no corollary in language: written, spoken, or otherwise. In American Woman, the mass American public is an indistinct entity that is ever present to members of the SLA through radio broadcasts, newspaper reporting, and other media outlets; the fictitious SLA members think of this “bourgeois” public as their primary enemy. As defined by Michael Warner (2002), a public is an amorphous and collective entity that consists of the attention of people who are otherwise strangers. Publics are not quantifiable in the conventional sense of the term; while conceptions of “the public” have often been employed by social scientists for analysis and empirical study, according to Warner they are ultimately fictitious realms of the “social imaginary” (11–12). Drawing from Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, Warner argues that a public is a “space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself… It exists by virtue of being addressed”: that is, a public is a space of attention created through the circulation of a particular stream of information (67; emphasis in original). In American Woman, Jenny’s attention to a widely shared “space of discourse” situates her as a part of a mass American public, even as she lives in hiding. Warner posits that the formation of a public is “poetic” in that its shape is determined by creative human imagining (114) and that historically, publics have formed and maintained themselves through private acts of reading. While the terms “public” and “private” are usually conceptualized as distinct, according to Warner there is significant overlap between the two. Marriage, for instance, is an institutional acknowledgment of a private bond. Warner writes that publics provide “resources for interiority and contexts for self-elaboration” (30). That is, individuals are able to articulate a sense of self through their relationship to a particular public. Warner proposes that those who identify with a public understand their own identities as already belonging to the discourse that addresses them. This process of “self-elaboration” through public discourse makes publics feel “pre-conceptual, almost instinctual, rooted in the orientations of the body and common speech” because of the way in which personal identity is formed within the context of public space (23). In this way, publicly

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

195

formed knowledge feels inexorable and thus takes on the tenor of “common sense” (133). Warner discusses alternative public-like formations that are defined in opposition to predominant mass publics. He calls these groups “counterpublics,” a term which he borrows from Nancy Fraser (118). If publics are taken to be spaces of the social imaginary, the contours of a dominant public are not certain or static and may be challenged. If a public is formed through discourse that both abides by and generates an unspoken set of rules and norms, then a counterpublic posits a rejection of those rules and norms. That is, they do not petition specific groups for measurable change but instead, attempt to disrupt public knowledge through violent intervention. Unlike alternative social movements or countercultures, they are entities that “cannot express themselves through performatives of rational critical discourse. For many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself” (123). Instead of seeking to change the shape of dominant publics through critical discourse – that is, through passive acts of reading, writing, and speaking – counterpublics use the language of action to disrupt and reshape mass publics. The SLA’s radical antagonism to the norms of American society situates the group as a counterpublic; it is through this counterpublic formation that Jenny attempts to make herself visible to the American public in American Woman. The historical SLA disseminated their message through acts of violence, the most prominent act being the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. In American Woman, violence is similarly, for Jenny, a way of transmitting a message; while she once believed that her work as a bomber had been a means of conveying a critique of the Vietnam War, in prison she wonders if it was in fact a means of vengeance, an expression of rage at her own powerlessness or, as Choi writes, the fact that she was “such a ridiculous, small, not-taken-seriously, average American girl” (2003, 350). Reflecting upon her decision to participate in the bombing, she thinks, “she’d believed in violence – as the only reliable way to seize people’s attention” (315). Counterpublic violence is used by Jenny to puncture a space that otherwise would not see or hear her, just as the historical SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst in order to transmit a message through violence. Choi’s rendering of the SLA in American Woman further situates the fictionalized group as a counterpublic in that their agenda is not concrete or definite; their aim is not to seize political power or revise public policy

196

R. MARTIN

so much as it is to violently disrupt the mass American public – a generalized group of people that they view in the abstract as the “bourgeoisie” or “pigs” (37, 107, 301). Their messages are conveyed through violent action and not through written arguments; even their broadcast messages are intensely energetic and intended to create fear among listeners or lead to direct action. As in a counterpublic, the group finds written communication, the mode through which publics are constructed, distasteful. This is illustrated when a character named Frazer, a jock-turned-radical activist and old friend of Jenny’s, attempts to convince the cadre to write a book about their radical beliefs in order to raise money for their cause. He tries to frame the task in a way that might appeal to the trio by declaring it “another way of waging war. A war of words” (37). Despite Frazer’s attempts to use the language of action to convince the group of his plan, Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline agree that it sounds “bourgeois” (37). Juan says, “I mean, Mao wrote a book. Definitely. It just seems like, in this country books are such shit” (37). As the leader of the diminished SLA, Juan wants to change the dominant public ideology through violent revolution. To write and circulate a book is regarded as a passive act that, for Juan and the group’s other members, would only contribute to a selfperpetuating “bourgeois” system; it is an act that does not align with the group’s counterpublic ideology. Jenny and Pauline each partially articulate their individual sense of self through passive attention to forms of media such as newspaper articles or radio broadcasts, as members of a mass public would. In hiding, Jenny is a fastidious consumer of information, be it via radio broadcast, the written word, or other forms of transcription. Before Jenny is introduced to the SLA, she lives in the small town of Rhinebeck, New York – a place that seems impervious to the modulations of the country as a whole. She is employed by an elderly woman named Dolly, who is the last remaining member of a formerly wealthy family. Dolly has very little money but still sees herself as aristocratic and employs Jenny to restore her house. While working for Dolly, Jenny reads every newspaper at the Rhinebeck Library and continuously listens to the radio. Choi writes that for Jenny, listening to the radio “[emphasized] her loneliness more than relieving it… The contrast of her life with the world outside sometimes felt too great on those nights. The radio was like a tiny porthole in her drifting balloon” (89). As a fugitive, Jenny fastidiously consumes news, in part to ensure her own safety. This stream of information also acts as a fine thread that connects her to the outside world. While in hiding, the radio and other news

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

197

sources become a comfort to Jenny and even a substitute for companionship although they remind her of what she lacks. Conversely, Pauline’s relationship to the American mass public is ambiguous; while she appears to have been indoctrinated by the counterpublic attitude of the SLA, it remains unclear to Jenny the extent to which Pauline remains a hostage. Pauline’s value to the SLA as a captive is her public visibility and she herself is aware of her own fame, keeping a folder of newspaper clippings from articles that have been written about her. She shows these to Jenny, signifying that she, too, defines herself in relation to the mass American public, despite outwardly situating herself in opposition to it. While Jenny and Pauline participate in activities that create counterpublics, they each separately maintain a connection to the broader American public and their respective senses of self are formed in relation to both worlds. When Jenny and Pauline abandon the SLA, they develop an intensely symbiotic relationship, one in which the influence of the mass American public and the SLA on each character’s sense of self has been muted. After spending so much time without real companionship, Jenny is intensely affected by her newfound physical and emotional proximity to Pauline. In Pauline, she finds what she has been longing for: a “comrade” or person who can see her and whose fortune is bound to hers (349). Of this time, Choi writes that for Jenny and Pauline, “prior history all seems unreal. They don’t remember that they are two girls, fabulous prey, on the run from the law everywhere. In this sticky cocoon, it’s surprising, perhaps, that they never make love to each other. It isn’t a secret they have to discover” (281). During the time that Jenny spends alone as a fugitive, most of her important relationships are maintained through indirect forms of communication. Her relationship with her partner William, for instance, is maintained through a series of letters that have been transcribed by a mutual friend. These relationships, mediated through text, lack the potency of her relationship with Pauline. Still, the importance and intensity of this relationship exist outside of public knowledge and at the edge of what is available to Jenny’s own imagination, as though this relationship were invisible to discourse and existing only outside of normal constructions of time. Freeman (2010) gives us a framework through which we might understand the way that this relationship is temporally located against the grain of public discourse. She posits that “time binds a socius,” by which she means that “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a

198

R. MARTIN

form of mastery” (3; emphasis in original). Her use of the terms “bind,” “naked flesh,” and “embodiment” points us to the physical implications of her argument. Freeman argues that our bodies are sites where knowledge is created, and that knowledge may be limited by a system that only recognizes moments of productive value. She writes that “the past seems useless unless it predicts and becomes material for a future. These teleologies of living, in turn, structure the logic of a ‘people’s’ inheritance; rather than just the transfer of private property along heteroreproductive lines, inheritance becomes the familial and collective legacy from which a group will draw a properly poetical future” (5; emphasis in original). As elaborated earlier, Freeman uses the term chrononormativity to define the logic through which these groups recognize “productive” or “useless” moments. This principle works to ensure that legacies are formed only through moments of constructive significance, erasing detours and “hiccups” in time (3). In American Woman, Jenny’s relationship with Pauline is a “detour” from chrononormativity in that it has no legacy and nothing comes of it. When the pair are arrested and the “lost year” is over, the tangibility of their relationship disappears. There is no record of their friendship, except in Jenny’s memory. Choi writes that: no journey can fit in the mind as it happens through distance and time. There’s no way to record it as you might the repetitions of your heart with a vibration-sensitive needlelike pen on a very long roll of paper. Looking back it does not unscroll smoothly. Moments stood out because something had happened, others because nothing had happened but sublime coexistence between the whipped hair of the woman beside her, and the glimpse of her own eyes in the rear-view staring back like a critical stranger’s. (2003, 284)

Jenny notes that while a heartbeat can be transcribed, the modulations of her journey cannot. When she says that her time with Pauline “does not unscroll smoothly,” she is offering a metaphor for the way in which the record is insufficient. The most important moments to Jenny are, from the outside, perhaps not even noteworthy. They do not form a part of the discourse that comes to constitute public knowledge of history. This is in part due to the ephemeral nature of these moments, but it is also reflective of the significance ascribed to Jenny’s experiences as an Asian American woman in her time. In writing a queer intimacy into Patty Hearst’s “lost

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

199

year,” Choi renders visible the moments that may elapse beyond recorded history, and in doing so elevates the importance of those moments that exist invisibly alongside the normative stream of recorded time. Jenny and Pauline’s intimacy can also be seen within the context of Rich’s term “compulsory heterosexuality,” discussed in a seminal essay about the erasure of lesbian perspectives from feminist scholarship and public discourse in general (1980, 657). She posits that presumed heterosexuality is a political institution, one that limits the erotic potential of female relationships: sexual or otherwise. “Lesbian existence,” she writes, is “both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women” (649). Rich observes that lesbian existence and the potentially erotic nature of female friendship had been routinely omitted from feminist scholarship and public discourse in general at the time she was writing. She attributes this erasure to the presumption and enforcement of the idea that all women are heterosexual and that their most important relationships are with men. Rich writes that lesbian relationships embolden women to reject states of powerlessness. By broadening the scope of “lesbian experience” to include relationships that are not explicitly sexual, Rich seeks to bridge the gap between the different feminist camps in the early 1980s. In doing so, she advocates for the importance of intimacy between women, otherwise rendered irrelevant, to be recognized. Rich’s paradigm of affirmative female bonding was revolutionary in its time, but it has since been complicated by the work of contemporary scholars such as Judith Taylor (2013) who argues that a portrait of intimacy that does not leave room for hurt, betrayal, and failure is incomplete. To amend this fissure, she draws upon an archive of feminist letters that engage in the bleaker aspects of bonding between women. She employs Jack Halberstam’s model of “anti-social feminism,” from The Queer Art of Failure (2011), which “refuses rescue, and refuses ‘the lineage of femininity’ of which friendship is an intrinsic part” (96). For Halberstam and Taylor, this refusal allows for intimacy which is “both less benign and more erotically charged” (2013, 96). While anti-social feminism may appear grim, it allows for a clearer understanding of Jenny and Pauline’s relationship in American Woman – a bond of survival that is erotic and yet ultimately not liberating. This bond is only tangible through momentary interaction, and later, personal memory; it does not impact the official record of either character’s life.

200

R. MARTIN

In contrast to her relationship with Pauline, Jenny’s relationships with men are mediated by processes of transcription. Jenny maintains a relationship with her imprisoned lover William by writing coded letters to him. She uses these letters to remind herself of her love for William, but the process is one that ultimately makes her miserable. She thinks, “his letters arguably lacked nothing, but she couldn’t stop searching them for… the orthographic equivalent of his hands on her skin” (Choi 2003, 111). Her own letters are copied out by a mutual friend, Dana, to preserve Jenny’s anonymity. She wonders how William perceives her own letters that have been transcribed in Dana’s “slanting, regular hand” so unlike Jenny’s own (111). Jenny thinks to herself that in these transcriptions “perhaps a little of Jenny’s love was lost also, like steam” (111). Handwriting may remind Jenny of physical proximity, but it is a poor substitute for intimacy; for her, love is only knowable through the body. She recalls William declaring his love for her and thinks, “she hates this pro-forma exercise; what she really means, what she really feels, needs, craves, is hardly expressed by these words. These words seem like a fence to her, a little white line of pickets to keep things at bay” (227). An expression of love is daring for William, like a boundary being crossed or even an act of conquest; for Jenny, by contrast, words cannot contain desire but only regulate it. Jenny first appears in American Woman from the perspective of Frazer through the traces of information that she leaves behind. Frazer is tracking Jenny down to convince her to help him protect the surviving members of the SLA. He imagines that she is “walking backwards, sweeping out her footprints as she goes, leaving clear arcs in the dust. The same hieroglyphic again and again: I’M AFRAID” (9). Frazer recognizes her handwriting on a painted sign at the entrance to Dolly’s house. He thinks, “it wouldn’t be right to say he recognized the handwriting: Rather, he recognized the ability to have unrecognizable handwriting” (22). To Frazer, Jenny is defined not by her ability to create but to effectively transcribe. Yet there is some “essence” of Jenny that Frazer sees in her nearly flawless ability to transmit a message in writing; Jenny’s capacity to retain and transcribe information acts as a kind of camouflage, yet this camouflage is distinct to her and recognizable if one knows what to look for. When Pauline first meets Jenny, her reputation has been elevated to a semi-mythic status through stories that Frazer had told to the cadre. Pauline is initially jealous of Jenny’s independence. For Pauline, Jenny is “so self-sufficient, with her faraway world that she wrote to, and her lover

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

201

in prison, her journal. She’d drive off in the loud little car, her neat cap of black hair flying back, her huge sunglasses on – she was always departing. You sensed any time she might just leave for good, an idea Pauline hated, and brooded upon” (258). While Frazer is attracted to Jenny because he views her as inaccessible and “other,” Pauline sees her former self in Jenny. She tells Jenny that she had once “had her own car, and she’d driven around with her long clean hair flying behind and her sunglasses on” (258). For Pauline, the initial distance between Jenny and her is akin to the distance between Pauline and her previous life, prior to capture by the SLA. When Jenny and Pauline abandon Juan and Yvonne, their relationship develops a symbiotic quality with unclear boundaries. They live in motel rooms, sleep in the same bed, and even shower together. Pauline asks Jenny if she has ever considered sleeping with a woman. When Jenny tells her that she has not, Pauline says “your conditioning might have repressed it. You might have had the feeling, but it was somehow disguised” (280). This is the closest they ever come to discussing the possibility of sex, but in Jenny’s mind at least, the idea still lingers. Choi writes: in sleep, their bodies twine together at the center of the bed. There have already been nights with frost but even when it’s not cold they still wake up touching, sometimes tightly spooned…That’s all there is: in spite of the one conversation, or perhaps because of it, there is only this edging against the idea, in the same way their bodies edge up to each other in the guise of blind sleep. (280–81)

Jenny’s romantic relationships with men in American Woman have boundaries and caveats that she must navigate; her relationship with William is mediated through text and across time. When reflecting on the time they spent together, she recalls feeling disconnected, as though she had to invent a version of herself for him. Jenny reflects that the “tension, between the girl she was and the bold, brilliant woman she’d pretended to be, had been central to falling in love – had been love, the thrill of transforming, in secret, into the lover her lover desired” (291; emphasis in original). Similarly, Frazer is attracted to Jenny, but fetishizes her inaccessibility. In Jenny’s relationship with Pauline, however, the connection is unspoken and the boundaries are diffuse. Choi’s rendering of Jenny’s time with Pauline is intensely immediate, almost always narrated in the present tense, even when Jenny is reflecting on that time. The two fugitives exist in a state

202

R. MARTIN

of intense symbiosis, in which eroticism hangs like a specter but is not directly articulated or acted upon. It is possible that this bond exists most potently in Jenny’s imagination. Regardless, its intensity signals a deviation – though not a clean rift – from the main thread of each character’s life; even in hiding, Jenny and Pauline’s enduring connection to the outside world limits what they expect for themselves and from each other. While the pair depend on each other in hiding, they also fight viciously; these arguments are frequently imbued with the tension between Jenny and Pauline’s intimacy in hiding and the expectations of their previous lives. Choi writes, “it will only be late nights when they’ve possibly drunk too much wine, the kinds of nights when they fight, and Pauline almost phones up her mother, and Jenny her father, and each hates the other for seeing her armor break down – it will only be then they’ll crave some explicitly sexual battle. Possession of the other and erasure of the self” (281). While in hiding, the greatest threat to the duo’s intimacy is a return to familial bonds and the expectations informed by their respective relations to the American public. Once the pair are captured, they yield to the conventions of chrononormativity; they are not liberated from compulsory heterosexuality, but instead only evade it for a time. Despite their intimacy, Jenny and Pauline’s relationship is ultimately mediated by written documents that overwrite the importance of their previous proximity. When they are still fugitives, Pauline grabs Jenny’s hand and tells her urgently, “if they don’t kill us I swear I won’t tell them a thing about you…I’ll never tell anyone you were with us…I’ll tell them I met you this morning” (262; emphasis in original). Upon capture, however, Pauline names Jenny as an accessory in the murder of Mr. Morton, a civilian who was killed by members of the SLA in a botched burglary. When the lawyer hands Pauline’s statement to Jenny, she is “aware of the oversized letter, bursting out of its cheap envelope” (348). This final message from Pauline is inadequate in every way; it stands in for an absence of intimacy, and yet this written statement is as tangible as their previous connection had been amorphous and inarticulable. Jenny has already written Pauline a meticulous 15-page letter when she receives the statement and she chooses to send her letter in spite of the impersonal contents of Pauline’s testimony. Jenny feels rage and heartbreak at her friend’s betrayal. She writes new, angry letters that she never sends, but ultimately accepts the dissolution of their relationship, recognizing that they are each bound to divergent histories. Choi writes that Jenny “admitted her long-ago feeling – tender, jealous, frustrated – that Pauline

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

203

might bloom under her care, but would always be rooted in some other sphere” (350). Even when Pauline has disavowed her family, she remains the daughter of wealthy, famous Americans. Outside of the shielded space of fugitivity, each character returns to the life that prior history had propelled them toward and thus the time that Pauline and Jenny had spent together comes to be figured as a diversion in a more recognizable and publicly accessible narrative. In a conventional re-telling of events, Jenny’s relationship with William would figure most prominently; it is, after all, her most enduring relationship, and one of which there is tangible “proof” in the form of countless letters. These letters may provide evidence of a bond, but Jenny’s relationship with William is continually characterized by its limitations and the borders between them. Conversely, Jenny holds on to the memory of her relationship with Pauline, despite its intangibility. She thinks “the true bond with a comrade was what she herself craved most of all… a perfect comradeship… Unlike, even, Jenny’s previous life with William, in which she had felt herself struggling to keep his approval” (353). When Pauline reaches out to Jenny for support, Jenny accepts Pauline into her life in a way that she later describes as “abdication, the relief of giving up” (348). Like Pauline, who submits herself entirely to the SLA, Jenny submits to Pauline. Choi writes that “she’d stopped fighting and known, as Pauline must have known when she’d joined with her captors, that any bond is its own great salvation, no matter how damning in all other ways. She’d bound herself then to Pauline, and Pauline’s rushing fate” (349). Yet still, outside of the context of the “lost year,” it is as though this intimacy never existed. Jenny sees her former companion one final time on the news. Along with the rest of the American public, Jenny learns that Pauline has married a member of the security detail that her parents hired upon her release from prison. Pauline reenters the normative stream of time in which the most recognizable moments are those with “productive” value – in this case, heterosexual marriage. When Jenny first joins Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline in hiding, the three companions are a tightly-knit group of fugitives, existing in a mutually confirmed reality that is defined in opposition to an abstract American public rather than to specific individuals. While they are restless and eager to continue engaging in radical action, they are also reeling from the deaths of their companions. Recalling their initial meeting, Jenny thinks: at the hot core, beneath all these strata, was a feeling they didn’t yet know how to name. They might never name it while they were together. So

204

R. MARTIN

long as each remained within view of the other a reality pertained between them, and the core feeling didn’t intrude. It was amazing, Jenny thought, how a death could remain so abstract, but it was also not surprising at all. (283)

When the cadre are together as a unit, their personal boundaries are diffuse and they are tone-deaf to any language besides that of action. Later, when they accidentally kill an innocent man named Mr. Morton, the trio has trouble grasping the implications of his death. Death is illegible to the trio; instead, they each hold onto a version of reality that is reciprocally created within the boundaries of the group and confirmed by mutual defiance toward an abstract American public. While Frazer wants the cadre to write a book, Jenny encourages them to write an elegy for their companions who were killed in an hours-long shootout with police, which Pauline, Juan, and Yvonne escaped as the only remaining members of the SLA. The cadre does compose an elegy, but it takes the form of a declarative audiocassette that they want to broadcast over the radio. Jenny helps them circulate their message against her better judgment. As an outsider who maintains a thread of connection to the world outside of the cadre’s fugitive ethos, Jenny is the only one who registers how the message might be heard by the wider public. As they listen to a radio broadcast of the tape that they sent out, Jenny thinks: all over the country, at that instant, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were listening to this. Did the three of them realize, themselves? They had never heard themselves as she had, driving down a country road with the radio blaring and paralyzed suddenly by their crazed, keening screed. It was possible that their own voices were an echo chamber around them, beyond which they grasped nothing. (122)

Jenny is describing the process of a counterpublic ramming up against a public sphere. Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline do not have a clear conception of the individuals who constitute the public; they see the network as a holistic entity, composed of “pigs” who uphold an unjust system. Similarly, they see anyone who appears oppressed by the system as part of a single unit that they are fighting for. Juan tells Jenny, “your skin is a privilege. Your Third World perspective’s a privilege,” conflating her identity with innumerable others simply because she is not white (140). In her protest of the Vietnam War, even Jenny reflects that she was fighting for

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

205

a group of people whose identities she had conflated. Jenny thinks that it was “hard to know anything concrete about them, these people to whom she’d felt pledged. They had been an abstraction, the way Mr. Morton had been an abstraction, although now Jenny sees him with an almost unbearable clarity” (352). The SLA justified the violence they committed against Mr. Morton because they did not see him as an individual, but rather as a member of a group – a member of the “bourgeoisie” or the oppressive mass public. When he is killed, the fact of his death is troubling and contradictory in that the singularity of his life becomes irrefutable; to acknowledge this would rupture the ideology that the cadre have devoted themselves to. When she has been captured, Jenny reflects on the violent actions of the SLA and her own radical network. She remembers an image that deeply moved her: a monk burning himself alive in an act of protest. Here Choi is referencing the famous 1963 photograph of the Vietnamese ? Ðu´,c, who committed an act of self-immolation to monk Thích Qu ang protest religious persecution by the US-backed South Vietnamese government. When she first observed the image, Jenny thought that the monk intended to intrude upon other people’s minds with an “unparalleled shock of the real” (351), an act of self-immolation that communicates through action as in the mode of a counterpublic. After her eventual capture, Jenny revises the opinion that she held when she was young, that the monk intended to impress reality on to people’s minds. She thinks: perhaps she’d been wrong, and the monk had really meant to convey the horrifying idea that had first crossed her mind seeing him, and that afterward she’d so urgently tried to refute: that a passion for rightness was never enough, that one’s every attempt would be futile. That, in the end, the only way to protest was by simply removing oneself from the world. (351)

The monk’s self-immolation is a violent act of refusal, one that leaves a mark on the world through elimination. In American Woman, Jenny is motivated by a sense of justice, but also rage, directed in part at the war, but also at her own invisibility and perceived smallness; her radical action is, in part, an attempt to push up against her own erasure. Through violent acts of protest, Jenny claims a stake in both the outcome of the Vietnam War and her own visibility, but by the end of the novel, she feels that little has changed.

206

R. MARTIN

At the beginning of Part Four of American Woman, Choi writes from the perspective of a journalist named Anne Casey, who is reporting on the story of Pauline’s capture and her involvement with the SLA, a story that is, for the newspapers, Pauline’s alone. While looking through archival material, Anne uncovers all kinds of information that is auxiliary to her reporting. She uncovers information about Pauline’s family history, including a memoir written by Pauline’s grandfather’s mistress, which “she checked out purely as a distraction…but then she’d been mesmerized by the mistress’s robust vulgarity and her casual racism” (315). This memoir includes a racist diatribe against Japanese Americans and the mistress expresses relief when Pauline’s grandfather and she learn that their neighbors will be placed in internment camps. Anne also learns about Jenny and her family’s history – how her father was interned in one of the camps referenced by Pauline’s grandfather’s mistress. While Anne takes interest in Jenny, Choi writes that for Anne, “Jenny still isn’t the story. Jenny’s nobody’s story. Although this might be why Anne pursues her, if only in her spare time. Because she knows no one else will; and that even she, in the end, will stash Jenny away with the mistress and the wonderful homes, with whatever new lint – good, unusable stuff – she picks up” (319). Although she is the focus of Choi’s novel, Jenny is an insignificant piece of the reported story that Anne’s readers are anticipating, the one that details Pauline’s capture by the SLA, her conversion from hostage to accomplice, and ultimately her trial. Anne reflects on the fact that the time Pauline spent living as a fugitive with Jenny “has already been termed by the fast-thinking TV newsmen as ‘the lost year,’ which means no one need find it” (318). Jenny has almost no part in the publicly reported version of events, and the relationship that develops between the two women during this time does not either. These details, Choi reminds us through the reporter Anne, are pieces of the story that do not ultimately accumulate into the stream of history as it is written and known. In American Woman, Choi diverts our attention from mainstream history and instead takes us through a catalogue of silences and erasures. These silences are, in the words of Anne, the “lint” of history – aspects of experience that do not accumulate to reveal an easily digestible, coherent narrative. Through close attention to various acts of transcription, Choi dramatizes the processes by which the American public of the 1970s and the counterpublic action of the SLA might be created and revised. While most of Jenny’s experiences in American Woman are mediated by various forms of transcription, the bond that develops between Pauline and her

11

QUEERING THE “LOST YEAR”: TRANSCRIPTION …

207

exists outside of any official register and is knowable only through physical contact and fleeting conversation. In writing Patricia Hearst’s “lost year” in the context of a queer relationship, Choi figures this time itself as queer – a detour from chrononormativity that situates bodies as sites of knowledge production and probes the limits of articulated knowledge.

Bibliography Choi, Susan. 2003. American Woman. New York: HarperCollins. Didion, Joan. 2006. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graebner, William. 2008. Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hearst, Patricia. 1975. “Texts of Affidavits Submitted by Patricia Hearst and Her Parents in Bid for Bail.” New York Times, September 24. Weblink no longer available. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5: 631–60. Taylor, Judith. 2013. “Enduring Friendship: Women’s Intimacies and the Erotics of Survival.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 34 (1): 93–113. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Yeh, Grace I. 2010. “Wendy Yoshimura and the Politics of Hugging in the 1970s.” Journal of Asian American Studies 13 (2): 191–218.

CHAPTER 12

The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction Mark West

The summer of 2016 was a summer of the 1960s – at least in American fiction. June saw the publication of Emma Cline’s The Girls, in July David Means’ Hystopia made the Man Booker Prize longlist, while August heralded the publication of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth and Anne Korkeakivi’s Shining Sea. These novels addressed both the momentous events of the period and its shifting emotional terrain: the Manson Family murders, John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the generational divide, PTSD. If this suggests – at the very least – that the sixties remain important for American novelists, this was not quite the case for the critic James Wood, who wrote in his review of Cline’s book that it never entirely succeeds in …making the case that there was anything personally or historically necessary about Cline’s decision to raid the American-culture store and pluck one of the best-known and most lurid

M. West (B) School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_12

209

210

M. WEST

episodes [the Manson Family murders] from the shelf …the book is a poor cousin to superficially similar projects of historical archeology by writers such as Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, and Peter Carey. As I read “The Girls,” my admiration for its many beauties was corrupted by a worming question: “Why this subject?” (Wood 2016)

While I think Wood is being cruel to Cline here, his question is a valid one, though not for the reasons he thinks it is. Two of the novels he cites implicitly – Kunzru’s My Revolutions (2007) and Carey’s His Illegal Self (2008) – Wood himself reviewed, yet he does not note that The Girls is only the most recent example of a type of novel that has established itself over the last 20 years: the contemporary sixties novel. Although it has precursors in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1975) and The Things They Carried (1990), Marge Piercy’s Vida (1979), Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), Susan Daitch’s L.C. (1986), and Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), this strand of American fiction has blossomed since the mid-1990s, marked by the publication of Jennifer Egan’s first novel The Invisible Circus (1995) and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997); by 2018, it amounted to some 40 novels.1 Asking “why this subject?” is valid, then, because it addresses a significant strand of recent American fiction, one which has not yet been fully recognized by critics. This essay is concerned with sixties novels written by writers well-placed to observe the way the period is fast becoming, in Amy Hungerford’s words, “history, not memory” (2008, 416). These writers belong to a generation designated by Jonathan Pontell as Generation Jones – because, as Jeffrey Williams (2016) puts it, the generation is characterized “by a yearning (as in “jonesing”), a feeling that it missed out, arriving after the legendary flourishing of the 1960s” (95) – and by Adam Kelly as “post-baby-boom American writers” or “post-boomer[s]” (Kelly 2011, 393). Born between the late 1950s and, for Pontell, the mid-1960s and, Kelly, the early 1970s, this generation includes Patchett, Means, and Egan, as well as Dana Spiotta, Christopher Sorrentino, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Nell Zink, and Jeffrey Eugenides, all of whom have addressed the sixties in their work. This essay will offer brief readings of three novels that have to date received limited critical attention – Egan’s The Invisible Circus, Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006), and Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) – after first setting out the historical, theoretical, and literary position of these “post-boomers.” The final section of the chapter will address more

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

211

directly something raised in the first: Does the historical fiction these authors write signal a movement away from the historiographic metafiction associated with literary postmodernism, and if so, to what extent?

Narrative Problems In Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008), Stephen J. Burn tentatively uses the term “post-postmodern” to describe American fiction’s re-accommodation of history. He argues that a key difference “between postmodern and post-postmodern fiction …is in the degree of personal history dramatized by the author, and this is linked to alternative treatments of time” (24). For Burn, post-postmodernist writers’ lesser skepticism about linear personal history “represents a younger generation’s more fundamental belief in the shaping influence of temporal process – that the things that happen to you in the past make a difference to who you are in the present” (25). As Burn’s term indicates, the postpostmodernists “develop a conversation with postmodern fiction” (Kelly 2011, 394), which for writers of historical fiction means reckoning with “the problematizing of history by postmodernism” (Hutcheon 1988, xii). In post-boomer novels about the sixties, Linda Hutcheon’s “problem of history” (1988, 17) is also a problem of narrative. The sixties were irruptive, and the problems of integrating the events of this decade into history were registered in narrative terms almost immediately. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), for instance, displayed an “obsession with plots” (Hutcheon 1988, 120), while in The White Album (1979), Joan Didion characterized the “period [which] began around 1966 and continued until 1971” as “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told himself” (11). Sounding like Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, who “wonder[s] whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself” (Pynchon 2000, 66), Didion sensed that she “was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement …[yet] I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility” (1979, 12–13).

212

M. WEST

DeLillo traced this narrative difficulty back to the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination. As he put it in a 1991 episode of the BBC documentary series Omnibus: When Kennedy was shot, something changed forever in America, something opened up, a sense of randomness, deep ambiguity. We lost the narrative thread …The assassination left an emptiness that made everything plausible, made us susceptible to the most incredible ideas and fantasies. We couldn’t seem to find out what happened on even the most basic level. (quoted in Evans 1991)

For DeLillo, Kennedy’s assassination facilitated the kind of narrative world The Crying of Lot 49 depicts, one full of plots and their implications, outlandish or otherwise. His own Libra is, like Pynchon’s novel, full of plots and counterplots, of the construction of plausible narratives and their tailoring for specific (usually political) purposes. As Hutcheon writes of Pynchon’s novels, “his characters discover (or make) their own histories in an attempt to prevent themselves from being the passive victims of the commercial or political plots of others” (1988, 120–21). The irruptive sixties, then, have always been narratively “framed,” as Bernard von Bothmer (2010) has put it (3), for different political purposes, something that can be appreciated by noting just a few of the histories of the period that have been published since. Tom Hayden, one of the authors of the Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement in 1962, tries in The Long Sixties : From 1960 to Barack Obama (2010) to reassert the positive, liberal narrative of the period and its afterlives; Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool : Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997), a book highly interested in the way the sixties has been used by politicians, quotes Newt Gingrich’s conservative narrative of American history in which the sixties features as a “momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism brought to the national elite” (3). This conservative creation of a “bad sixties” (von Bothmer 2010, 54) by Ronald Reagan, and the subsequent right-wing use of the period to popularize conservative ideologies, is the focus of von Bothmer’s Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (2010), while James Berger’s After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (1999) similarly examines the way “Reaganist amnesia …was trying to forget the 1960s, or, rather, to reinvent the 1960s movements for social justice and

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

213

peace as destructive and infantile” (xiv). Across the political spectrum, these framings cast the sixties as a battleground for narratives of political meaning and identity. For post-boomer authors – writing after the “postmodern age[’s] …generalized distrust of official facts, and a blurring of the boundary between events and facts as represented” (Currie 2006, 25) – perpetual contestations of the sixties and conflicting interpretations of the decade’s meanings exacerbate a basic difficulty: how to link together a series of events into a comprehensible and explanatory narrative. If, as Burn (2008) suggests, these writers “more obviously address the idea of a real world” (21), then I want to ask how that is complicated by the legacy of postmodern theorizations of history, offered most prominently by Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), where she elaborates her concept of “historiographic metafiction” (xii). In the work of these post-postmodern, post-boomer writers, as we will see, this complication results in a pronounced anxiety. That anxiety is compounded by the post-boomers’ generational position. Because they were born in the sixties, it is perhaps more accurate to say that contra Hungerford, for them the decade represents a mixture of both history and memory. They were alive during the period, but too young to be fully involved in its upheavals. Thomas Frank, born in 1965, is speaking very literally when he writes that “[f]or me and, I assume, for others my age, the sixties are the beginning of the present” (1997, ix). As such, the post-boomer, post-postmodern writers of sixties novels are dealing not just with a period that is perpetually in political contestation – as Frank, von Bothmer, and Berger show – and not just with a period in which that contestation occurs alongside the re-framing of the production of historical narratives by both theoretical and literary postmodernism (as in the work of Hutcheon, Hayden White, Pynchon, and DeLillo), but also a period which, for them, is partly remembered and partly historical, something learned about after the fact. These historical, theoretical, and generational circumstances combine to reinforce the problematic nature of historical fiction.

The Post-postmodern, Post-boomer Sixties Novel There is no single aesthetic program to which these post-boomer writers conform. Rather, as Andrew Hoberek (2007) has put it, they attest to the way American fiction “has entered a phase of as-yet-uncategorized

214

M. WEST

diversity” (240). That is not to say, however, that certain forms and gestures do not recur across these writers’ work. A brief inventory of the ways a few of these novels deal with the problematic nature of historical fiction after postmodernism may be instructive. The Invisible Circus Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus dramatizes the pursuit of historical knowledge. Set in 1978, it traces 18-year-old Phoebe’s journey around Europe, following in the footsteps of her sister Faith, who had been involved in the counterculture and New Left in San Francisco and Europe, and who died in Italy in 1970, apparently as a result of suicide. At the beginning of this journey, Phoebe fortuitously bumps into Wolf, Faith’s ex-boyfriend, who accompanies her for the rest of it. In their historical relationship to the sixties, Wolf and Phoebe act as counterpoints to each another. Wolf was part of the counterculture and the New Left, but now wants to historicize them. Phoebe, too young to take part, has idealized the sixties both in a general way – she is awed by young people’s ability to effect change – and in a more particular, familial way: she has made Faith into a myth. The novel charts these two characters’ movement toward each other: Phoebe’s ideal loses its sheen after being exposed to Wolf’s historicization – she learns that Faith committed suicide because she could not live with the guilt of responsibility for Red Army Faction violence – and Wolf’s apparently disinterested drive to historicize is revealed to be motivated by his own individual relationship to 1960s politics and his desire to escape guilt for his own actions: he watched Faith jump off a cliff and did not try to stop her. Wolf hopes to dilute his “[u]nfinished business” (Egan 2012, 252) in the larger waters of history. The novel stresses the belatedness of Generation Jones. Its first lines are “[s]he’d missed it” (3), referring to Phoebe, who is “anxious to relive what she’d failed to live even once” (4). The novel, as Martin Paul Eve (2018) has also noted, borrows the structure of the detective story described by Tzvetan Todorov – the story of the crime and the story of the investigation of the crime – which is here transposed onto the story of Faith’s death and Phoebe’s investigation of that death. As Todorov noted, the second story mediates access to the first, and as the detective does, Phoebe goes over the same ground as the victim, retracing Faith’s steps in order to understand how she died. I argue that because

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

215

Phoebe, as a member of Generation Jones (she is 18 in 1978), experiences belatedness, the detective’s method of working through the past becomes particularly attractive. If, for this generation, the sixties are “half ghostly, a transparent outline” (Egan 2012, 72) because they are both memory and history, and because this generation’s members are continually mediating between one and the other, then the detective story is attractive because it, too, begins with a void and goes on to dramatize the establishment of firm historical cause and effect. Furthermore, in the figure of the detective, who repeats actions and retreads ground, we find a version of the post-postmodern writer, who, as Adam Kelly suggests, “begin[s] with postmodernism” (2011, 394) much as the detective “begins” with a body whose presence registers the absence that has brought the detective to this beginning in the first place, an absent presence that still influences the present. One of the distinguishing marks of The Invisible Circus is the way it thematically incorporates the historicization of the sixties. Wolf offers a theory of the counterculture and New Left’s failures centered on its “arrogance” (197), manifested in its confidence of historical mastery. As he puts it, “I remember thinking, Shit, this is going to be huge” (Egan 2012, 195). This memory is testament to the way the counterculture and New Left understood themselves as historical actors, and how they looked forward to the point in the future where their significance would be recognized. Such anticipation of retrospection – “looking forward to looking back” (Cohen 2009, 201) – had an effect on how they behaved in the present, as seen in the novel’s description of the kind of historical event, a “Happening” in San Francisco, that gives it its name: these “reporters” were taking notes on everything that happened, then Richard Brautigan – no joke, Brautigan himself – would type up the notes into “news bulletins”…that got passed around instantly, so not only were people doing all this crazy shit, but a lot of times they were reading about themselves doing it before they’d even finished. (Egan 2012, 195)

In 1978, though, Wolf has “no answers about that time …Only questions” (195). His drive to historicize is in service of asking “what happened? Why didn’t it work? Or did it work, but for some reason I can’t see it?” (195). In short, since the 1960s, he has moved from confidence to doubt about history and historical significance.

216

M. WEST

Eat the Document Switching between the late 1960s/early 1970s and the 1990s, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is populated with characters trying to make sense of the relationship between the two periods. This is most forcefully dramatized in the strand of the novel that features Henry, a Vietnam draft dodger, who contracts and eventually dies from an illness associated with exposure to chemical weapons used in Vietnam. He makes sense of this by understanding it as a moral parable about honor and guilt: he got the disease he should have got had he not dishonestly avoided fighting. Henry knows it does not make sense, but as he says, “[t]his is how my life makes sense. This is how my life signifies something” (Spiotta 2006, 264). This struggle to connect the past with the present also exercises another of the novel’s protagonists, Mary. A former radical, she spends her life on the run, moving from name to name, each with its own identity, and trying to provide a narrative for herself: she imagined in future years there would be time to go over the series of events that led to the one event that inevitably led to the motel room …She knew she would comb over how she came to be involved …Someday she would explain her intentions to someone …surely in years to come she would think about it, over and over again, especially the part where Mary became Freya became Caroline. (14)

Tellingly, the novel shows Mary “thinking about it,” but when she is offered the chance to “explain her intentions to someone” (14) – by her teenage son Jason – she finds she cannot. The sections of the book set in the 1990s are gathered around a radical bookstore in Seattle. One of its customers, a teenager named Josh, begins the novel as an anti-capitalist hacker, only to end it a capitalist apologist, extolling capitalism’s “elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty” (258). In tracing both Josh’s arc in the 1990s and the fate of oppositional politics between the 1960s, when Mary decides to embark upon a bombing campaign, and the 1990s, when teenagers go to shops called “Suburban Guerilla” (257), the novel flirts with co-optation narratives which, through telling simple stories in which effective, pure opposition is appropriated by the powerful, offer a clear account of cause and effect. Jason gets closest to historicizing the sixties and linking his present with that past by figuring out his mother’s real identity. But even he cannot articulate the significance of this, and the novel ends with him

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

217

reflecting on his passing love for the Beach Boys. He gives two reasons for holding onto the records: first, at some point enough time will have gone by of not listening that I’ll listen again …[and] second …I feel compelled to keep these artifacts …because of something I am quite certain will transpire. I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago …in this very specific place and time …Something in that music will recall not just what happened but all of what I felt, all of what I longed for, all of who I used to be. (289–90)

Jason maintains a faith that the cultural artifacts of the 1960s will hold the key to knowledge in the future. If Jason, like his mother earlier, is engaging here in the anticipation of retrospection, then in this case it highlights the role this temporal relationship has on a structural as well as a thematic level. Mary does not conclusively reach the future she desires, and her anticipation of retrospection points further into the novel. But because Jason’s anticipation forms the last section of the novel, Eat the Document ends by projecting into a future that it will not show us; and because that anticipation echoes Mary’s, it ends also by returning to the mode it began with, which encourages us to return to the past, to go over the novel again. This also anticipates that unshown future beyond the novel’s span as one in which a similar return will be undertaken by Jason himself. If this asserts the categorical and continued importance of the sixties to American culture, it also admits that real understanding of it is not yet possible, testifying to the problematic nature of accessing historical knowledge. If, as Kelly (2011) suggests, in post-postmodern fiction “[t]he stress is no longer on the rupture between past and present, as it was in much postmodern fiction, but rather on continuity” (393), then Eat the Document dramatizes how continuity is more of an ideal than an experience. For characters like Henry, Mary, and even Jason, achieving continuity is precisely the problem. On the other hand, in the way Spiotta’s novel highlights its characters’ investigations into the past, and their concern with linking that past to the present, which is reflected structurally by the novel bringing its two time periods together, Eat the Document does seem to hold a “fundamental belief in the shaping influence of temporal process – that the things that happen to you in the past make a difference to who

218

M. WEST

you are in the present,” something Burn suggests is characteristic of postpostmodern writers (2008, 25). The problem for Henry and Mary is less whether the past influences the present, but rather that they are unable to explain how it does, and as a result they either have to knowingly create false stories, like Henry, or they are left, like Mary, imagining a time in the future when this will be possible. Spiotta’s novel remains faithful to the real irruptive nature of the sixties, but in dramatizing the effects of its ruptures, risks a helplessness in the face of history. Trance Like Susan Choi’s American Woman (2003), Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) is a novelization of the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping case. Unlike Choi’s novel, which is more closely focalized through a clearly defined protagonist, Trance is characterized by its roving focalization through an ensemble of characters and by its incorporation of (invented) TV newscasts, newspaper reports, and political communiqués. It dramatizes a would-be revolutionary cell, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), whose kidnapping of the Hearst figure (here renamed Alice Galton) is motivated by the desire to be “committed …drawn in and implicated, [to] move beyond the everyday, into a kind of history, a legend amid the outlaw annals, larger than ideology” (Sorrentino 2005, 363). In this sense, the SLA constitute the last vestiges of the 1960s radicalism that was confident of its historical significance; on the other hand, Sorrentino emphasizes their delusions of grandeur, showing why such radicalism was destined to fail. Combined with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the SLA and the Hearst affair might be said to mark the true end of the sixties. The SLA measure their success by the coverage their actions receive – “Roger drives to the Bay Area, listening to a special radio broadcast, The Kidnapping of Alice Galton: A Year Passes ” (357) – and its leader cannot help himself “stopping to examine the newspaper headlines. Hey, hey, SLA, made page one again today” (343; emphasis in original). If this self-consciousness recalls Brautigan’s bulletins in The Invisible Circus , the “crazy shit” of the period becomes subject to the anticipation of retrospection by Lydia Galton, Alice’s mother, who wonders “where had the world gone?” (364; emphasis in original), and has “little doubt that around the 1990s there would be a television comedy all about the trigger-happy days of the seventies. All this would be funny in the distant

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

219

future!” (365). Like Spiotta’s characters in Eat the Document , Lydia is unable to account for the present and wryly anticipates a kind of co-opted future in which revolutionary politics is fodder for popular comedy. The anticipation of retrospection, wedded to the SLA’s desire for historical confirmation, can be detected, too, in the way that Norman Mailer’s ghostly presence animates the novel. The SLA can be manipulated by the simple mention of his name, along with Tom Wolfe’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s, because in the New Journalism of the 1960s, the group see a form given legitimacy by the kind of cultural immediacy found in Brautigan’s dispatches, by its ability to turn the scramble of events into a definitive history even as that history is in formation. Sorrentino engages, too, with the relationship between history and the novel that Mailer foregrounded in Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), offering, in an Author’s Note at the end of Trance, a vision of history and fiction merging into the kind of hybrid form Mailer sought: “while many of the situations this novel depicts, and the people it portrays, are drawn from a well-documented episode in recent American history, I have disregarded the record whenever it’s served my purpose to do so … Seekers of documentary truth are gently encouraged to look elsewhere” (Sorrentino, 515–16). Sorrentino’s phrasing is important here. By implying that “documentary truth” is a particular kind of truth, Sorrentino is suggesting that truth can be teased away from fact. Truth, here, is understood as limited rather than total.

Contemporary Historical Fiction While these readings are in no way exhaustive, they do, I hope, give an indication of the kinds of repeated gestures that occur across postboomer, post-postmodern accounts of the sixties. If these novels display a kind of drive to interrogate history that might be described as a “historicizing project” (Kelly 2011, 409), then they also foreground the problems faced by that project. The anticipation of retrospection appears as a motif across these texts, the convoluted temporal structure it produces signaling a broader trend across these accounts to present historical investigations in nonlinear ways and/or in ways that emphasize the sixties’ relationship to other historical periods. So, for instance, David Foster Wallace sets his discussion of the 1960s in The Pale King (2011) in the context of the 1980 presidential election, and his characters conceptualize the period

220

M. WEST

in relation to civic ideals set out in the early years of American independence, tracing an arc of civic-mindedness from the Founding Fathers to its “apex in the sixties” (Wallace 2011, 133); Spiotta’s novel switches back and forth between the late 1960s/early 1970s and the 1990s; Egan views the 1960s from the standpoint of 1978, while Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) regards them through the experience of a child of countercultural parents growing up in late 1970s Brooklyn. In addition to Lydia Galton’s bemused projection into a 1990s future, Sorrentino traces the anti-government resentment felt by a Japanese American member of the SLA back to her parents’ internment during World War II, something also highlighted by Choi in American Woman. One of the protagonists of Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing (2002) is a scientist, a contemporary of Einstein, who muses throughout the novel on the nonlinearity of time, and Powers places his depictions of the sixties into a wide-ranging investigation of twentieth-century American racial history. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002) and Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013) are similar in this respect; both books span the majority of the twentieth century, featuring extended sections on the sixties. Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) interrogates the personal and political impact of the Black Panthers’ presence in the Bay Area between the 1960s and the first decade of the twenty-first century; Nell Zink’s Mislaid (2015) begins in the 1960s and runs up to the present day. David Means’ Hystopia (2016) asks readers to consider the sixties not from a different temporal perspective but from a counterfactual version of the same decade. The anxiety about history discussed above, then, is visible across these novels in the way that they are alert to the sixties’ constant re-framing from different historical perspectives. This is a recognition that history is never settled, and in it they might be read as maintaining historiographic metafiction’s emphasis on narrative multiplicity. In other ways, too, the three novels considered here seem to conform to Hutcheon’s descriptions of postmodern historical fiction. Sorrentino’s Trance, for instance, “inscribes and …then subverts its mimetic engagement with the world” (Hutcheon 1988, 20), problematizing its depiction of a “real world” in various ways that are consistent with Hutcheon’s formulation: in its use of “multiple points of view” (117); in its understanding that “[f]acts [can be] superseded by newer and more influential facts” (Sorrentino 2005, 515); by falsifying or inventing historical “facts” in order to highlight how conditional, and possibly erroneous, historical knowledge is. Thus,

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

221

Sorrentino freely admits in his Author’s Note to having “emphasized, diminished, conflated, and omitted incidents and individuals …frequently invented characters and incidents altogether …changed the chronology of events and consciously indulged in anachronisms” (515). All of these techniques are listed by Hutcheon as examples of the way historiographic metafiction problematizes history. Like Trance, Egan’s The Invisible Circus signals its intention to examine historical reality; it is named after a 1967 Diggers event in San Francisco, one copiously archived on the Diggers’ website (“The Invisible Circus”). But, like Trance, and in accordance with Hutcheon’s descriptions of historiographic metafiction, the novel problematizes access to this reality. Influenced by Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962), which taught us that “media imagery obscures as much as it reveals” and showed us “the phoniness of mediated experience” (Egan 2016, 637), one of the main themes of The Invisible Circus is the inevitability of mediation and distortion when appraising history. Early in the novel, Phoebe is shown memorializing Faith through images. She flips through fashion magazines “half expecting to find a picture of Faith” (Egan 2012, 31) and remembers how their father painted hundreds of “sketches of Faith” (39) which lie around the house after she dies. These images form the basis of her idealization of Faith and provide an obstacle to historical knowledge that consequently requires Wolf’s historicizing to overcome. But, as the novel reminds us, historicization is not disinterested; Wolf’s inquiry is personally motivated, which “challeng[es] the implied assumptions of historical statements: objectivity, neutrality, impersonality, and transparency of representation” (Hutcheon 1988, 92). Spiotta’s Eat the Document , too, is interested in the role of the image. In the 1990s, Josh and Miranda wander around Suburban Guerilla, a shop which sells “a calendar with ‘Paris ’68’ on the cover …[a] shower curtain with a drawing of Subcomandante Marcos” (Spiotta 2006, 257) and a “New Left Series” set of playing cards (258). Josh defends “the purity of capitalism,” asking “what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory?” (258). The novel’s examination of the ways commodification distorts history is encapsulated in Josh’s rationale for his defense: “It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?” (258). What these post-postmodern, post-boomer writers are most ambivalent about, in these novels, is metafiction. Sorrentino exiles his most overt self-reflexivity to the Author’s Note, and the television transcripts and

222

M. WEST

newspaper reports in the novel are offered as mimetic devices. The Invisible Circus is, to use Nicholas Dames’ phrase, “more or less realist” (2012, 157) and features less of the play on genre tropes and metafictional techniques that characterize Egan’s later novels The Keep (2006) and A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), respectively. Eat the Document , in its temporal sweep and multiple protagonists, takes a similarly omniscient narrative position to Trance. This apparent minimization of metafictional devices conforms to one of Burn’s “skeleton definitions” (2008, 19) of post-postmodern writing, which he suggests “identifie[s] metafiction as the malignant tissue within the flesh of the postmodern novel” (21). In trying to excise this tissue, he argues, the “post-postmodern writer” has a “tendency …to effect some compromise” between self-reflexivity and more realist forms (21). How, then, do we characterize the kind of historical fiction these writers produce? One way of beginning to answer that question is to acknowledge the concerns gathered under the term “postmodernism.” If we agree with Fredric Jameson (1991) that postmodernism was “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1), then the work of these post-boomers suggests a certain cleaving of work from context: if “the world depicted by postmodern fiction [is] still …the recognizable world facing the post-postmodernists” (Kelly 2011, 399), then the connection between politics and aesthetics is perhaps less symbiotic than hitherto thought. Alternatively, this might register a critical awareness on the part of these post-boomer writers of the limits of postmodern literary forms. Among this group of writers, such an argument was no more explicitly made than by David Foster Wallace in his attacks on the corrosive effects of irony; at the heart of Wallace’s critique of Bret Easton Ellis was the understanding that the aesthetic forms associated with postmodernity contributed to, rather than critiqued, its deleterious economic, social, and political effects. As Wallace put it: “you can defend [American] Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that” (quoted in McCaffery 2012, 26). One might argue that metafiction is minimized in these novels because for these “post-theory” writers (Huehls 2015, 282), the critique that metafiction enacted is now widely accepted, and thus implicit, across historical fiction. We might suggest that writers are happy to admit that “knowledge cannot escape complicity with some meta-narrative, with the fictions that render possible any claim to ‘truth,’ however provisional …no

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

223

narrative can be a natural ‘master’ narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon 1988, 13; emphasis in original). As Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden (2011) suggest, “the contemporary eclipse of postmodernism might …register as its ultimate triumph, as methods of reading or aesthetics once thought to be specifically tied to the postmodern era are now disseminated as reading practices in many, even all, historical periods, and as standard reference points for contemporary art and literature” (292). This perspective is a resolutely historical (and historicist) one, insofar as it maintains the mutually constitutive connection between literary form and the “real world” and, irrespective of postmodernism’s apparent ahistoricism, encourages us to “understand the world depicted by postmodern fiction …as itself historical, as the outcome of a historical process, and as capable of historical understanding” (Kelly 2011, 399). The narrative of contemporary literature that emerges from this goes as follows: postmodernity is still, in Kelly’s words, the “recognizable world” writers inhabit (2011, 399), but postmodern “methods of reading or aesthetics” are now processes associated not with a specific historical period but instead “standard reference points” (Gladstone and Worden 2011, 292). Alongside this, “the world depicted by postmodern fiction” is being historicized. Implicit in this “historicist turn” in “the new postmodernist studies” (Kelly 2011, 392) is the accuracy of Jameson’s theses. But given the continued resonances of Hutcheon’s analyses in these examples of contemporary historical fiction, then her writing – which rejected the Jamesonian view of postmodernism – still remains useful. In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon argues that “the postmodern is not ahistorical or dehistoricized” and through the procedures of historiographic metafiction performs a “critical revisiting of history” (1988, xii). If we accept both this and the seeming conclusion from our readings of postboomer, post-postmodernist novels – that they bear some of the identifying marks of historiographic metafiction – then the question becomes not one of a post-postmodern “return” to history, but rather, to what extent does post-postmodern historical fiction differ from postmodern historical fiction? This question animates Elodie Rousselot’s concept of “neo-historical fiction” (2014, 1). Inasmuch as it offers “continuities” (1) with historiographic metafiction, neo-historical fiction – which “consciously re-interprets, rediscovers and revises key aspects of the period it

224

M. WEST

returns to” and “conduct[s] an active interrogation of that past” (2) – is an instructive concept. Indeed, in suggesting that neo-historical fiction’s acknowledgment of the problems of history is more “implicit” and less “disruptive” than historiographic metafiction (5), Rousselot’s analyses chime with Gladstone’s and Worden’s view of post-postmodernism. All read it as developing and recalibrating postmodern techniques rather than rejecting them outright. Where the term neo-historical fiction is perhaps less useful, and where it might diverge from the “post-theory” narrative offered by Mitchum Huehls and by Judith Ryan in The Novel After Theory (2006), is in Rousselot’s claim that “the ‘neo-historical’ novel [i]s a coherent and recognizable sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction” (2). Whether or not one agrees with this claim is a question of what one understands “post-theory” to mean – whether it refers to a particular group of writers or to the wider state of contemporary fiction. Despite the wide range of work gathered under Rousselot’s term – from contemporary British neo-Victorian fiction to the work of Michael Chabon – it is possible to see neo-historical fiction as a “sub-genre” if one tends toward Andrew Hoberek’s emphasis on “the heterogeneity of contemporary fiction” (2007, 236). This might allow for some areas of the fictional field to have “escaped” theory’s influence and, in historical fiction specifically, to still maintain a faith in “teleology, causality, continuity” (Hutcheon 1988, 90). That said, the examples of such heterogeneity that Hoberek offers – “middle-class realism,” “comic-book magical realism,” and “picaresques” (2007, 236) – do not necessarily imply a lack of theoretical influence. Whatever position one takes on those arguments, what both of these conceptions of theory’s influence on the novel reveal is the continued importance of Hutcheon’s analyses for considerations of historical fiction. Rousselot’s concept is useful to the extent that it shows how far (or not) contemporary historical fiction diverges from Hutcheon’s definitions, and if it is weakened by overstating the case for the distinctiveness of “neohistorical fiction,” that is because Hutcheon’s work has been so influential as to make certain distinctions between types of historical fiction difficult to uphold. Assessing the place of historiographic metafiction, as a particularly postmodern conception of historical fiction, in assessments of so-called postpostmodern writers – as this essay has done – involves examining how post-postmodern novels conceptualize the relationship between history and fiction. As we have seen, the contemporary sixties novel explores that relationship in various ways: in the interaction between myth-making and

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

225

historicization; in fictionalizations that enable history to “signify something”; pace Mailer, in the different “truths” of fiction and history; in figuring the anticipation of retrospection as beginning a process of historical understanding that defers completion; and in recognizing how history is constantly re-framed by other histories and new narratives. Such variety might attest to the disparate or heterogeneous nature of contemporary American fiction, but it is also testament to the vigorousness of historical fiction’s investigation of its own possibilities. In the contemporary sixties novel, that investigation is impelled by an anxiety about history emerging from historical, literary, and theoretical circumstances. Such anxiety manifests in the dually held convictions within this body of writing: that it is worth trying to account for history even if it is difficult (or even impossible) to achieve, and that such an attempt must remain attentive to the problems of history Hutcheon and others have revealed. In this sense, the writers discussed here have moved a little beyond those analyzed by Amy Elias (2001), who “theorize and ironically desire history rather than access it through discovery and reconstruction” (xvii). The contemporary sixties novel is less ironic and has more faith in “discovery and reconstruction” (Elias 2001, xvii) though not so much as to eradicate the “problem of history” (Hutcheon 1988, 17).

Note 1. Beyond The Invisible Circus and American Pastoral, these novels are Toni Morrison, Paradise (1997); James Ellroy, The Cold Six-Thousand (2001); Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2002); T. C. Boyle, Drop City (2003); Susan Choi, American Woman (2003); Neil Gordon, The Company You Keep (2003); Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003); Russell Banks, The Darling (2004); Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind (2005); Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (2005); Joyce Carol Oates, Black Girl/White Girl (2006); Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (2006); Steve Erickson, Zeroville (2007); Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (2007); Paul Auster, Invisible (2009); James Ellroy, Blood’s a Rover (2009); Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (2009); Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009); Libby Fischer Hellman, Set the Night on Fire (2010); Stephen King, 11/22/63 (2011); David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011); Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue (2012); Lauren Groff, Arcadia (2012); Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens (2013); Cathleen Schine, Fin and Lady (2013); Bill Morris, Motor City Burning (2014);

226

M. WEST

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015); Jane Smiley, Early Warning (2015); Nell Zink, Mislaid (2015); Emma Cline, The Girls (2016); David Means, Hystopia (2016); Anne Korkeakivi, Shining Sea (2016); Ann Patchett, Commonwealth (2016); Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone (2017); Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists (2018); A. G. Lombardo, Graffiti Palace (2018); and Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018).

Bibliography Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum. Cohen, Samuel. 2009. After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Currie, Mark. 2006. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dames, Nicholas. 2012. “Theory and the Novel.” n+1 14: 157–69. Didion, Joan. 1979. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster. Egan, Jennifer. 2012. The Invisible Circus. London: Corsair. Egan, Jennifer. 2016. “A Note by Jennifer Egan.” In The New Yorker Book of The 60s: Story of a Decade, edited by Henry Finder, 637–39. London: William Heinemann. Elias, Amy J. 2001. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Evans, Kim (dir.). 1991. “The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” Omnibus, September 27. London: BBC TV. Eve, Martin Paul. 2018. “Jennifer Egan.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First-Century American Novelists, edited by George Parker Anderson, 75–86. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gladstone, Jason, and Daniel Worden. 2011. “Introduction: Postmodernism, Then.” Twentieth-Century Literature 57 (3–4): 291–308. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” TwentiethCentury Literature 53 (3): 233–47. Huehls, Mitchum. 2015. “The Post-Theory Theory Novel.” Contemporary Literature 56 (2): 280–310. Hungerford, Amy. 2008. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.” American Literary History 20 (1–2): 410–19.

12

THE CONTEMPORARY SIXTIES NOVEL: POST-POSTMODERNISM …

227

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kelly, Adam. 2011. “Beginning with Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 57 (3–4): 391–422. McCaffery, Larry. 2012. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.” In Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn, 21–52. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Pynchon, Thomas. 2000. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Vintage. Rousselot, Elodie. 2014. “Introduction: Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction.” In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary NeoHistorical Fiction, edited by Elodie Rousselot, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sorrentino, Christopher. 2005. Trance. London: Vintage. Spiotta, Dana. 2006. Eat the Document. New York: Scribner. “The Invisible Circus.” Digger Archives, n.d. http://www.diggers.org/diggers/ incircus.html. Von Bothmer, Bernard. 2010. Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Wallace, David Foster. 2011. The Pale King. New York: Little, Brown. Williams, Jeffrey J. 2016. “Generation Jones and Contemporary US Fiction.” American Literary History 28 (1): 94–122. Wood, James. 2016. “Making the Cut.” The New Yorker, May 30. http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/the-girls-by-emma-cline.

CHAPTER 13

“What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and the Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia Diletta De Cristofaro

The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of alternate history novels, that is, novels whose worlds “diverg[e] at a specified point from the normalized narrative of the real past ” (Singles 2013, 7; emphasis in original), including examples by critically acclaimed and established American writers, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). As Matthew SchneiderMayerson (2009) argues, while alternate history or the counterfactual “has been pursued in print since Classical Greece” and while “the production of cartoons, films, and stories increased sharply in the wake of the Holocaust, which continues to provide subject matter for alternate historians,” the establishment of alternate history as a generic label is a recent phenomenon (63–64). Indeed, the founding of the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History in 1995 “defined the alternate history

D. De Cristofaro (B) School of English, Drama and Creative Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_13

229

230

D. DE CRISTOFARO

as a literary category and became a mechanism to draw and police the borders of the genre” (64).1 Focusing on an example of this growing body of contemporary writing, David Means’ 2016 novel Hystopia, set in a world in which President John F. Kennedy survives several assassination attempts and pursues the Vietnam War in his third term, this chapter considers the relationship between alternate history and the postmodern turn in historiography. Not only does Hystopia emphasize the narrative nature of history as typical of this turn, but the text also reflects upon the shape that our historical narratives take. Hystopia foregrounds the constructedness of the “sense of an ending” (Kermode 2000) – namely, the way we use narrative endings to impose a univocal order on the chaos of historical contingency – and in so doing fosters historical agency against the determinism intrinsic to this mode of emplotment. Although, as I will outline later on, my analysis of the understanding of history articulated by Hystopia differs from Kathleen Singles’ arguments about the “‘history’ in alternate history” (2013, 26), her definition of the genre as that which diverges “from the normalized narrative of the real past ” (7; emphasis in original) already points to the foundation of the relationship between alternate history and postmodern theories of historiography: the notion of narrative. The postmodern turn in historiography can indeed be summarized through F.R. Ankersmit’s theory that “we know [historical reality] only in and by its representations” (1994, 190): that is, narratives about the past. Where modernity’s key belief is the neutrality and objectivity of our representations of the world, which entails the conception of the time of history as a neutral and objective way of coordinating events in a homogeneous continuum and single line of causality, postmodernity is a “discursive condition” that challenges this neutrality as a mere construct (Ermarth 2011). As Hayden White (1987) writes, the historically real, the past real, is that to which I can be referred only by way of an artifact that is textual in nature. The indexical, iconic, and symbolic notions of language, and therefore of texts, obscure the nature of this indirect referentiality and hold out the possibility of (feign) direct referentiality, create the illusion that there is a past out there that is directly reflected in the texts. But even if we grant this, what we see is the reflection, not the thing reflected. (209)

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

231

Since the “historically real” is ultimately “textual in nature,” for it can only be accessed via the texts that construct it, postmodern theories argue that we need to turn our attention to the “systems of meaning production (the modes of emplotment) that historiography share[s] with literature and myth” (White 1987, 44), as well as to the power dynamics and agendas that inevitably inform historians’ choice of modes of emplotment. The very idea of history’s neutrality and objectivity – or “direct referentiality,” in White’s words – signals an instrument of power, for within this conception, “any particular status quo is to be regarded as the inevitable outcome of an inexorable development, whose right of existence is beyond dispute and to whose extension into the future we must accede” (Wesseling 1991, 110). Naturally, “unlike literary fictions, such as the novel, historical works are made up of [that is, emplot] events that exist outside the consciousness of the writer” (White 1973, 6). Yet, since history and fiction writing do share the same narrative techniques, historical fiction, alternate history included, affords a unique perspective on our way of emplotting events in order to impose a meaning on the historical sequence.2 Scholars have underlined the relationship between postmodern theories of history and alternate history. Singles (2013), for instance, provides a detailed overview of postmodern understandings of history, arguing that “the discussion of history as narrative …in the context of the socalled ‘linguistic turn’ does indeed have important consequences for the investigation of alternate history” (22). Similarly echoing the centrality of narrativity to postmodern theories of history, Karen Hellekson (2001) emphasizes how alternate historical fictions “foreground the ‘constructedness’ of history and the role narrative plays in this construction” (5). Gavriel Rosenfeld (2002) goes as far as to claim that “the rise of postmodernism, with its blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction …has encouraged the rise of alternate history” (92). Critical divergences occur, however, around the political potential of alternate history to disrupt canonized narratives of the past and their supposed objectivity, as well as around the genre’s approach to the question of historical agency. On the one hand, Amy J. Ransom argues (2010, 261) that “alternate ‘fictional’ timelines reinforce the ‘real’ timeline of one master narrative of History ‘as we know it’.” This point is also put forward by Singles (2013):

232

D. DE CRISTOFARO

alternate histories reflect the postmodern tension between artificiality and authenticity, but they do not deny the existence of a real past, nor do they deny the validity of a normalized narrative of the real past. Rather than challenge our notions of history, or call into question our ability to know the past through narrative, they conservatively support the normalized narrative of the real past. (7; emphasis in original)

This is because, in order to recognize these narratives as alternate histories in the first place, we need to be aware of the “normalized narrative of the real past.” Schneider-Mayerson equally maintains that “rather than provide a conflicting version of a dominant historical reading – as ‘history from below’ does, for example – and thus challenge the foundation of historical objectivity, alternate histories …reinforce traditional western notions of historiographical objectivity even as they appear to subvert them” (2009, 67). On the other hand, Hellekson (2001) points out that “the very fact that one can posit a ‘history’ that never happened implies the changeability of history and the element of chance that was involved in constituting our own world” (34). Rosenfeld similarly maintains that “the central allohistorical principle that everything could have been different …erode[s] the power of deterministic worldviews” (2002, 92). As Elisabeth Wesseling (1991) summarizes this theoretical position, “alternate histories are inspired by the notion that any given historical situation implies a plethora of divergent possibilities that far exceed the possibilities which happened to have been realized” and that “a single possibility is often realized by the forceful suppression of alternatives” (100). This notion has the subversive potential to “debunk canonized history” not only in that it “alter[s] established facts,” but also in that it “disrupt[s] its basic logic,” for “such stories ridicule the idea of history as an orderly and meaningful process by inverting and exaggerating those features of the narrative representation of history which sustains this illusion” (107). My chapter’s analysis is aligned with this second theoretical position. I argue, first, that in foregrounding the narrative nature of history, Hystopia shows how privileging certain historical narratives as objective over others often serve to prop up and legitimize power structures. Second, I maintain that the novel exposes the constructedness of “the idea of history as an orderly and meaningful process” (Wesseling 1991, 107) by drawing attention to the mode of emplotment based on the sense of an ending and to how this retrospective deterministic patterning of the temporal sequence undermines historical agency.

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

233

While the reader’s understanding of Hystopia as alternate history depends on what scholarship of the genre commonly terms the “point of divergence” from the normalized narrative of the past – the fact that the Vietnam War rages on in 1970 under Kennedy’s leadership – and while this point of divergence might be taken to reinforce the normalized narrative of the past, as Ransom (2010), Singles (2013), and SchneiderMayerson (2009) would have it, Hystopia does in fact question the validity and objectivity of canonized history. As one of Means’ characters, Klein, puts it in one of the novel’s many metafictional reflections on the nature of history and our narrative modes of emplotment, “history misses the point” (Means 2016, 45). Together with the references to the Vietnam War, Kennedy and other past events or figures from real life, Means’ frequent self-reflexive gestures align Hystopia with postmodernist historiographic metafictions, famously defined by Linda Hutcheon (1988) as “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” so that their “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs …is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). Indeed, the context in which Klein utters the above pronouncement is significant in framing Hystopia’s self-reflexive emphasis on history’s constructedness. Klein, a Captain in the Psych Corps, which in the novel’s alternate history was created by Kennedy to treat traumatized war veterans, is discussing war history: “take the Somme, for example. The big fuck-up …You had something like sixty thousand lads – and they were lads – die in the first day of battle …but do historians mention it? Hell no. Are we willing to call Nam the Little Fuck-Up? Christ no” (45–46). War history “misses the point,” therefore, because it often constructs its normalized narratives of the past to abide by nationalistic agendas and propaganda, covering up people’s suffering and the failures of the nation-state. Klein’s emphasis on power dynamics chimes with postmodern deconstructions of traditional historiography, which expose the agendas intrinsic to history’s supposedly objective accounts of the past. Further complicating the distinction between history and narrative, Means’ Hystopia consists of an alternate history novel within an alternate history novel. The editor’s notes, author’s notes, and interviews that frame Hystopia introduce us to its fictional author, the traumatized veteran Eugene Allen, who has written the novel as an alternate version of his “reality” in which Kennedy pursues the Vietnam War having survived several assassination attempts. These notes and interviews explain the

234

D. DE CRISTOFARO

context of Allen’s Hystopia: key historical events in this alternate world, from which Allen’s novel slightly deviates in turn, as well as Allen’s medical conditions and his family history, specifically his sister Meg’s relationship with a soldier, Billy-T, who is killed in action, and her subsequent breakdown, which forms the backdrop to Allen’s story. These paratextual elements also recount the novel’s publication history, for the text is found and published after Allen’s suicide, and they include engagements with his work by both historians and literary critics, an element that signals the concern of Means’ Hystopia with the narrative nature of history from the outset. Indeed, the documents prefacing and postfacing Allen’s Hystopia seek to provide Allen’s fictional narrative with the mark of historical authenticity – as discussed below, many of these sources testify to just how realistic and “true” Allen’s novel is, despite its nature of alternate history – but in Means’ metafictional play they outline an alternate history to the reader’s knowledge of the history of the Vietnam War. Just as with Klein’s pronouncement, the emphasis is on the possibility of manipulating, and even fabricating, historical narratives, so that the very notion of historical authenticity comes under scrutiny. Crucially, if, according to Singles (2013), “bibliographies, footnotes, newspaper articles, reviews, and other fictional sources” that often accompany alternate history articulate “no true epistemological questioning of the normalized narrative of the real past,” for they “create a fictional past that is just as ‘real’ within the fiction as the one that we know” (61, 66), in Means’ Hystopia these documents arguably do call into question the very nature of historical knowledge by creating a double alternate history that blurs the boundary between fiction and the “real” past even within the novel’s universe. While Allen’s fiction is an alternate history of his world, in its inaccuracy the novel paradoxically ends up revealing important aspects of this “reality” to the wider public. Drawing on his own experiences with war trauma, as well as his sister’s, Allen creates a fictional universe that is close to his own fictional world, as fashioned by Means. Yet the world Allen depicts in his Hystopia does have points of divergence from his “reality.” For instance, from the editor’s notes, we learn that, in the world where Allen writes, Kennedy was finally killed after seven attempts in Springfield, Illinois, on September 17, 1970, while Allen’s Hystopia has the assassination happen in mid-August 1970 in Galva, Illinois, both obviously contradicting the historical records of Kennedy’s assassination in the reader’s real-life knowledge. The interviews and editor’s notes that frame Allen’s Hystopia are there, however, to testify that the veteran’s

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

235

“bending [of] history” reveals his own world to itself (Means 2016, 11), including – impossible as this may sound – events that happened only after Allen commits suicide as well as a top-secret and problematic treatment, “enfolding,” created by the Government to manage war trauma. As one of the interviewees metafictionally puts it, “history has always had a hard time allying itself to the novel. The young man’s creative effort, disturbed though it might be, is realistic to the extent that it captures the tension of history meeting the present moment” (16). As is typical of the alternate history genre, Allen’s Hystopia and by extension Means’ Hystopia “explor[e] the past less for its own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the present” (Rosenfeld 2002, 93): in particular, upon the nature and endurance of historical trauma as well as the life of war veterans in a post-Vietnam and post-9/11 context alike. In interviews, Means has indeed declared that he is “glad the book’s popularity has helped advance the dialogue about how to help those who are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” since he wanted Hystopia to “becom[e] part of the bigger conversation about the nature of war and its effect on the country and on the individuals who fight these wars that seem to go on and on” in a post-9/11 world (quoted in Hertz 2016).3 Where “history misses the point,” to go back to Klein’s claim, Allen’s fiction – and by extension that of Means – does not and it has heuristic significance precisely because it does not claim to be an objective narrative of the past. At the core of those arguments that discount the potential of alternate historical fiction to disrupt canonized history lies the idea that “in alternate history, the past is knowable” (Singles 2013, 59). Hystopia, however, insists on the notion that the “real” past can never fully be known, not only through the double alternate history but through a key element of Means’ alternate history: enfolding. In both the layering of alternate history and enfolding, the “real” past is buried under competing narratives which underline the human need for stories that impose an order on historical contingency as well as the constructedness of these stories. Combining a drug, Tripizoid, with the re-enactment of the original trauma, enfolding treats the many Vietnam veterans by erasing war trauma and all events closely associated to it (the “Causal Events Package”).4 As Allen outlines in his author’s notes, re-enacting traumatic events “turns (enfolds) the drama/trauma inward” so that the patient forgets about the original trauma, “becoming fully immersed in the reenacted [sic] trauma’s nullification of the real trauma” (Means 2016, 18). Once enfolded, one no longer has access to one’s traumatic past so that

236

D. DE CRISTOFARO

this history remains a nowhere, to pun on the title of Means’ novel, which recalls the word “utopia,” from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place). Of course, Means’ title also recalls the opposite of utopia: dystopia. As Means explains, the neologism “hystopia” derives from the fact that he “was creating a dystopian novel in a specific historical moment” but, he continues, he “was thinking about the word ‘hysteria,’ too” (quoted in Hertz 2016). Indeed, with the dystopian attempt to manage war trauma by erasing it, it is history itself that becomes the object of the Government’s hysteria. On the one hand, enfolding does not always work and, when it fails, it doubles the original trauma, so that Hystopia’s plot centers around a failed enfolded veteran, Rake, who – as a result of the treatment going awry – embarks on a killing spree and kidnaps a girl, Meg (based on Allen’s sister), herself enfolded to cope with her boyfriend dying in the war. On the other hand, as Amy Weiss-Meyer (2016) points out in her review of Hystopia, the dystopian implication of the novel is that “the more successful the treatment is in blurring painful memories, the less reason there is for a country still at war ever to withdraw.” In other words, the meddling of power with narratives of the past serves, as ever, as a way for power to legitimize and support itself. Even those that are successful enfolds – like Singleton, a member of the Psych Corps tasked with finding Rake – long to recuperate their lost past, and the novel sees these characters constructing a proliferation of conflicting narratives to make sense of their inaccessible personal history.5 Hystopia, however, suggests that narrative is all we have when it comes to the “real” past. The very idea of enfolding is intertwined with the postmodern notion of history as narrative. Significantly, enfolding is one of the aspects of his world that Allen captures through his alternate history novel, even if he could not have known about the treatment. As an enfolded veteran muses in one of the interviews that frame Hystopia, “maybe the treatment process wasn’t called enfolding, but the process I went through was similar to what he describes. As far as I knew, it was top-secret shit …All the same, man, he got it right” (Means 2016, 11). Enfolding is seemingly just an element in Allen’s plot and yet one that ends up reinforcing the heuristic power of narratives since, after all, the “historically real” is “textual in nature” (White 1987, 209). The way in which enfolding is described in the author’s notes perfectly encapsulates the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, history and narrative that lies at the core of Hystopia. The curative process, Allen writes, depends on a “mysterious blurring of the line between what happened and what is re-enacted. One

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

237

folds into the other” with the creation of an “artificial apex call[ing] the originating events into question” (Means 2016, 18). To further complicate these already collapsing distinctions between reality and its narrative reconstructions, the editor’s notes disclose that the process of enfolding is considered bogus by the very scientists who created it. The paradox is, however, that the cure is in fact often effective, so that the “claim of its bogus nature [i]s itself partly bogus” (21). Similarly to Allen’s book, which openly positions itself as a mere construct but ends up being more realistic than supposedly objective representations of the past, enfolding, an ostensibly bogus treatment, ends up being effective, at least to the extent that patients do generally forget the originating trauma, though they might still long to recuperate it. If Allen invents in his novel a way of dealing with trauma “based on the primacy of stories – on the notion that retelling events can serve as an antidote to explosion” (Weiss-Meyer 2016), it is clear that, through Hystopia itself, he is telling a story to cope with trauma: not only war trauma but the trauma of his sister’s mysterious disappearance from a hospital where she had gone to recover from her breakdown. As his best friend Buddy discloses in an interview, throughout the writing of Hystopia, when Meg’s body had not been found yet and Allen still did not know what had happened to her, he kept repeating “what’s the plot, man?” (Means 2016, 324), a question that underscores how his purpose in writing a novel about a woman named Meg was to impose a narrative order on his own experiences and those of his sister. Allen’s suicide, however, suggests that his storytelling cure – the narrative order he tried to conjure up out of his trauma – failed. The issue here is that narrative is just a precarious imposition of order and meaning on trauma, which transcends order and meaning tout court. “Traumatic memory is not narrative,” warns one of the epigraphs to Means’ Hystopia, taken from Jonathan Shay’s study of PTSD, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994); “rather, it is experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory replay of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen, heard, smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments” (Shay 1994, 172). The narrative re-enactment of the traumatic event and the cause-effect links that lead to it at the core of enfolding appear, therefore, as fragile constructions made out of such disconnected fragments. As Billy-T puts it in a vision to Meg, “fuck plot and fuck story and fuck the way one thing fits to another and fuck cause and effect, because there wasn’t none [in Vietnam], and

238

D. DE CRISTOFARO

if there was we didn’t see much of it” (Means 2016, 159). Hardly by chance, Allen’s editor underlines how the Grid symbol – denoting a transitional area in which enfolded patients live for a while before being released into the wider community – connotes an attempt to “systemize the unholdable” (22). Rake, who kidnaps Meg from the Grid, comes to represent in Allen’s novel the return of this repressed “unholdable,” a chaos that refuses to be systemized, notwithstanding the Government’s hysterical efforts to control it. Rake explicitly sets himself in opposition to those whose job is to find “some semblance of order in all this madness,” the Psych Corps (31). In his own words, he is a “nightmare” who is going to haunt the Grid (160). Even beyond trauma, however, Hystopia emphasizes that historical narratives are themselves a precarious attempt at systemizing the unholdable of historical contingency. Hystopia returns time and again to the human need for narratives as our way of making sense of time and, specifically, to how we use the sense of an ending to impose a univocal order retrospectively on the chaos of historical contingency, all the while underlining the constructedness and determinism of this mode of emplotment. According to Frank Kermode (2000), “the end confer[s] organization and form on the temporal structure” (45). Without an end, time is pure, disorganized, and meaningless succession. We thus use the end – either projected in the future or in terms of events that we can interpret as endings in the present or past, such as historical turning points like wars – to make sense of time and construct a retrospective concordance between beginning, middle, and end, imposing a cohesive order on the historical sequence. The risk of the sense of an ending, however, is that it “closes down time by conferring a spurious sense of inevitability on the sequence actually realized. The very possibility of possibility [which was there as events were unfolding] is ultimately eliminated” (Morson 1994, 38). As alternate history – that is, a work of fiction guided by the notion that events could have developed in a different way from how they did – Hystopia emphasizes this sense of possibility within the sequence of historical events actually realized and challenges the sense of an ending with its construction of a necessary single line of causality. At the same time, it acknowledges the comforting sense-making function that this construct performs. Nowhere is this engagement with the sense of an ending as a comforting, but ultimately deterministic, mode of emplotment clearer than in Singleton’s frequent musings about writing the report of his mission to find Meg and terminate Rake. Throughout this mission, Singleton is

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

239

guided by two principles. First, the importance of constantly repeating briefs about Meg and Rake to allow a gut feeling about patterns connecting people and events to emerge, for “if [a detail] matters, we’ll only know in retrospect” (Means 2016, 68). Second, the knowledge that operation plans, including war operation plans in Vietnam, are written only once the operation is over and then backdated, “to look retrospectively like it all fit together” (323). These principles encapsulate the workings of the sense of an ending as a mode of emplotment that gives shape and meaning to a disorganized temporal sequence by making events fit into a single line of causality, retroactively eliminating anything that deviates from this line to produce a sense of inevitable, rather than contingent, development. And indeed, as the final events of his mission unfold, Singleton keeps projecting beyond the end of the mission, considering which events he will include and which he will not in his backdated operation plan and report. To write these documents effectively, Klein instructs Singleton, one needs “the gumption to go back and revise history,” creating a “subtext of preordained domination. A twisting of failure into success ” (242, 270; emphasis in original). In retrospectively imposing an order and coherence on the sequence of events within the mission through the sense of an ending, Singleton knows he needs to ensure that everything fits a narrative pattern which, in its complicity with the state apparatus, consists in twisting even the Psych Corps’ failures into successes. After all, as Klein admonishes Singleton, the gumption to revise history according to this narrative pattern is what one needs to ascend to positions of power, an element that once again signals Hystopia’s postmodern critique of the imbrication of historical narratives with power, especially those articulated by official records and canonized history. Importantly, the comforting appearance of meaningfulness, emerging from what is just a disorganized and random temporal sequence through the sense of an ending, also entails a sense of things being preordained: that is, Means suggests, the erasure of historical contingency and thus of the space for free will and the agency to shape the course of events through one’s actions. Singleton slowly begins to believe that his entire mission – including his falling in love with Wendy, another Psych Corps agent, against regulations – is being carefully orchestrated by the Corps to create a more advanced form of treatment than enfolding; in other words, that his agency is limited and his actions are the result of “string-pulling at the highest level” (139). Meg and Rake, it turns out, are both connected to Singleton’s enfolded trauma, the death of his friend Billy-T, and rumors

240

D. DE CRISTOFARO

have begun to spread that exchanging memories between people who have a common enfolded trauma produces a “natural memory outside of the traumatic material,” fully rehabilitating the subject by counteracting the desire to recuperate this traumatic material (283; emphasis in original). “Only when the story is over and the report is written can the truth [about whether everything was scripted by the Corps or not] be known fully,” Singleton repeats to himself, taking confidence from the sense-making function of the end (238). But of course, no “truth” can be known, even at the end of the mission: The “truth” for Singleton is just a story constructed by the writing of the report. It is for his own sense of sanity (284) that Singleton decides to hold on to the sense of an ending, namely, to the comforting idea that there is a pattern and meaning to his life story and history more broadly, and to write down in his report that Klein arranged the mission as a form of rehabilitation. And yet Singleton still feels cheated by the ending of his mission, for while he had been hoping for an “apex of all narratives line leading to [him killing] Rake …[as] a beautiful purge of inner tension” (265), once he does find Rake, the latter is already dead. Indeed, the ending of Allen’s Hystopia and the final notes that frame Means’ Hystopia underline how the sense of an ending, although we consistently use it to make sense of time and history, is just a fragile construct, constantly threatened by the chaos of historical contingency and competing versions of the past. The conclusion of Allen’s Hystopia reports the rumors that flourish around Wendy, Singleton, Meg, and Hank, the latter being another enfolded veteran and former friend of Rake’s who manages to trick Rake into taking part in the duel that will kill him. These rumors foreground the constructedness of the sense of an ending by articulating many different versions of what happens to the four characters once Rake’s life is over and they have managed to collate the various interconnected pieces of their traumas without fully reliving the traumas themselves. All these different versions, however, stress “the beautiful ending” (310): four people sharing their stories and memories, without fully unfolding, and finally finding peace – a hopeful ending all the more necessary in what Allen describes “as an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair” (312). Enfolded veterans spread these rumors, with their emphasis on a beautiful, serene, and hopeful ending, because they need to believe in the comforting fiction of a solution to their longing to recuperate a trauma they know will only make them suffer even

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

241

further. After all, according to Kermode’s argument, it becomes particularly pressing to achieve the sense of an ending at times of crisis, when we need to believe in an ending that will offer a resolution to this crisis and make sense of everything that came before, including our suffering. Those veterans who, like Singleton, have full confidence in the Psych Corps tell the versions of these rumors that make the “structure of the conspiracy [namely, the idea that the mission was aimed at experimenting with a more advanced form of treatment] …tight and believable” (313). Others tell the versions that emphasize free will, suggesting that “chance put [the four] together, necessity emerging only in retrospect” (313). The first category of people fully believes in the sense of an ending, in a necessary preordained pattern – the Psych Corps’ conspiracy – that is revealed at the end of the mission. The second category of people instead underlines how this sense of necessity is something that emerges only in retrospect and is thus a constructed order imposed on pure chance – and a precarious one at that. Hystopia’s frame narrative confirms the novel’s adherence to this second understanding of time and history, one that preserves space for contingency and agency. From Hystopia’s frame, we know that Allen’s novel is his own way of constructing a comforting sense of an ending for the life of his sister, who was killed by a lunatic, her body found violated after years of the family not knowing what had happened to her. It is not only the plot of Meg’s disappearance that escapes Allen in writing Hystopia – as mentioned, he obsessively repeats the question “what’s the plot, man?” (324) – but also the sense of an ending itself. As the interviews with his friend Buddy reveal, Allen was not convinced by the ending of his novel, for although the rumors granted Meg a happy ending with Hank, this conclusion left his desire for revenge unsatisfied, an element metafictionally signaled by Singleton’s dissatisfaction with Rake already being dead once he finds him. Yet the fragment handwritten by Allen – found taped at the back of the manuscript, and included in the notes that postface his Hystopia – suggests that what is ultimately at stake in this lack of satisfaction with the novel’s conclusion is the realization that the sense of an ending is just a fictive order imposed on historical contingency. In the fragment, Allen imagines the moment in which a young cop finds his sister’s body in the woods. The cop begins to postulate that the killer must be somebody who has been in Vietnam and experienced trauma. Yet, years later, the cop revisits this moment and ascribes this explanation to his inexperience, musing

242

D. DE CRISTOFARO

a rookie cop – or a young cop – made up for his deficiencies, and his fears, by creating an inner narrative that was, above all, coherent; he – or she – saw a causal sense of one thing leading to another; whereas the older, wiser cop, or the retired officer, understood that the terminal result – a dead body – was often of dispirited, random, windblown, senseless events. (336)

Where a rookie cop finds comfort in the sense of an ending, namely, in a coherent narrative pattern that makes sense of the sequence of events by conferring on it a sense of inevitability, the older, wiser cop knows that history is just a random sequence that does not follow any necessary pattern. Singles (2013) maintains that “alternate histories feature a paradoxical notion of contingency and necessity …The point of divergence relies upon the principle of contingency, while the continuing variance from the normalized narrative of the real past – that is, the rest of the narrative – relies on the principle of necessity” (9). Against this type of critical argument that ultimately denies the potential of alternate historical fictions to disrupt normalized narratives of the past, I argue that Hystopia insists on the contingency of history through the critique of the sense of an ending embodied by the nature of the conclusion to Allen’s Hystopia – rumors and constructs – as well as by the fragment in the frame narrative. The novel emphasizes how history has no intrinsic or necessary order. Rather, chiming with the postmodern understanding of history and the debunking of the presumed objectivity of canonized histories, Hystopia draws attention to how it is our modes of emplotment that seek to make sense of this contingency through narrative patterns like the sense of an ending.

Notes 1. On the distinction between alternate history and the counterfactual, see Singles (2013): “alternate histories are works of fiction, counterfactual histories are not. Unlike counterfactual histories, alternate histories feature both a fictional world narrated and a narrator that are ontologically independent of the world of the reader” (7; emphasis in original). With regard to the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, it is interesting to note that both The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union were winners and, more broadly, that “almost two thirds of Sidewise winners or runners-up are American, and the most popular topics deal with themes directly relevant to U.S. history, often in an intentionally nationalistic manner” (Schneider-Mayerson 2009, 56).

13

“WHAT’S THE PLOT, MAN?”: ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE SENSE …

243

2. On the distinction between historical fiction and alternate history, see Hellekson (2001): “by their very definition, alternate histories must change the historical event. Historical novels uphold the ‘true’ version of history, whereas the alternate history dismantles it. In an alternate history, an event must change” (28). 3. Means also obliquely alludes to the fact that writing Hystopia was his way of grappling with “a certain family trauma” (cited in Domestico 2016, 24). Even in this respect, however, Means speaks of his “roundabout way” to get this “deeply personal story [he] wanted to rescue” out there (26), thus reinforcing the idea that Hystopia, qua alternate history, is a “parataxic construct of sorts” (Means 2016, 12). 4. The controlled and staged re-enactment of war trauma under Tripizoid literalizes the compulsion to repeat traumatic events, for instance through nightmares, as observed and theorized by Sigmund Freud (1961). 5. In parallel with my point about Freud and the compulsion to repeat traumatic events, it is important to note that, with his enfolded characters longing to recuperate their unknown traumatic past, Means is again literalizing the workings of trauma. As Cathy Caruth (1996) writes, trauma “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (4; emphasis added).

Bibliography Ankersmit, F. R. 1994. History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Domestico, Anthony. 2016. “A Problematic Believer: An Interview with David Means.” Commonweal, September 9, 2016: 24–26. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. 2011. History in the Discursive Condition: Reconsidering the Tools of Thought. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton. Hellekson, Karen. 2001. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Hertz, Larry. 2016. “Kudos to David Means: Hystopia Nominated for the Booker Prize.” Vassar.edu. September 29, 2016. http://stories.vassar.edu/ 2016/160929-david-means.html. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.

244

D. DE CRISTOFARO

Kermode, Frank. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Means, David. 2016. Hystopia. London: Faber. Morson, Gary Saul. 1994. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ransom, Amy J. 2010. “Warping Time: Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern uchronie québéquoise.” Extrapolation 51 (2): 258–80. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. 2002. “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’: Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41 (4): 90–103. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. 2009. “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel.” American Studies 50 (3/4): 63– 83. Shay, Jonathan. 1994. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Scribner. Singles, Kathleen. 2013. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Berlin: De Gruyter. Weiss-Meyer, Amy. 2016. “Hystopia: An Ambitious, Dystopian Retelling of the Vietnam War.” The Atlantic, May 9, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2016/05/hystopia-david-means-review/481635/. Wesseling, Elisabeth. 1991. Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 14

“To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres DeLisa D. Hawkes

There are two concepts in particular that shape the narrative of Dwayne Alexander Smith’s 2014 novel Forty Acres: historical trauma and revenge. Forty Acres tells the story of a secret society of rich and powerful black men who kidnap and enslave white men and women; they do not capture children. Forty Acres’ members claim that enslaving the descendants of their ancestors’ captors will cure them and other African descendants of the historical trauma stemming from US slavery. Dr. Kasim, the group’s leader, calls this trauma “black noise,” or the psychological remnants of antebellum slavery that later evolved into institutional racism and self hatred for some black Americans. The narrator describes the society’s members in stately terms calling them “titans of industry” and “role models”: “men who had reputations to protect and images to uphold” (Smith 2015, 45). However, the members’ violent and inhumane acts do not necessarily pair well with the public persona they hope to protect. These men seek Dr. Kasim’s teachings to cure them from “black noise.”

D. D. Hawkes (B) The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_14

245

246

D. D. HAWKES

Dr. Kasim expounds upon “black noise” and its effects in the following passage: The screams of our ancestors haunt every black man’s soul, a constant reminder that the white man not only conquered our forefathers but robbed them of their humanity. And because of this burden of shame and humiliation, deep down every man of African descent, no matter how rich or powerful, harbors a poisonous seed of doubt that he is truly equal to the white man. Even worse, a fear of the white man. (150)

Forty Acres imagines the reversal of antebellum slavery – black men enslaving white men and women – during the twenty-first century as a remedy to the debilitating state of mind described above. Dr. Kasim and his followers view enslaving white people and working from inside extremely white-dominated corporations as the best possible methods through which to remedy unrequited racist crimes and to dismantle economic disparities between the races. Unfortunately, these men fail to realize the relative similarities between antebellum racist whites’ hatred for enslaved blacks and their own twenty-first-century prejudices against white people who benefit from their ancestors’ crimes. Hence, the acts of Forty Acres’ members amplify rather than silence “black noise” and work to the detriment of, rather than providing the remedy for, the US race problem represented in the novel. Considering elements of historical fiction, neo-historical fiction, and speculative fiction, this essay argues that Forty Acres acts as a speculative revenge narrative, or one that imagines acts of revenge and retribution within a contemporary setting in response to a historical event that happened centuries ago. The revenge and retribution enacted go against the current legal and social complexities of the novel’s contemporary setting as a direct consequence of chattel slavery. The plots featured in speculative revenge take on elements of what Elodie Rousselot calls neo-historical fiction, a subgenre of historical fiction that attempts to reimagine history and offer an “active interrogation of the past” (Rousselot 2014, 2). In this case, characters attempt to revise the historical outcomes by recreating and revising chattel slavery within the contemporary moment. Forty Acres invites readers to contemplate how best to reconcile historical wrongs when agents of that past are no longer accessible. By switching the roles held within race-based slavery during the antebellum period, the novel

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

247

imagines a reversed racial power dynamic that has been historically sustained through post-emancipation discriminatory laws and practices. Taking this approach, the novel invites readers to witness history’s evils and hauntings through the perspective of enacted revenge that forces readers to question what makes the imagining of an enslaved white body so uncomfortable. Furthermore, set against the backdrop of the US legal system, Forty Acres investigates what limits exist for reparations, retribution, and revenge when the historical event in question occurred so long ago. The issue that Forty Acres’ members attempt to solve, however, is that the historical event continues to impact the contemporary moment negatively.

Forty Acres: A Thriller, or a Speculative Revenge Narrative Whom these men capture and enslave does not occur by chance. The members’ strategic kidnappings are their attempts to force individuals to experience their historical trauma as a method to seek revenge. The narrator describes their kidnappings in ways extremely similar to those illustrated in Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots or even Solomon Northup’s 1853 slave narrative Twelve Years a Slave. These texts depict victims literally snatched from their everyday lives. Forty Acres sets the scene with Louis Ward, a white man, leaving a video store to pick up a box-set of his wife’s and his favorite TV sitcom. Within seconds of exiting the store, unidentified captors take him away: As Louis reached his beat up old Honda Civic and fished for his keys, he noticed the black van easing to a stop in the lane…The side door of the van flew open and two men wearing ski masks rushed towards him…Two hours later a Green Hill Mall security guard would cruise by and notice a beat-up old Honda with its driver’s side door hanging open. And even stranger, an unopened copy of Seinfeld: The Complete Series laying on the ground beside it. (Smith 2015, 2)

Louis’s seemingly senseless capture illustrates mysterious figures stealing away his humanity for reasons unknown to him. An underground court of sorts seeks revenge, and Louis is prosecuted for crimes he did not personally commit. Readers later find out that Dr. Kasim and his followers are responsible for Louis’s seemingly random kidnapping and enslavement.

248

D. D. HAWKES

The narrator reveals, however, that unlike the captures that occurred along West Africa’s coastlines during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “a lot of time and effort was put into researching and locating Caucasian individuals whose lives were enriched today because their ancestors had profited from the blood and sweat of African slaves” (184). Only descendants of former enslavers appease “black noise,” which Dr. Kasim describes as the combination of institutionalized racism and economic disparity, the interference which “clouds the black man’s mind” producing a condition of self-hatred under which he cannot achieve full personal or economic success (142). He explains: This interference keeps black children from focusing on their studies…turns black teens into drug addicts and killers…keeps black men from being good fathers and providers [and] keeps a black man behaving like a slave even when he’s the master. It is this interference that keeps the black man from walking the earth with pride…. That is why I built Forty Acres. To help strong black men free their minds of this interference. (142)

In contrast to white noise, the muffled loudness that overpowers unpleasant or disturbing sounds which some find soothing, “black noise” amplifies that which is unpleasant and disturbing. The contrast between these two “complexions” of interference gestures toward the white supremacist notions of racialized color, where white is good (soothing, relaxing interference) and black is bad (traumatizing, anxiety-producing interference). Furthermore, “black noise” stops its sufferers from being able to live out the pleasurable experience of self-actualization. Dr. Kasim suggests that, had white men and women been subjected to psychological interference from antebellum slavery as those who were enslaved or as descendants of the enslaved, then they would also suffer from a similar historical trauma – one that Marianne Hirsch might call “postmemory,” or the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before — to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (quoted in “Interview with Marianne Hirsch”)

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

249

The difference between the trauma that Dr. Kasim speaks of and that which he suggests those he enslaves have not experienced is that the effects of “black noise” thrive within contemporary society. Thus, Forty Acres’ members believe that their actions must warrant foreseeable change in the present and near future. Dr. Kasim even goes so far as to invoke Holocaust survivors and their descendants in an effort to make his point about descendants of the enslaved needing to seek revenge and retribution for their ancestors’ suffering. He proclaims, “the Jews are so furious they’re still burning down Nazis to this very day. And I don’t blame them. Only the black man is brainwashed to bury his anger” (Smith 2015, 159). Dr. Kasim believes that white enslavement during the twenty-first century will right history’s wrongs against enslaving African descendants in the US. Contemporary enslavement of individuals in the US goes against the nation’s evolved appreciation for basic human rights since before 1865, however. The novel forces readers to ask the question: Can (and if so, how can) the race problem in the US ever be remedied? Are there limits to speculative revenge? To say to the unsuspecting reader that Forty Acres imagines black men enslaving white men and women sometimes receives mixed responses. For instance, I have taught the novel several times to undergraduates and suggested it to academic colleagues; in both instances, I have witnessed immediate fascination from some individuals and immediate disengagement from others. In so many ways, the plot basically asks readers to contemplate white supremacy’s incubation within US society and to question their comfortability with the lingering effects of slavery’s aftermath. In a 2014 interview, Smith comments on the novel’s reception stating: “slavery is a touchy subject in the United States. Many readers who are looking for something entertaining to read won’t easily select a thriller centered around such a sensitive topic. Surprisingly, the book has been better received in Europe” (quoted in Didibooksenglish 2014). The current racial climate in the US begs for a novel like Forty Acres – one that forces readers to consider slavery’s and white supremacy’s vast impact on modern US society. In 2018 alone, the US witnessed the increased hypervisibility of white supremacists who feared losing their assumed white privilege, and in particular white male privilege. August 9, 2018, marked the four-year anniversary of a Ferguson, M.O. police officer’s murder of Michael Brown, and on August 12, 2018, the “Unite the Right” rally was held in Washington, DC, only steps away from the White House and held only one year after the unconscionable Charlottesville Attack. These

250

D. D. HAWKES

are just two of the many recent and more publicly discussed racist attacks on US citizens that historians can connect to events and practices from the antebellum period and the early twentieth century. Forty Acres calls readers to question why Americans – black, white, or other – find it so uncomfortable to imagine the reversal of US race-based slavery. Most fiction represents slavery under traditional racial dynamics and does not receive the same suspicion as Forty Acres. The ghosts of antebellum slavery and post-emancipation Jim Crow have been made more visible with the continued robbery of black Americans’ equal rights and equal protection under the law. Some readers’ anxiety toward Forty Acres goes far beyond the plot’s detachment from basic human rights and sheds light on white supremacy’s strong presence within society. The novel challenges the notion that to even imagine an alternate narrative of the nation’s race and power dynamic appears problematic. Smith’s Forty Acres, alongside neo-slave narratives such as Dolan Perkins-Valdez’s Wench (2010), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (2018), turns readers’ attention to the antebellum era in order to question how the past is still very much within the present. For, as Rousselot claims of neohistorical fiction more generally, this genre “is characterized by its similar creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits [and] by its participation in, and response to, contemporary culture’s continuing fascination with history” (2014, 2–3). Forty Acres, however, is not a neo-slave narrative nor is it a typical example of the many other genres that allow readers to speculate on alternative pasts or futures. The novel is not sci-fi or fantasy since it does not merely imagine a situation that has never happened. Rather, it speculates about what would happen if society responded to historical traumas by implanting a revised historical narrative within the present. Forty Acres expresses more than a “fascination with history” and instead examines history’s continued existence within the present while considering the physical and psychological coercion of individuals during the contemporary moment in order to overcome the past. Forty Acres’ members use slavery to respond to claims of a post-racial US in two ways. First, the men see the imagined collective black man’s mind as enslaved by negative views of self; and second, the men view enslaving white men and women as the only acceptable method through which to alleviate feelings of entrapment. Dr. Kasim and his followers transport a revised version of the past within their present

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

251

in a twisted effort to silence “black noise” and to proactively shape the futures of black race pride and, more specifically, black manhood.

“Revenge Is an Essential Human Trait” Set in the years following President Barack Obama’s election, Forty Acres centers on Martin Grey, a successful, up-and-coming civil rights attorney, and his struggle with deciding how to handle knowledge about the secret society and its compound where members keep those they have enslaved. Grey wins a high-profile civil rights lawsuit against the charismatic corporate attorney, Damon Darrell. Despite Damon’s loss to Martin, Damon admires his life-long dedication to civil rights. However, he does not favor Martin’s white law partner and best friend, Glen. Damon sees potential in Martin joining Forty Acres. However, Martin has his doubts about Damon. When he questions how Damon can live without shame knowing that he represents corporations that “blatantly take advantage of minorities” (Smith 2015, 44), Damon responds: What do you think would happen if I turned down those cases? Even better, what if every conscientious black attorney refused to defend any corporation accused of racial discrimination? …Those corporations would just turn around and hire a white firm …My firm employs over two dozen [black] lawyers…In a slow year our billing easily exceeds one hundred million. Every year I donate twenty-five percent of my firm’s profits to numerous black charities… If those corporations pay their multimilliondollar legal fees to a white firm instead of me, none of that amazing stuff happens. What the corporations siphon away from our people with their discriminatory practices, I take back tenfold when they get my invoice. (44)

Damon and his protégés view any “tiny act of revenge” against whiteowned corporations as having the potential to “appease…black noise” (150). Damon has been a senior member of Forty Acres for quite some time and agrees with Dr. Kasim’s belief that these seemingly superficial acts allow him “to avenge [his] race” (50). The most extreme act of revenge and retribution, however, occurs at the group’s compound, Forty Acres. Named after General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, Forty Acres is the site where these men keep their white slaves. Special Field Order No. 15 was the first formal attempt at reparations for slavery that promised newly freed slaves 40 acres of approximately 400,000

252

D. D. HAWKES

lots formerly owned by Confederates. The 13th Amendment included the order in its direction, but following President Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson revoked the order and returned all lands to the original owners. Forty Acres bears stark similarities to the grand Southern plantations that ensconce areas such as Louisiana’s River Road or Virginia’s James River, yet twenty-first-century surveillance and security technologies accent the “wide gravel road… lined on both sides with the biggest oak trees” (115). The narrator describes Forty Acres in terms reminiscent of Tara, the “white-columned plantation house in [Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel] Gone with the Wind” (115). White men and women work these grounds while Dr. Kasim and his followers relax, read books, and enjoy concubines. However, the enslaved do not work outside in fields; they work underground in a depleted gold mine, essentially performing “busy work” which generates no useable or profitable product for the enslaved or the enslavers. Roy, the overseer, describes the once-thriving gold mine that the enslaved whites work day in and day out: This mine didn’t shut down because the gold ran out. They shut it down because they reached a point where the gold ran low. Once the cost of digging is greater than the value of what comes out of the ground, it’s time to pack up and leave. So yes, technically the slaves are mining gold, but they only find a few ounces a year. Not even enough to keep them fed. Gold is not what’s important here… It doesn’t matter what they pull out of the ground. It’s just to keep them working. (210; emphasis in original)

Forty Acres’ members enforce a twisted punishment where hard labor never receives even the slightest material reward. This passage also comments on global white colonial history – both European and American – with its emphasis on mineral mining in African countries and plantation labor in the Americas. Forty Acres’ members do not gain monetary wealth from their enslaved whites’ labor; profits only incur mental and psychological benefits for the enslavers. Similar to courts and judges working within the legal justice system, Forty Acres’ members take it upon themselves to use their power, professions, and wealth “to avenge [their] race” (150). Essentially, the men seek a form of what Charles Barton might call “victim justice,” or justice which “requires the substantial empowerment of victims by law, giving them the legal right to become involved in the relevant legal processes, some

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

253

of which may culminate in impositions of punishment on their wrongdoers” (Barton 1999, xiv). Forty Acres’ members, however, target and capture individuals whose ancestors supported slavery in some shape or fashion, whether that meant enslaving black men, women, and children, or building slave ships. They also target large corporations that profit from demoralizing or discriminating against black communities. All in all, while these men’s intentions to weaken institutionalized racism and strengthen black communities are understandable, their enslaving whites go against contemporary laws and basic human rights, inflicting similar racial prejudices and immorality to those that white enslavers enacted against their ancestors. Speculative revenge allows the novel to step outside of social and legal norms to consider slavery as the solution to silencing “black noise.” According to Kyle Wiggins (2013), “vengeance [in new revenge novels] does sate the damaged self as much as it repairs group victimization. Revenge in American fiction frequently occurs on behalf of principles shared by the body politic yet violated in some structural level” (680). In order to accomplish revenge, characters must “reject a philosophically incompatible world and thus attempt to impose their moral principles upon it” (683). Forty Acres’ members also reject moral principles agreed upon by the contemporary society which Martin advocates for in his profession and that he represents in the novel. The narrator says, “they had brought Martin out to Forty Acres to confront him with their truth… an extreme afrocentric worldview that, no doubt, empowered them” (Smith 2015, 143). Here, the narrator suggests that the men’s worldview does not align with that of the society they challenge. Thus, readers may translate their actions into extremism. Had the worldview not allowed for chattel slavery centuries ago, then perhaps its heinous presence would have been more widely viewed as “extreme” as well. Revenge encompasses retribution in the novel in that the revenge enacted by the men, namely contemporary slavery, “is retributive punishment of a personal kind… that can be just or unjust depending on whether the principles of justice are observed or violated” (Barton 1999, 42). In other words, retributive punishment in the novel can be thought of as a tit-for-tat repayment: you did this, so I will do this; your ancestors did this, so we will do this. Carver, one of Dr. Kasim’s youngest followers, alludes to his and the other members’ problematic actions but attempts to defuse the reality by claiming, “we’re not evil like the white man. Violence does not come naturally to us. But we are forced to do violence

254

D. D. HAWKES

to set things right” (Smith 2015, 236). Forty Acres’ members feel they must match a historical wrong with the same amount of barbarity in order to feel relief. “Justice” in the novel, however, rests with the fact that the whites that Forty Acres’ members enslave are not the actual individuals who wronged these men or their ancestors. The captives stand in for the institutional racism and self-hatred that the men aspire to end. Dr. Kasim urges Martin to see the bigger picture: What we do is not personal or about individuals. It’s about making the white race pay for its unpunished crimes against the black race. For too long the modern black man has let his ancestors down… What we do here at Forty Acres isn’t for selfish reasons. It is a duty that we are privileged to bear. A duty to free our minds of that noise by any means necessary, and to use that freedom to become strong black men. Men who can lead our people out of the trash heap of human history. (154)

Although Dr. Kasim and his followers view “revenge as an essential human trait” (150), speculative revenge in Forty Acres reveals that slavery, as an institution or act of revenge and retribution, is vile in nature regardless of the perpetrator or time period. Speculative revenge allows readers to understand the complexities and problematic nature of revenge and retribution, especially for historical wrongs, in the sense that revenge and retribution can target innocent individuals based on the enforcer’s understanding of morality or considerable punishment. Barton explains, “legal systems must grant victims the right to fair retributive justice, as well as a corresponding right to show leniency and mercy as they see fit in their own cases. Their decisions on such matters should be vetoed only if they display unreasonable leniency or harshness” (1999, xiv; emphasis in original). Dr. Kasim and Forty Acres’ members do not view the US legal system or American culture as entities that allow black Americans to fully thrive, nor do they believe that these entities have granted justice to African descendants in the name of their ancestors. Therefore, they take it upon themselves to secure justice for their ancestors and future generations according to their worldview of justice, revenge, and retribution. Following this logic, it is perfectly understandable for Forty Acres’ members to target innocent whites based on their understanding of who is responsible for their disadvantage at the time. Retribution does not have to always be for a moral wrong and, in fact, revenge and retribution

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

255

can target innocent individuals. Wiggins (2013) might call these individuals “proxy representatives,” or entities through which one group’s rage becomes embodied by some other individual or figure. In tracing the elements of the new revenge novel, he argues that there is a “necessity in recent revenge fiction whereby the aggregate guilt for systemic crimes gets transferred to a synecdochal villain” (676). Characters in new revenge fiction seek revenge and retribution against intangible enemies, and therefore, the metaphorical enemy essentially stands in for something larger, where no equal punishment authorized by law exists (676, 683). Similar to post-emancipation claims by white men of feeling the need to protect their women and families from the so-called “black brute,” Forty Acres’ members choose to seek revenge and retribution on behalf of their entire race by attempting to reconfigure the image of black manhood. By keeping black women away from Forty Acres, the men claim to strengthen their sense of manhood against stereotypes that suggest black male dependence. When Martin asks why the men’s wives do not join them on their retreats to Forty Acres, Solomon responds, “Dr. Kasim created Forty Acres to be the perfect haven of relaxation, recreation, and reflection for the black man… Dr. Kasim teaches us that far too often black men use their women as a crutch. This place is about building us up…No wives or girlfriends allowed” (Smith 2015, 117). The men must complete the “manly” duty of avenging the race by rebuilding their sense of self and masculinity. If they achieve these tasks, then, following concepts of patriarchy, they also take steps to reshape their familial structures and their power within the household. For instance, every time the members visit Forty Acres, Dr. Kasim makes a point to ask about the men’s children. The following scene occurs during the members’ first dinner with Martin present: Dr. Kasim grilled each man about his kids. Martin noticed that his interest in their offspring did not seem all that casual. He wanted very specific updates on their behavior, education, and most importantly, their career choices. And when Dr. Kasim heard something that troubled him, he would make a firm suggestion to correct the issue. For instance, when Damon mentioned that his young son, Kevin, was considering foregoing law school after college to join the air force, Dr. Kasim shook his head and said, ‘No black man belongs in the military, you know that. Change his mind.’ …Dr. Kasim never asked any of the men about their wives, and the men never mentioned them. (136)

256

D. D. HAWKES

Dr. Kasim responds to a racist white patriarchy by attempting to fashion a patriarchy of his own design, one where black women’s perspectives are disregarded and their influence within familial relationships is nonexistent. This approach counters the image of the black woman leading the household due to the absence of the black father. Race remains a central issue under Dr. Kasim’s patriarchy and he uses it as a tool by which to maintain boundaries where society views one race and gender as superior over all others. For instance, at Forty Acres, Dr. Kasim “fixes” the concubines so that they cannot bear mixed-heritage children. Carver assures Martin, “no need to worry about STDs or birth control or any of that. All the pretty ones are tested regularly and fixed. As Dr. Kasim likes to say, no mutts allowed” (166). Dr. Kasim’s patriarchy bears little to no difference from the white supremacist one that Forty Acres’ members claim they oppose. At Forty Acres, a similar rejection of voluntary interracial romantic relationships dictates that sexual interaction between the enslaved and the enslavers can occur, but children from these unions cannot exist. The races must be kept separate. The only difference at Forty Acres is that the men aim to remove the presumed power of whiteness from their ideology. These men continue to enforce a sense of exclusivity and impose a sense of inferiority upon those that they view as lesser than them, even those within their own race. Unlike the rest of the men, Martin does not hold radical views concerning race relations. He acknowledges racism’s reality; after all, he is a civil rights attorney. However, he does not readily see the impact of antebellum slavery acting within the present. Dr. Kasim and his followers, on the other hand, take it upon themselves to show Martin how the remnants of slavery manifest in the present and not only interrupt black-white cooperation, but also foster intraracial tensions and ignorance. For example, Kwame, another member of Forty Acres, educates Martin on the limited number of black CEOs in the US compared to whites, and more specifically, on the average black American’s lack of awareness concerning racial representation. He implies that by black Americans not keeping abreast of race relations or even the status of individuals within their own communities, then the entire race suffers. Martin feels quite embarrassed that he had no idea that Dr. Kasim’s following included top CEOs who just happened to be black men. Kwame responds, “Don’t sweat it, my brother. The sad truth is 57 percent of black males over the age of thirty would not be able to name the CEO of any corporation,” implying black America’s

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

257

inattentiveness to prominent figures who influence society outside of politics and entertainment (26). The narrator points out similarities between Forty Acres and private country clubs throughout the US in an effort to show the contrast between one race’s comfort with racial exclusivity and the efforts of the other to break racial barriers. The narrator describes restricted clubs – either de facto in the past, or de jure in the present – as places “where black servants catered to an all-Caucasian membership. Forty Acres was just the reverse” (143). Whether the men discuss Fortune 500 companies or membership in exclusive clubs, the topics they consider all somehow lead back to slavery and the limited number of black Americans in powerful positions when compared to whites. Although Martin understands the place from which these men channel their grievances, he feels torn between his personal views and those racist experiences that individuals in black communities all over the US have witnessed. After all, Martin has a white legal partner and best friend. Forty Acres’ members, on the other hand, have not had the best experiences with whites and transmit their anger into a unified ideology under the guise of “uplifting” the race. Ideas on racial uplift appear in black American literature during the years before emancipation and even well into the twenty-first century. These texts feature characters and plots that contemplate black American exclusion from and attempts at securing acceptance within the mainstream American culture. According to Kevin K. Gaines (1996), “uplift” has had multiple meanings throughout US history that match the climate of race relations during a given historical period. During the antebellum period, “uplift” relied upon a personal and collective spiritual transcendence from worldly oppression and misery found in enslavement. Following emancipation, education, and specifically education based on uniform Anglo-centric models of pedagogy, became the key element toward racial uplift. During Reconstruction, and even into the twenty-first century, “uplift” began to refer to the success of middleclass black American elites carrying the entire race out of degradation by emphasizing “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth” (1–2). The men at Forty Acres, however, seek revenge as a method for racial “uplift” for all black Americans who have been systematically excluded from equal economic privileges and social justice. However, they let their hunger for personal revenge get in the way of seeking morally appropriate compensation, such as reparations or some other nonviolent act. Each man’s personal traumas brings him to Dr. Kasim and his teachings. For instance,

258

D. D. HAWKES

Carver comes to Forty Acres not only to avenge his race but also to cure himself from the trauma of being accused of rape by a white woman when he once played college football. The following scene recounts Carver’s thoughts as he sexually and physically abuses a concubine at Forty Acres: Slap! Carver backhanded the girl and she flew backward onto the bed crying… He tore off his pants and leapt onto the girl. Clamped her throat tight… How he wished that the girl squirming on the bed before him was that bitch Diana Miller and not just some random white whore. More than once Carver had tried to convince Dr. Kasim to have that Diana captured and dragged back to Forty Acres… [Dr. Kasim] just kept giving the same fucking answer. “The Miller family doesn’t fit the profile. And Forty Acres is not about personal vendettas.” To Carver that excuse just didn’t make sense. Forty Acres was about the biggest personal vendetta ever. (Smith 2015, 180; emphasis in original)

Forty Acres’ members conflate their individual experiences with those of their ancestors and their race. Barton argues that to say an act contains a principle of justice requires that the retribution does not target the innocent (1999, 45). The only way that the men and the race can be cured from “black noise” is to revise the historical moment where the illness began and to avenge their ancestors who were captured and enslaved. However, since the men live outside of that historical moment, they must abuse innocent individuals in the name of revenge against the long-dead guilty. In this way, Forty Acres speculates on revenge and retribution for racism which has its roots in race-based chattel slavery. Consequently, Forty Acres’ members exude a similar race-based hatred to the one that they claim to act against. While Dr. Kasim paints a picture where slavery’s aftermaths only affect people of African descent, Martin sees the obvious prejudice in the members’ actions, calling the men “criminals of the lowest sort. Criminals of hate” (Smith 2015, 155). In this way, “black noise” works in the novel to show how hatred by way of race-based slavery has become a destructive, yet steady feature of the American way of life. Ashraf Rushdy notes that slavery’s lingering effects do not only haunt the descendants of the enslaved: American intellectuals have consistently employed terms, narratives, and conceptual devices to hide what they are trying to reveal. Slavery in American intellectual discourse is not only a metaphor, a sin, a crime, or a shame… Slavery is the family secret of America. [Slavery] is secret in the

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

259

sense that it haunts the peripheries of the national imaginary…the event we need to rationalize…as a central paradox in the creation of American freedom. (Rushdy 2001, 2)

Stephanie Powell Watts (2013) adds to this discussion by using a metaphor of haunting to consider how the past literally seeps into the present. She calls these instances “ghosts” and argues that these spectral relics haunt places, texts, and contemporary moments, essentially transformed into hauntings by past historical eras. For example, in Forty Acres’ members’ eyes, electing President Barack Obama does not avenge antebellum slavery’s ghosts nor does it prove that the US upholds the moral façade of equal opportunity that it likes to proclaim. If anything, what society views as unthinkable attempts at revenge and retribution actually support the opinion that the nation has not transformed into a post-racial society. The speculative revenge novel allows readers to participate in this thought-experiment. When Damon invites Martin to his home for dinner to see if he is Forty Acres “material” (“material” in the sense of membership as well as in the sense of slave to the Forty Acres ideology), he shows Martin his collection of slavery artifacts including “chains, leg irons, wrist shackles, steel collars, [and] wooden neck and wrist stocks,” all items writhing with the ghosts of a racially violent past (Smith 2015, 34). Martin prematurely reflects on these relics uttering, “It is inspiring. Especially now that we have a black president” (36). Damon and the other members give their various responses. Solomon states, “now that Barack’s in office, a lot of white people are thinking, Now we’re even. Now we can forget slavery and racism is finished. Our hands are finally clean. Of course, everyone in this room knows that is far from the truth. Not even close” (40; emphasis in original). Tobias offers the murder of Trayvon Martin as an example of continued injustice, followed by Kwame’s example of “how the Supreme Court recently gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965” (40). The conversation then turns from political injustices to economic disparities. Kwame asserts, “think about it, brother. The accumulated wealth and power of the Caucasian race is so vast that it would take centuries for us to even get close” (40). Solomon offers the Land Rush of 1889 as an example that has continued to affect black Americans’ opportunities to attain wealth for generations: “In 1889, twenty years after slavery was abolished, the United States government opened up the Oklahoma Territory to any American citizen who

260

D. D. HAWKES

wanted to go west and tame the land… Free land. Now, do you think that our ancestors were allowed to participate in this bonanza? Of course not. Do white families, to this very day, profit from that land rush?” “You better fucking believe it,” Carver said. “American history is littered with events in which our ancestors were robbed of opportunities that white people profited from.” (41)

“Black Noise” or Black Rage Martin feels that “black noise” should be treated as a psychological condition where professionals incorporate research to treat his deteriorating condition. Although Martin agrees with a few elements included in Forty Acres’ mission, he does not agree with Dr. Kasim’s approach. Martin believes that enslaving other human beings is undeniably immoral and baseless. Furthermore, he values his wife Anna’s opinions and contributions to their marriage, and he values interracial collaboration. The narrator gives a glimpse into Martin’s thoughts about Forty Acres: The old doctor [Kasim] wasn’t interested in research, only revenge in the name of overdue justice. And that’s where Martin drew the line. Kidnapping and enslaving innocent people because of ills committed by their forefathers seemed a greater crime than the original offense. Martin was proud to be a member of the black race, but first and foremost he was a member of the human race. (155)

Dr. Kasim’s articulation of “black noise” invites parallels with psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs’s conceptualization of “black rage.” Grier and Cobbs argue in their 1968 study Black Rage that black people’s experiences in the US, including institutionalized racism by way of enslavement and Jim Crow, resulted in psychological damage that developed into a paranoia (Grier and Cobbs 1968, 206). Essentially, they undertake a psychological study of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness and measure the psychological effects that cultural doublethink has on black Americans living in a racist society. Grier and Cobbs assert: When slavery ended, and large-scale physical abuse was discontinued, it was supplanted by different but equally damaging abuse. The cruelty continued unabated in thoughts, feelings, intimidation and occasional lynching. Black

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

261

people were consigned to a place outside of the human family and the whip of the plantation was replaced by the boundaries of the ghetto. (26)

The cure for “black rage,” Grier and Cobbs suggest, is a deep understanding of the experiences of racism and oppression that black Americans have faced in the US; these experiences are tightly interwoven in the fabric of US history but remain overlooked by society at large. Furthermore, US society isolates slavery’s and Jim Crow’s ghosts to the past and tends overtly to overlook their contemporary effects. By claiming the US exists in a post-racial reality, individuals who believe this notion trivialize black Americans’ experiences with the remnants of slavery – psychological and material – in the contemporary moment and attribute those experiences to the individual. Grier and Cobbs appear to place the responsibility of placating “black rage” on society rather than individuals. In response, bell hooks criticizes this conceptualization of “black rage,” stating that it does “not urge the larger culture to see black rage as something other than sickness, to see it as a potentially healthy, potentially healing response to oppression and exploitation” (hooks 1995, 12). Speculative revenge allows audiences to imagine responses to these injustices while providing a suitable mechanism through which to heal racial oppression and exploitation. Thus, Forty Acres acts as an excellent example of the therapeutic qualities of fiction for issues like racism which face our social world. Smith takes up Grier and Cobbs’s imagined ultimate cure for “black rage” in Forty Acres. Grier and Cobbs contend that “long after slavery, many whites are haunted by a vision of being oppressed, exposed to the whims of a powerful cruel black man. To dissipate the fantasy, increasing barriers have had to be erected. In reality it seems a remote possibility that blacks might overthrow their oppressors and enslave them” (Grier and Cobbs 1968, 33). In other words, Grier and Cobbs present a thoughtexperiment that suggests that if white Americans could imagine what black Americans and their ancestors have experienced, then perhaps race relations in the United States would drastically improve along with the social and economic disparities facing some blacks. By using speculative revenge in a cathartic sense, audiences of all races can witness the horrors welded within slavery’s continual effects and change their approach to race in America. Forty Acres uses speculative revenge to invoke a sense of mutual understanding between the multifaceted perspectives concerned with race contained within such a divisive historical and contemporary

262

D. D. HAWKES

moment. Dr. Kasim speaks about his own struggles with “black rage” and how he uses those feelings to put forth a cure: The pure and perfect anger that I felt was fueled by something more than just my personal loss. Something deeper. Like a pressure inside me suddenly let loose. It was the anger I felt for all the crimes committed against my people. For kidnapping and raping and enslaving and killing my people. It was the anger I felt because no one had been punished for these crimes. It was the anger they tell black men to keep inside. The anger he’s told that he just has to let go of because all that raping and killing happened in the past… and I began to feel thankful to [the white man]. Because that anger led me to a greater purpose. (Smith 2015, 147)

Speculative revenge not only challenges the historical event but speculates about methods to erase or drastically alter the aftermaths that are a direct result of that event. Forty Acres reimagines US slavery under completely different terms for the purpose of healing the descendants of those once enslaved. The novel provides no relief from detrimental race relations within the US given that the enslaved whites never leave Forty Acres and therefore cannot challenge their lived experiences in slavery. Imagining a US in which black men enslave white men and women means reimagining a racial dynamic created during antebellum slavery and sustained through discriminatory post-emancipation laws and social practices. Because Forty Acres remains a secret society, then, the racial dynamic presented in the novel’s imagined America remains the same. By responding to antebellum slavery in modes similar to the original historical moment, the men at Forty Acres attempt to reverse the psychological damage ingrained in generations up to the present, but nothing changes. Smith’s speculative revenge novel opens the door to new approaches to considering the aftermath of slavery in the contemporary moment. Rousselot notes that the “critical re-appraisal of specific historical periods and of their social, cultural, and political contexts” characterizes the recent rise in popularity of neo-historical fiction (2014, 1). Audiences have witnessed an increased amount of neo-slave narratives published since the mid-1960s. Madhu Dubey argues that “the literary return to slavery gained momentum at a critical time of transition in U.S. racial politics; bespeaking a strong sense of pessimism about the future, these works obliquely register the uncertain prospects confronting black racial politics in the post-Civil Rights period” (Dubey 2010, 781). Forty Acres invokes the uncertainty of the post-civil rights period, mentioning real people,

14

“TO AVENGING MY PEOPLE”: SPECULATING REVENGE …

263

places, and events that occurred during the antebellum era and the contemporary moment. However, the novel denies the claim that the US has transformed into a post-racial society by illustrating a world where racial prejudices continue due to their roots in the past.

Bibliography “An Interview with Marianne Hirsch.” n.d. Columbia University Press. https:// cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/hirsch-generation-postmemory. Barton, Charles K. B. 1999. Getting Even: Revenge as a Form of Justice. Chicago: Open Court. Didibooksenglish [sic]. 2014. “Author Interview: Dwayne Alexander Smith Talks About Forty Acres.” Brown Girl Reading, December 22, 2014. https:// browngirlreading.com/2014/12/22/author-interview-dwayne-alexandersmith-talks-about-forty-acres/. Dubey, Madhu. 2010. “Speculative Fictions of Slavery.” American Literature 82 (4): 779–805. Gaines, Kevin K. 1996. Uplifting the Race. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Grier, William H., and Price M. Cobbs. 1968. Black Rage. New York: Basic Books. hooks, bell. 1995. Killing Rage. New York: Henry Holt. Rousselot, Elodie. 2014. “Introduction: Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction.” In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary NeoHistorical Fiction, edited by Elodie Rousselot, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 2001. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Dwayne Alexander. 2015. Forty Acres: A Thriller. New York: Atria. Watts, Stephanie Powell. 2013. “We Are Taking Only What We Need.” Public Reading at Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY, July 24, 2013. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVxB8NvhFfs. Wiggins, Kyle. 2013. “The New Revenge Novel.” Studies in the Novel 45 (4): 675–92.

Index

A Aarons, Victoria, 130 abolition of slavery, 76, 86–89 absent fathers, 172–174, 175–176, 184–186 Accursed, The (Oates, 2013), 7–8, 95–109 adoption, of Korean children by Americans, 160–162 Adorno, Theodor, 145 African American folklore, 18 ahistoricity, 44–46 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 131, 145–146 All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr, 2014), 8, 131, 134–140 Alter, Alexandra, 134 alternate history, 236–242 American mythology, 26–28 American national identity, 75, 79, 172 American Protestantism, 153, 154 American Woman (Choi, 2003), 10, 191–207, 218, 220 Ankersmit, F.R., 230

“anxiety of origins,” 3–4, 75 Apocalypse Now (film, 1979), 176, 181 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 68 archives, 131–133 Arendt, Hannah, 194 Ariès, Philippe, 57 Atwood, Margaret, 74 B Bailey, F. Lee, 191 Barthes, Roland, 111, 117–120 Barton, Charles, 252, 253, 258 Beckstead, David, 114 Belletto, Steve, 164 Berger, John After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (1999), 212, 213 epitaph in Roy’s God of Small Things , 138 Bildungsroman, 61–62 black noise/black rage, 11, 245, 248, 260–262

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7

265

266

INDEX

Black Panthers, 220 Blight, David, 18 Blum, Virginia, 64 Boorstin, David, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962), 221 Bordewich, Fergus M., 21, 22 Boswell, Clarice, Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journey to Freedom (2002), 22 Bothmer, Bernard von, Framing the Sixties (2010), 212–213 Boyden, Jo, 67 Brautigan, Richard, 215, 218, 219 British fiction, 2 Brown, James, 30 Brown, Michael, 249 Burn, Stephen J., Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008), 211, 213 Butler, Judith and grievability, 74, 78–79 Precarious Life (2004), 56, 65, 66, 69 Byron, George, Lord, Don Juan, 23 C Cannon, Patty, 6, 25–28 Carey, Peter, His Illegal Self (2008), 210 Caruth, Cathy, 144–145, 243n5 Casey, Maud, 43–45 Chabon, Michael, 210, 224 Telegraph Avenue (2012), 220 The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007), 229, 242n1 Charlottesville Attack, 249 child narrators, 81, 82–84 child prostitution, 53–54, 62 children cultural constructions of, 8–9, 53–59

and death, 80–84 and futurity, 129–130, 140–141, 144 and vulnerability, 4, 56–57, 59–61, 68–70, 135–137, 141 China, 153 Chion, Michel, 117, 123 Choi, Susan American Woman (2003), 10, 191–207, 218, 220 The Foreign Student (1998), 149, 152, 154 as “post-boomer,” 210 Christianity, 80, 153–154, 159, 160, 162 chrononormativity, 193, 198, 202 cinema, and sound, 116–118 Civil Rights Movement, 29 Civil War, 76, 78, 87 Clary, Grayson, 187n4 Cline, Emma, The Girls (2016), 209–210 Cobb, Price, Black Rage (1968), 260–262 Coetzee, J.M., Disgrace (1999), 134 Collyer brothers (Homer and Langley), 127n1. See also Homer and Langley (Doctorow, E.L., 2009) “compulsory heterosexuality,” 4, 10, 193–194, 199, 202 Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), 165 Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now (film, 1979), 176, 181 cosmopolitanism, 67–68 counterfactual histories, 220, 242n1 Currie, Mark, 213 D Daitch, Susan, L.C. (1986), 210 Dames, Nicholas, 222 Darda, Joseph, 4

INDEX

Davis, Robert Con, 173 death and mortality, in Lincoln and the Bardo (Saunders, 2017), 7 De Cristofaro, Diletta, 10, 11, 236–242 DeLillo, Don Falling Man (2007), 139 on Kennedy’s assassination, 212 Libra (1988), 210, 212 and postmodernism, 213 De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), 163 Derrida, Jacques, “Memory: The Question of the Archives,” 131–133 Didion, Joan “The Girl of the Golden West” (2006), 192 The White Album (1979), 211 Dobard, Raymond G., Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts (1999), 19, 20 Docherty, Michael, 6–7, 33–50 Doctorow, E.L. Homer and Langley (2009), 8, 111–127 Ragtime, 95 Doerr, Anthony, All the Light We Cannot See (2014), 8, 129, 131, 134–140 Dorson, Richard M., 20, 23 Douglass, Frederick, 18, 21 dreams, 28–30 Dubey, Madhu, 262 Du Bois, W.E.B., 260 Dunant, Henri, A Memory of Solferino (1862), 158–159, 163, 165 Duquette, Elizabeth, 75 Durham, Carolyn, 188n8

267

E Edugyan, Esi, Washington Black (2018), 250 Egan, Alexis, 82 Egan, Jennifer The Invisible Circus (1995), 210, 214–215, 218, 221–222 The Keep (2006), 222 as “post-boomer,” 210 A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), 222 Elias, Amy, 45 Ellis, Bret Easton, 222 Eshel, Amir, 145 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 47 Middlesex (2002), 220 Evaristo, Bernardine, Blonde Roots (2008), 22 Eve, Martin Paul, 214

F fakelore, 6, 20, 23 family, 66–68 Faulkner, William, 47, 85 Absalom, Absalom! (1936), 176, 184, 185 The Hamlet (1940), 188n7 The Sound and the Fury (1929), 138 Faye, Lyndsay The Fatal Flame (2015), 55, 59, 61–63, 65–67, 69 The Gods of Gotham (2012), 53–56, 61, 62–65, 69 Gods of Gotham trilogy (2012– 2015), 6–7, 53–70 Seven for a Secret (2013), 55, 59–61, 65–67 1960s fiction, 236–249 Fink, Ida, A Scrap of Time (1987), 134

268

INDEX

First African Baptist church, Savannah, 22 Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), 137 Foley, Barbara, 34, 35 folklore, 23 Ford, John, The Searchers (film, 1956), 27 Forty Acres (Smith, 2014), 245–263 Fox, John, 30 Frank, Anne, 129 Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool (1997), 212, 213 Franzen, Jonathan, 47, 48 Fraser, Nancy, 195 Frederick Douglass Circle Memorial, Central Park, 18, 21 Freeman, Elizabeth, 193, 197–198 Freud, Sigmund, 131–133, 144, 243n4 Friedman, Ellen G., 173 Fry, Gladys-Marie, 21 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 25 futurity, 129–130, 140, 144–145

G Gaines, Kevin K., 257 gangsta and rap culture, 29 Ganteau, Jean-Michel, 68 Generation Jones, 210, 214, 215 Geneva Conventions, 158, 159 Gingrich, Newt, 212 Girard, René, 188n6 Gladstone, Jason, 223, 224 Gods of Gotham trilogy (Faye, 2012–2015), 7, 53–70 Goethe, Johann Georg, Faust , 23 Goodhart, Sandor, 137 gothic, 74, 96, 97, 105 Greene, Graham, The Quiet American, 176, 179–181, 187n4

Grier, William, Black Rage (1968), 260–262 Groot, Jerome de, 96–97 Gross, Terry, 34, 35–36, 40 H Habermas, Jürgen, 194 Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure (2011), 199 Haley, Alex, Roots (1976), 247 Hannah, Kristin, The Nightingale (2015), 8, 129, 130, 140–144, 145 Harris, Brandon, 47 Harris, Emily, 191 Harrison, Christine, 1, 59, 68 Harris, William, 191 hauntology, 68 Hawkes, DeLisa D., 10–11, 245–263 Hayden, Tom, The Long Sixties (2010), 212 Hayes-Brady, Clare, 7, 73–90 Hearst, Patricia, 10. See also Patty Hearst kidnapping Hearst, Patricia, 191–192, 195–196 Hearst, William Randolph, 191 Hellekson, Karen, 231, 232, 243n2 Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms (1929), 143 Heywood, Colin, 57 Hirsch, Marianne, and “postmemory,” 173–174, 248 historical documents, use of, 39–41 historiographic metafiction, 2–3, 5, 10, 74, 75, 79, 177, 179, 211, 213, 220–221, 223–225, 233 Hoberek, Andrew, 213–214, 223–224 Hochberg, Severin, 23 Hogan, Moses, 19 Holocaust, the, 130–131, 132, 146, 249 Homer

INDEX

Iliad, 158 Odyssey, 173 Homer and Langley (Doctorow, E.L., 2009), 8, 80–81, 111–127 Honeyman, Susan, 57–59 Hong, Christine, 160, 165n1 hooks, bell, 261 Hopkinson, Deborah Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt (1993), 20 Under the Quilt of Night (2002), 20 Horton, James, 21 Huebert, David, 89 Huehls, Mitchum, 222 The Novel After Theory (2006), 224 Hungerford, Amy, 210, 213 Hutcheon, Linda historiographic metafiction, 2, 3, 74, 75, 78–79, 177, 179, 213, 220–221, 223–225, 233 on irony, 103, 109, 179 A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), 213 on postmodernism, 187, 223 “problem of history,” 211 on Thomas Pynchon, 211 Hystopia (Means, 2016), 236–242 I Indignation (Roth, 2008), 8–9, 150–157, 160, 162, 164 Irving, Washington, Rip Van Winkle, 23 J James, Allison, 57, 65 James, Henry, What Maisie Knew (1897), 59 Jameson, Fredric, 222, 223 Japan, 158, 160, 163

269

Japanese Americans, 192–193, 206, 220 Jefferson, Thomas, slave children of, 21 Jin, Ha, War Trash (2004), 149 Johnson, Andrew, 252 Johnson, Joe, 25 Jongh, Countess Andrée Eugénie Adrienne de, 141, 142

K Kachka, Boris, 36, 40, 41 Kalaidjian, Walter, 120, 121 Karagouni, Villy, 7, 8, 111–127 Keen, Suzanne, 68 Kelly, Adam, 78, 210, 215, 217, 223 Kennedy, John F. assassination, 209 in Hystopia (Means, 2016), 230, 233, 234 Kermode, Frank, 230, 238, 240 Kim, Daniel Y., 165 Kim, Richard, The Martyred (1964), 149, 153, 154, 160, 163 Kincaid, James, 57 King, Martin Luther Civil Rights Movement, 29 in McBride’s Song Yet Sung , 18, 26–28 King, Stephen, 95–96 Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior (1976), 185 Korean War in The Coldest Night (Olmstead, 2012), 149 in The Foreign Student (Choi, 1998), 149, 152, 154 in Home (Morrison, 2012), 149, 153, 155, 160, 166n5 in I am the Clay (Potok, 1992), 149, 161

270

INDEX

in Indignation (Roth, 2008), 8–9, 150–157, 160, 164 in Lark and Termite (Phillips, 2009), 149 in The Martyred (Kim, 1964), 149, 150, 153, 154, 160, 163 representations of, 149–151, 163–165 in The Surrendered (Lee, 2010), 9, 150–151, 155, 156, 157–165 in War Trash (Ha Jin, 2004), 149 Korkeakivi, Anne, Shining Sea (2016), 209 Kuhn, Reinhard, 58 Kunzru, Hari, My Revolutions (2007), 210 L Lambert, Josh, 130–131 Lee, Chang-Rae A Gesture Life (1999), 157 Native Speaker (1995), 157 The Surrendered (2010), 9, 154, 155, 157–165 Lee, Robert E., in McBride’s “The Under Graham Railroad Box Set,” 30 Lethem, Jonathan, 210 Dissident Gardens (2013), 220 The Fortress of Solitude (2003), 220 Ligocka, Roma, The Girls in the Red Coat (2002), 136 Lincoln, Abraham on Harriet Beecher Stowe, 103 in Lincoln and the Bardo (Saunders, 2017), 80, 86–88 in McBride’s “The Fish Man Angel,” 30 and physiognomy, 81 and reparations for slavery, 251 Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders, 2017), 7, 73–90

Lincoln, William Wallace, 76, 77, 79, 81–84, 86 Llosa, Mario Vargas, The Bad Girl (2006), 134 Lombardo, Patrizia, 57, 58 London, Jack, 103 M magical history, 46 magical realism, 46, 74, 224 Mailer, Norman, 219, 225 Manchuria, Japanese occupation of, 157–158, 163 Mangold, James, Kate and Leopold (film, 2001), 29 Manson family murders, 209 Mantel, Hilary, Reith Lectures (2017), 1 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus , 23 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 47 Martin, Rebecca, 10, 191–207 Martin, Trayvon, 259 Marx, Karl, 179 Maryland, 25, 26 masculinist ideology, 171–172 Mason, Bobbie Ann, In Country (1985), 172, 174, 210 Maxey, Ruth, 149–165 McBride, James “The Christmas Dance,” 30 The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother (1996), 17 “The Fish Man Angel,” 30 Five-Carat Soul (2017), 30–31 The Good Lord Bird (2013), 18 “Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul” (2016), 30 Miracle at Sant’Anna (2002), 18 Song Yet Sung (2008), 6, 17–31

INDEX

“The Under Graham Railroad Box Set,” 30 McCarthy, Cormac, The Road (2006), 47 McLennan, Rachael, 7–8, 95–109 Means, David, 210 Hystopia (2016), 11, 209, 220, 236–242 Melville, Hermann, Moby Dick, 49 metafiction, 41, 221, 222, 234. See also historiographic metafiction Michelangelo, Pieta, 76 Millard, Kenneth, 62 Minha, Trinh T., 183 Mitchell, David, 39 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind (1936), 23, 252 Montell, William Lynwood, 21 Morrison, Toni, 74 Beloved (1987), 37, 47, 84 Home (2012), 149, 153, 155, 160, 166n5 multivocality, 75–76, 81–82, 84–86 music in Homer and Langley (Doctorow, 2009), 111–127 and the Underground Railroad, 19–20 musique concrète, 124–125 myth-making, 26–28 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 47 Nagy, Ladislav, 34 narrative strategies ahistorical, 34 child narrators, 81–84 multivocality, 81–82 “sense of an ending,” 230, 238–242 unreliable narrators, 155, 174–176 neo-historical fiction, 2–3, 10, 176, 223–224, 246, 250, 262

271

neo-slave narratives, 262 New Journalism, 219 Newman, Judie, 6, 17–31 New Sincerity, 78 New York, 64 Nguyen, Viet Thanh The Sympathizer (2015), 5, 171–187 on US justification of war, 165 Nightingale, The (Hannah, 2015), 142–144 Northup, Solomon, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), 247 O Oates, Joyce Carol, 47 The Accursed (2013), 7–8, 95–109 Bellefleur (1980), 97 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966), 98–99 Obama, Barack, 251, 259 O’Brien, Tim Going After Cacciato (1975), 210 In the Lake of the Woods (1994), 172, 174 The Things They Carried (1990), 210 Olmstead, Robert, The Coldest Night (2012), 149 Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient (1993), 134 opium, 163 oral history, 21 Orwell, George, 97 Ozick, Cynthia, “The Shawl” (1980), 144 P Pablo, Peter, 30 Park, Josephine, 149, 156, 157, 164

272

INDEX

Patchett, Ann, 210 Commonwealth (2016), 209 patriarchal ideology, 172 Patt, Avi, 130 Patty Hearst kidnapping in American Woman (Choi, 2003), 191–207 in Trance (Sorrentino, 2005), 218–219 Peacock, James, 6–7, 53–70 Perkins-Valdez, Dolan, Wench (2010), 250 Phillips, Jayne Anne, Lark and Termite (2009), 149 physiognomy, 81 Piercy, Marge, Vida (1979), 210 Pifer, Ellen, 57 Plymouth Historical Museum, Quilts of the Underground Railroad (exhibition), 23 Pontell, Jonathan, 210 post-9/11 fiction, 137, 139, 145, 235 post-boomers, 210, 213–214, 221 Postman, Neil, 58 post-memory, 173–174, 176, 248 postmodern Gothic, 95–109 postmodernism, 215, 222–223, 229–233 post-patriarchy, 172–174 post-postmodernism, 10, 12, 78, 211, 215, 217–219 post-postmodernism, 221–225 Potok, Chaim, I am the Clay (1992), 149, 161, 162 Powers, Richard, The Time of Our Singing (2002), 220 Pozorski, Aimee, 8, 9, 129–146 Prout, Alan, 57, 65 publics and counterpublics, 194–197, 204–205, 206 Pynchon, Thomas, 213 The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), 211

Q queer relationships, 194, 199 “Quilt Code,” 6, 25, 29

R race and racism and the 1960s, 220 black noise/black rage, 260–262, 10–11 Charlottesville Attack, 249 institutionalized racism, 260 Jewishness, 249 sinophobia, 153 and slavery, 17–30, 33–50, 86–89, 245–263 whiteness, 172, 174 white supremacy, 249, 250 Ramazani, Jahan, 139 Ransom, Amy J., 231, 233 rape, 180, 182 Reagan, Ronald, 212 Red Cross and Red Crescent movements, 158 revenge narratives, 246–263 Reznikoff, Charles, Holocaust (1975), 135 Rich, Adrienne, 4, 10, 193 Rich, Adrienne, 199 Ringgold, Faith, Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railway in the Sky (1992), 22 Robinson, Alan, 56 Robinson, Kim Stanley, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), 229 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, 231, 232 Roth, Hal, 25 Roth, Philip American Pastoral (1997), 210 Indignation (2008), 8–9, 150–157, 160, 162, 164 Nemesis (2010), 153

INDEX

The Plot Against America (2004), 154, 229, 242n1 Rousselot, Elodie, 2, 176, 224, 246, 250, 262 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things (1997), 134, 138 Rushdy, Ashraf, 258 Ryan, Judith, The Novel After Theory (2006), 224

S Saunders, George “Bounty” (1995), 74, 88, 89 Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), 7, 73–90 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 111 Schaeffer, Pierre, 124 Schindler’s List (film, 1993), 136 Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, 229 Schoenberg, Arnold, 112, 113 Schuessler, Jennifer, 37 Scott, Walter, 44 semiology, 111, 118–119 Shakespeare, William Hamlet , 188n7 King Lear, 188n10 Shaw, Kristian, 68 Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam (1994), 237 Sherman, General William T., 251 Shostak, Debra, 8, 171–187 Sidewise Awards for Alternative History, 229, 242n1 silent films, 116–118 Sinclair, Upton, in The Accursed (Oates, 2013), 103, 104, 106, 107, 109 Singles, Kathleen, 230, 231, 233, 234, 242 sinophobia, 153 Sixties novels, 210–225

273

slave fiction, 5–6, 17–31, 33–50, 62, 74, 84, 86, 247, 250 slavery abolition, 76, 86–89 in children’s books, 22–23 in Forty Acres (Smith, 2016), 245–263 in Lincoln and the Bardo (Saunders, 2017), 74, 86–88 and oral history, 21 and revenge narratives, 245–263 in Song Yet Sung (McBride, 1995), 23–26, 18 in Underground Railroad (Whitehead, 2016), 33–50 Slotkin, Richard, 44, 45 Smith, Dwayne Alexander, Forty Acres (2014), 10–11, 245–263 Smith, Horace, 31 Solferino, Battle of (1859), 158 Sommocolonia, Battle of (1944), 30–31 Song Yet Sung (McBride, 2008), 17–31 Sorrentino, Christopher, 210 Trance (2005), 218–219, 221 speculative fiction, 246, 253–255, 259, 261–263 Spielberg, Steven, Schindler’s List (1993), 136 Spiotta, Dana, 210 Eat the Document (2006), 216–218, 219, 221, 222 spirituals, 19–20 Spiropoulou, Angeliki, 1, 59, 68 Stephens, Sharon, 67 Stevens, James, 23 Stocker, Bryony, 44 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 61, 103 Dred (1856), 19, 27 Strawser, Jessica, 141

274

INDEX

Stroud, Bettye, The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom (2005), 22 structuralism, 119–121 Styron, William, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), 37 Surrendered, The (Lee, 2010), 9–10, 150–151, 155, 156, 157–165 Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), 191–192, 195–196, 218–219 Sympathizer, The (Nguyen, 2015), 171–187

T Taylor, Judith, 199 Thích Quång Ðúc, 205 Thompson, Hunter S., 219 Tobin, Jacqueline, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts (1999), 19, 20 Todorov, Tzvetan, 214 transnational American fiction, 162 trauma and 9/11, 235 and history, 134 and slavery, 245 and the Holocaust, 131–133, 134, 137–138, 140, 145–146 and the Vietnam War, 236–237 trauma theory, 145–146 Truffin, Sherry R., 105–106, 107 truth, questions of, 1–2 Tubman, Harriet, 6, 20, 22, 25, 26 Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the American Frontier in American History” (1893), 75 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 43 Twain, Mark, 103 typography, 83

U Underground Railroad as civil rights movement, 29 in fiction, 22, 33–50, 250 and the Fugitive Slave Act, 25 and the Quilt Code, 20 and songs, 19 stories of, 21–22 Underground Railroad, The (Whitehead, 2016), 5–6, 22, 33–50, 229, 250 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 23 Uprichard, Emma, 59 V Vaughan, Marcia, The Secret to Freedom (2001), 22 Verne, Jules, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), 138 Vietnam War as American trauma, 160, 172, 173, 209, 218, 236–238 in American Woman (Choi, 2003), 192, 195, 205 in Eat the Document (Spiotta, 2006), 216 in Hystopia (Means, 2016), 230, 232–235 in The Quiet American (Greene, 1955), 179–182 in The Sympathizer (Nguyen, 2015), 9, 171–186 Vonnegut, Kurt, 74 vulnerability, ethics of, 68–70 W Wake, Paul, 3 Wallace, David Foster, 210, 219, 220, 222 Warner, Michael, 194–195

INDEX

war trauma, 236–237 Watts, Stephanie Powell, 259 Weiss-Meyer, Amy, 236 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 232 West, Mark, 4, 10, 209–225 white colonial history, 252 White, Hayden, 45, 113, 213, 230–231, 236 Whitehead, Colson, The Underground Railroad (2016), 5–6, 22, 33–50, 229, 250 white male privilege, 249 white space, use of, 76, 140 white supremacy, 249 Wierzbicki, James, 116 Wiggins, Kyle, 253 Wild West, myth of, 26–28 Williams, Jeffrey, 210 Williams, Sherley Anne, Dessa Rose (1986), 19 Wilson, Woodrow, in The Accursed (Oates, 2013), 98, 103–104, 107

275

Winfrey, Oprah, 6, 21, 36, 46–50 Wolfe, Tom, 219 Wood, James, 209–210 Worden, Daniel, 223, 224 word-music studies, 112 World War II, 9, 130–131, 140–142, 220 Wright, Courtni C., Journey to Freedom (1994), 20 Y Yoshimura, Wendy, 10 Z Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 75 “anxiety of origins,” 3–4 Zink, Nell, 210 Mislaid (2015), 220 Zinneman, Fred, High Noon (film, 1952), 28 Zylska, Ruchel Dwajra, 17