(Re)conceptualizing History: Temporality, Language and the Human Experience

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(Re)conceptualizing History

Temporality, Language and the Human Experience

Marianne Svarstad

A Thesis presented to

The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The M. A. Degree in English Literature University of Oslo

Spring 2017

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(Re)conceptualizing History: Temporality, Language and the Human Experience http://www.duo.uio.no

Printed: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo

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Acknowledgements

Writing this thesis has been a rollercoaster of emotions. It’s been challenging. It’s been difficult. It’s been frustrating. It’s been exhausting. But it has also been rewarding. It’s been enjoyable. It’s been eye-opening. But most of all, writing this thesis has been an absolute pleasure. I have learned more during this year than I ever thought was possible, and it is with a heavy heart that I have now reached the inevitable end of this journey.

As with so much else in life, I could not have completed this project alone. A few moments of thanks are in order.

The appreciation that I have for my friends exceeds words. Thank you all for your indispensible words of encouragement and endless cups of coffee. A special thanks to Monica, for being my academic lifeline; to Åshild, my binary opposite, whose pedagogical skills have kept me grounded; to Karoline, for meeting me in my inherent pessimism; to Amnah, for always believing in me; and finally, to my sister Elin, for being my most unwavering source of support.

I also want to thank my supervisor, Associate Professor Bruce Barnhart, for his helpful insights and confidence in my oftentimes fragmented and shifting ideas.

A massive thank you is also due to all the other professors I have had the pleasure of encountering during my time at the University of Oslo. You have all helped me see what I could not see before, and for that I am deeply grateful.

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Abstract

This study argues for the possibility of seeing the field of historical construction as a site of subjective control, and is interested in how this particular form of power impacts the human experience. My understanding of history speaks to a combination of two separate but intimately intertwined concepts: time and language. Drawing from the Heideggerian thesis that time constitutes the foundation for the human experience, and the post-structuralist notion that language is the governing field of human comprehension, I argue that history is that which brings the basis of the human experience into human intelligibility. Based on this combination, the study sets out to explore the implications of historical construction, and how specific modes of writing history serves to cement the human understanding and the human experience into particular, pre-established structures. The thesis centers in on three different novels – The Book of Daniel (1971) by E. L. Doctorow, Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee, and The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy – all of which seek to illustrate the limited basis of the human experience that results from the dominant logic of historical construction. I argue that this emphasis on the human experience is of great significance, not only for the way in which it speaks to the anthropocentrically based status quo of organizing the world, but also, precisely in so doing, it engenders a means to open up arenas in which the status quo can be productively interrogated and challenged. Ultimately, the study concludes with the assertion that, in order to forward the potential for change in the logic of historical

construction, we need to start with a reconceptualization of what the key concepts, time and language, actually entail.

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Introduction

Action reveals itself only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants. All accounts told by the actors themselves, though they may in rare cases give an entirely trustworthy statement of intentions, aims, and motives, become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness. … Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and

“makes” the story.

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 192

This study is interested in the logic that grounds and perpetuates the governing mode of historical construction, and the impact this logic has on the human experience. My approach to history aims to elucidate its operative function as it is manifested at several levels. Ranging from its more generalized, explanatory function as a metanarrative of sorts to the role of historical narratives in our subjective understanding of the world, my various interests in history intersect in one central concern; namely, how the construction of history shapes and alters the way we experience both ourselves and the world more broadly. To explore these issues, this thesis will look at three different novels: The Book of Daniel (1971) by E. L.

Doctorow, Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee and The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, all of which approximate and illustrate the logic of historical construction as if the structure of history itself constitutes a system of power. Central to this study, then, is the presupposition that the texts in question are cultural texts, here understood as reflections of and commentary on the dominant cultural discourse. I do not, however, aim to criticize the novels themselves, but rather to explore the ways in which they approach and discuss the power structure that encapsulates the field historical construction. Before going on to the discussions proper, however, I will spend some time with the concept itself; history – what is it?

At the Margins of Historical Awareness

For Hannah Arendt, the creation and existence of history is intimately attached to human being’s ability to act. “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter,” she says in her 1958 book The Human Condition,

“corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life” (7). It is action, according to Arendt, that drives us; out of the three “fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action” (7), it is the latter that is most characteristic of the human condition. It is in

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action that we interact with other human beings; it is in action that we engage in plurality.

And plurality, says Arendt, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (8). It is an ongoing process of creating, of potentiality; it is the scene of politics. It is a continually ongoing process of human relations, about the assemblage of human plurality into a realm of simultaneous mutuality and irreducible difference. “Action,”

she says, “in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” (8-9). It is in our ability to interact, then, in our ability to process and store information that the potential for action has its locus. Indeed, says Arendt, it is “only because we are capable of acting, of starting processes of our own, [that we can] conceive of both nature and history as systems of processes” (232).

This ongoing process of plurality and action as the basis of the human condition reveals one very significant element: the human condition is, at its most fundamental level, grounded in the continual creation of history. The resulting history is, however, not just any kind of history. It is, notably, an anthropocentric form of history grounded in a linear sequence. I find Arendt’s thesis here problematic for two distinct but intertwined reasons.

First, the implications of her inherent anthropocentrism. For Arendt, the most elementary level of the human experience is located in our ability to act, to process and create. Such a thesis is problematic not just because of the way it allows for the perpetuation of the elevation of the human over all other animals, as has been the norm since the origin of Western philosophy, but it does also, notably, situate this hierarchy as one of the main pillars of the human condition. My second point of concern is the consequences of the specific temporal structure Arendt’s thesis is grounded in. For her, it is the ability to act that is essential to the human condition, the process of interaction, of both progress and memory. It is, in other words, the ability to situate one event after the other, to engender a sequential logic from one moment to the next that preserves the past and ushers us into the future. As such, then, Arendt’s thinking about the human condition is not simply grounded in an idea that situates the thinking human at the center. It is also, just as importantly, a form of thinking about the human that cements the human experience into a hierarchical and inevitably linear understanding of the world.

Situated in stark contrast to the futural and anthropocentric presentation of history found in Arendt is Karen Barad’s theoretical framework on agential realism. Combining quantum physics, critical theory and philosophy, Barad’s goal here is to open up for a significant re-evaluation of matter in ontology and epistemology, and in so doing, engender

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the potential for an approach to the world beyond the anthropocentric structures that govern our understanding of the order of the world today. Language, culture, discourse; they have all been given too much power, in Barad’s mind. They have all been granted agency. But what about matter, she asks, “how did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?”

(Meeting 132). Matter is not simply matter, she asserts in her 2007 book Meeting the

Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Indeed, matter is just as much an agent as language and culture purport to be. Maybe even more so.

Barad proposes that we approach matter differently; she suggests that we take matter

seriously. Drawing from the famous quantum physicist Niels Bohr, Barad depicts the basis of matter as inherently active: “matter is a dynamic intra-active becoming that never sits still – an ongoing reconfiguration that exceeds any linear conception of dynamics in which effect follows cause end-on-end, and in which the global is a straightforward emanation outward of the local” (Meeting 170). There is no static, inherent essence to be found in matter, she goes on to say, no naturally given meaning. Rather, matter and meaning are “inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder” (Meeting 3). In starting at the level the quantum, the very smallest unit of measurement there is, Barad’s thesis on the intrinsically shifting nature of all matter claims to engender a potential to not only counteract the biases of essentialism, but more pressingly to open up for an approach to the world that sees beyond the sequential linearity that grounds one the most dominant fields that helps us understand the world; namely, history.

History, according to Barad, pertains to an inherently humanist approach to and understanding of the world. In a similar way as language and culture purport to offer a means to approach the ostensibly inanimate nature of matter, Barad’s perception of history is that of history as intrinsically constructivist (“Posthumanist” 821). That is, history is nothing but humanity’s attempt to ascribe its own purported necessity onto the world’s supposedly preexisting matter. This distrust in the productivity of history is manifested as a complete disruption of the structure that grounds conventional modes of historical construction. The way we think about time today, she holds, aims for a total unification of time; a universal time. Driven by its intimate attachment to progress, this linear perception of temporal

unification is problematic both insofar as it inevitably engenders and perpetuates hierarchies, and also for the way in which the notion of technological, economic progress is based on a negligence of the earth’s resources. As such, holds Barad, temporal unification and universal time ought to be seen as the biggest threat to the earth itself.

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As opposed to the “sagas of progress from an earlier time period to a later one

punctuated with discoveries that lead the way out of the swamp of ignorance and uncertainty to the bedrock of solid and certain knowledge” (“Quantum” 244), Barad suggests a departure from the conventions of historical narratives of progress. In alignment with her thesis on the inherently active nature of matter, Barad show us how the quantum “is initially at one energy level and then at it is at another without having been anywhere in between” (“Quantum” 246).

There is no continuous movement, she says, but rather a movement that “troubles the very dichotomy between discontinuity and continuity” (“Quantum” 246). There is, in other words, no evidence to validate the linear, sequential logic that grounds the way in which we think about time today. What we find in quantum physics, according to Barad, is a broader perception of time; there is no one time, but rather a multitude of times at the same time.

Historical sequence, then, is not something that exists in the world of the quantum; what we have here, Barad says, is a temporal perception in which the identity of the past, its past ontology, was never fixed; the quantum alters its identity in and through every intra-action, and is as such “always open to future reworkings” (“Quantum” 260). No fixed past, no fixed ontology; “‘Past’ and ‘future’ are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity” (“Quantum” 261).

While Barad’s diffractive methodology certainly opens up for a much broader thesis on agency and what sort of matter comes to matter, there are nevertheless certain restrictions in her theoretical framework. Of particular interest to me here is the total decentralization of the human. Her thesis is such that it seeks to remove the human from the center of agency so that we might recognize that the human is not the dominant source of organizing meaning and knowledge. She wants to open up for agential diversity. As opposed to the

anthropocentric status quo of meaning making, Barad suggests a mode of meaning making that acknowledges the inherently active nature of all matter. Entities, she says, legible objects come into being by ways of endless encounters with each other, a ceaseless play of intra- actions that reveal the inherent agency with materiality. In this ongoing process of creation and re/configuration, binaries such as self and other, subject and object to not exist as such.

Instead, entities come into being in and through their specific situation, their specific

encounter with one another. We are all one stuff, as it were; there are no agential hierarchies, no distinction between matter and meaning. While I agree with Barad’s resistance against the notion of binarism, I would argue that a complete amalgamation of culture and materiality is problematic. Not only does such a combination take away the foundation of the dominant way in which the world is understood today, but it also inaugurates a new platform of

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comprehension that is so far removed from the mode of comprehension that grounds the status quo that an immediate transition would be difficult; in departing completely from what is today seen as the dominant source of agency, Barad is, by extension, eradicating much of the political potential of her own theory.

What we also need to take note of here is the difference between long and short-term processes of change. In the aim of challenging the status quo and engendering sites of change for the way in which we think about both the human experience as well as the world more broadly, I believe we need to work with the conditions of the status quo, not detach from them completely. Changes take time, and while I would argue that Barad’s diffractive methodology holds great potential for long-terms changes, I see her very progressive framework as too far removed from the current mode of comprehension to institute the potential for short-term changes. In saying this, though, I do not infer the claim that Barad’s thesis is without value. On the contrary, it is vital that we do not loose track of the potential for long-term changes while we emphasize the actions that will generate changes in the short- term; if we do not maintain a clear sight of the more overarching difficulties in the way that we think about the world today, such as the idea of temporal unification and ultimate anthropocentrism, we might end up settling for the changes that are possible in the present, which will in turn allow for the perpetuated naturalization of the status quo of problematic hierarchies of exploitation, most dominant illustrated in distinctions between the subject and the object.

So, while Barad’s diffractive methodology holds a lot of potential for long-term changes, I would argue that we also need to create sites that deal with changes that are possible in the present. And, as I see it, these possibilities of change are most productively explored by questioning the validity behind the concepts that have come to express the status quo of understanding the world. What I propose we do is to aim for an approach to thinking about the operative dynamics of the world that is situated as somewhat of a nexus between Arendt’s linear anthropocentrism and Barad’s agential realism. I would suggest we start with a thorough investigation of the purported stability behind the concepts that most intimately grounds our existence. It is when we start questioning the stability and validity of established truths that we truly engender a potential for change, and this thesis is interested in just such questions: if the status quo of thinking about the logic of the world is inherently

anthropocentric, then what are the most productive concepts to use in order to explore the basis for this mode of thinking? If the best approach to explore the human condition is by ways of history, as I would argue that it is, then how does the purportedly accurate, linear

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construction of history serves to engender a mode of comprehension that cements the

anthropocentric, sequential model of understanding as the purportedly natural approach to the world?

Defining History

History, as I understand it, speaks to a combination of two different but interrelated concepts:

language and time. First, it describes a specific process of textual narrativization. In making the past its subject matter, historical construction speaks to a process of describing that which has gone before, to engender a textual basis that makes us better equipped to approach the contingencies and uncertainties of the present and the future. This temporal element of historical construction emphasizes my second concept of interest; namely, time. As a

narration of the past, I argue that one of the most central concerns of historical construction is the attempt to structure and master the instabilities of time. My understanding of history springs from the amalgamation of these two concepts. History, as I see it, comes into being at the intersection where language and time encounter one another and bring each other into intelligibility; there is no language without the progression of time, and there is no time to speak of without language. Both language and time are central concepts for the arguments of this study, in their singularity as well as in their combined state, and it is thus important to spend some time with each of them.

Time is the foundation of the human experience, argues Martin Heidegger in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time.i The lecture itself addresses themes and concepts such as Being, Dasein and everydayness, and does as such offer a view into the ideas that would be central to Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927). Of particular interest to my study is the way in which the lecture deals with the relationship between Dasein and time. Daseinⁱⁱ is time, asserts Heidegger; in “running ahead Dasein is its future, in such a way that in this being futural it comes back to its past and present. Dasein, conceived in its most extreme possibility of Being, is time itself, not in time” (13-14E). At the most foundational level, Heidegger understands the core of Dasein’s being-in-the-world to be temporal. Moving time, time moving toward the future: “the most fundamental phenomenon of time is the future”

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itself; in his continuous move away from the past present, into the unknown future, the temporal Dasein engenders the dynamics of historicity in his very being.ⁱⁱⁱ

While the underlying notion that time is the basis of the human experience is central to the argument of this thesis, I find the definition of temporality as inherently futural

problematic. As will be explicated in the subsequent discussions, the integral push toward the future that accompanies such an understanding of time is unfortunate, not only because it cements the human experience into one particular understanding of time, but also because this specific form of temporal comprehension is one that accentuates the importance of future events over past experiences. In thinking that we are consistently being pushed toward the future, away from the past, we do not simply risk losing sight of our past experiences, but we are also ushered into a mode of comprehension where the past is established as known in comparison to the uncertainties of the future. This asymmetrical accentuation of the two different temporal modalities is problematic, not only for the obvious negligence it infers on the significance of the past, but more pressingly because, precisely in redirecting the

subjective attention away from what has taken place over to that which is to come, the past presents itself as a field that can be more easily controlled. If we simultaneously pay attention to the way in which the purported knowledge of the past is subsequently used to stabilize the contingencies of the present and the future, we can easily see how the sequential linearity of the futuristic claim contributes to induce a particular form of control over the human

experience. In drawing from the knowledge of the past to institute a similarly accurate knowledge of the present, we are effectively instituting a form of understanding wherein human beings are issued into the illusion of complete temporal mastery, a form of control that aims to claim monopoly of the totality of the human experience.

This perception of time and as the basis of the human experience runs parallel to an equally significant understanding of language. Drawing heavily from the post-structuralist tradition, this study advances the thesis that the dominant mode of organizing the world happens by ways of language. That is, the way in which human beings encounter and

engender the ability to make sense of the world occurs by ways of linguistic signification. We live in language, post-structuralist theorists claim. Ranging from Jacques Derrida’s claim that everything is discourse, to Jacques Lacan’s assertion that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ and Michel Foucault’s thesis on ‘the order of things,’ the intimate connection between language and subjective comprehension is elemental in the attempt to approximate a thesis on the subject itself. This intimate attachment between subjective understanding and language will be significant for the progression of this study; language is not simply the site

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in which our subjectivity is realized, but it is also, perhaps most importantly, the most dominant site in which entities and events can be brought into legibility.

History, as I understand it, makes for one of the most successful attempts to transmute the inconstancies of temporality into the realm of linguistic intelligibility. In speaking to that which has gone before, history purports to capture the past in the present, a depiction of knowledge that claims to make us better prepared to deal with and understand both the present and the future. History, as a predominantly written medium, is thus seen to transform the passing of time into text; history does, in other words, bring the basis of the human experience into the realm of human understanding. It is here, then, in its existence at the node between time and language that history reveals its greatest power; as that which brings time into the field of signification, history asserts itself as the dominant site in which the human experience can be shaped and altered.

This thesis is interested in the repercussions of just such a scenario. That is, when the general understanding of history becomes a means to lock human beings into a pre-

established, inflexible perception of the past, the present, and the future. In such a context, this study poses the question of the extent to which one can see the construction of history as a form subjective control. Is it, in other words, possible to think of the narrative process of historical construction as a means to structure the lives of individuals? I would argue that it is, and for the purpose of this thesis, I will be looking at the writing of history as a form of biopower.

The Biopolitics of History

Coined by Michel Foucault, biopower speaks to an explosion of historical developments and techniques that aimed to take charge of life at the level of the population. In the wake of the French Revolution, and with rise of modern medicine around the turn of the 19^th century, concepts of ‘the body’ took on a more prominent position in the logic of how power was exercised. What happened during this time, according to Foucault, was the emergence of a form of power “that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (History 137). It was, in other words, a form of power that was diametrically opposed to the Sovereign power to kill: “now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its

dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it” (History 138).

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Biopower, then, speaks to a system of norms and regulations that aimed to optimize the general welfare of the population. But this process of optimization, however, was not just any kind of improvement. Indeed, it was a process of generalization that aimed to induce a normative pattern, a regulatory structure from which one could easily differentiate between the general standard and the irregular individual that posed a threat to the stability of this standard. This shift from the individual to the general had its origin in the rise of modern medicine, says Foucault. To best safeguard the general health of the population, medical knowledge shifted from having its locus in the doctor, to medicine being manifested in a frame of reference constituted by “a series of descriptive statements” (Archaeology 37). This transition to a documentary directory of knowledge indicates a shift in the ways in which power operated as well, says Foucault. As the quantity of descriptive statements increased, power shifted from having its basis in one person, the doctor, to having its basis in a series of generalizing statements or descriptive documents. The formation of regulatory norms occurs on the basis of these masses of documentation, he says. The piles of documents became a way to monitor the regularities of a given condition, and in so doing, they functioned as a means to set the standard for what was conceived as normal. The mass of medical documents was as such affirmed as a site of power: based on the directory of documentation of medical knowledge, the clinics were able to institute a general standard of health, which enabled them to sift out the anomalies that could cause harm to the population at large.

Of particular interest to my study is the way in which this shift from the individual to the general runs parallel to a structural transformation in the realm of historical construction.

During the reign of the Sovereign, according to Foucault, the construction of history had been aimed at ensuring the stability of the Sovereign himself. As we crossed “the threshold of modernity” (History 143), however, it was the life of the population that came to be the central subject matter of historical construction. This amalgamation of history and life, explains Foucault, this biohistory manifested itself primarily in two different but intertwined processes. First, it inaugurated a drastic increase in the directory of documents. The transition from a history structured around the sovereign figure to this biopolitical history of the

population required a more extensive directory of documents as the group of people

accounted for also grew. The second consequence was manifested in a shift from a history of discontinuities to a history of continuity. While the historical discourse of the sovereign had been based on the discontinuities of history, the events that legitimated and perpetuated the stability of the power of the Sovereign, the history of the population was, in alignment with the logic of medical knowledge, centered in on patterns of continuity. What this

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transformation indicated was the reconfiguration of historical series and events: no longer was history about the process of transforming the monuments of the past into documents;

history was now about the transformation of documents into monuments. History was no longer about the attempt to account for the totality of particular events; history was now concerned with generalities. Illustrated as an account of chosen series of events, this modern mode of historical construction aimed to create a unified background that could in turn serve to engender and stabilize the structure of any given society; as a mutual ground from which people understood their present and their future, the creation of a historical backdrop served to inaugurate and perpetuate a sense of community. As such, says Foucault, history became a site of knowledge-power, a source of knowledge-production, a site of normalization and regulation.

What emerged from this transition into a generalized form of history was a new form of historical construction. It is no longer the events that are the object of history, Foucault says; it is the historian’s analysis. Having transitioned into a general history, it is up to the historian to link the various series of historical discourse together in ways that would create a legitimate unity. Embedded into this problematic is, of course, the difficulty of deciding which documents one should depend on, the sifting out of important elements and aspects that need to be included, what can be excluded, the delimitation of groups and areas that are to be included, and, perhaps most pressingly, the determination of logical relations between the event and the account of the event; the structural relation between the signifier and the signified. In short, the process of constructing a history based on a mass of documentation is the same as deciding what goes into historical discourse and what remains excluded. And ultimately, says Foucault, those decisions are made by he who organizes the documents: the historian.^iv

What I wish to take away from this description of the task of the historian is twofold.

First, the way in which historical construction is grounded in a sequential logic. Second, the emphasis on constructing a unified version of the past. The present is always fragmentary, Foucault explains, always already an unfinished or unknown totality. In creating a history that claims monopoly on truth, one was able to create a sense of coherence in the present. In this sense, history functioned as an attempt to create a totality, a way to re-constitute that which has been deprived of the subject. In and through constructing a purportedly totalizing truth of the past, the subject is able to envision a sense of unity, not only in their subjective understanding of themselves, but of the world more broadly as well.

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Chapter Outlines

The aim of this study is to illustrate the implications this mode of historical construction has on the human experience. To do so, I will center in on and investigate what I understand to be the three dominant levels at which the human experience is effected by the process of

historical construction: the individual, the national, and the global. Addressing the relationship between historical construction and the human experience from these three different angles will allow for a more thorough investigation into the inherent power of the structure that encapsulates the field of historical construction, which will again allow for valuable insight into the relationship between the logic of the established reality and the particular dynamic that grounds the status quo of historical construction. The structure of the thesis will mirror these three different levels, with the first chapter addressing the encounter between the individual and the forces of historical construction; the second chapter

addressing the outcome of the meeting between the dominant forces of historical construction and the national consciousness; and the final chapter discussing the universal repercussions of historical construction as it pertains to the human experience.

To address the encounter between the governing mode of historical construction and the subjective experience of the past, the first chapter will center in on E. L. Doctorow’s 1971 novel The Book of Daniel. Taking one specific historic event as its point of departure,

Doctorow’s novel addresses the politics of historical representation that govern the stability of official history. The novel itself is a fictionalized account of the infamous Rosenberg trial of 1951, an event that has come to mark a significant milestone in the history of the

American Left. The protagonist of the novel, Daniel, is one of the two Isaacson children, and the novel itself speaks to Daniel’s difficulty in coming to terms with what happened to his parents some 15 years before. The official story of the Isaacsons attests to their guilt, but Daniel is not so sure. His own memory of both his parents and the string of events that led to their ultimate execution speak to a different story than the one established by the governing mode of historical construction. The two versions of the same story are presented as

diametrically opposed, a binarism that serves to engender an understanding of history that perpetuates the centrality of instabilities and contingencies in the realm of historical

construction. In and through a juxtaposition of Daniel’s subjective experience of the chain of events that led to the execution of his parents on the one side and the official story of their guilt on the other, The Book of Daniel approximates a mode of historical narration that

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departs from notions of accuracy and truth and accentuates the inevitability of subjectivity in historical construction.

Of particular interest to me in this scenario of historical inflexibility is the novel’s inherent struggle with the linguistic and temporal logic of the conventional mode of historical narrativization. For Daniel, the most problematic aspect of the governing structure of

historical construction is located in the way that it is structured. Sequential monstrosity, Daniel calls it; the way in which language is structured is in such a way as to continually drive us toward the future, away from the past. This futural structure then gets implemented into the way in which we organize language; in the attempt to engender a mode of thinking about history wherein temporality is grounded in a logic of generalizing unification, the way in which we think about language needs to be placed into a dynamic that aligns with the logic of inflexible, universal perception of time. The result of this deterministic perception of language is that the construction of history is effectively transmuted into a logic that aligns more with scientific accuracy than with the freedom of imagination. The problem about this mode of constructing history, the novel tells us, is twofold. First, it locks us into an inflexible relationship with both the past and the present. Second, it eliminates the actual experience of the past. There is no scientific logic that grounds history, the novel tells us, and in thinking that there is, we allow for the perpetuation of a form of historical narration that locks us into an inflexible relationship with the past, the present, and ultimately the future.

The second chapter discusses the ways in which the results of the dominant mode of historical construction manifest themselves at the level of the national consciousness. To address this broader encounter between history and the population, this chapter will center in on the 1999 novel Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. My predominant point of interest here is the way in which Coetzee addresses the power structure that governs the dominant forces of historical construction in South Africa, and how this structure serves to debilitate the potential for a flexible understanding of relationality and being. The ways in which history has been constructed in South Africa up until the present, the novel illustrates, is by ways of totalizing structures. Of primary importance here is the shifting understanding of the

distribution of landscape and the logic in which history is constructed. Drawing from the theoretical framework offered by the postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant, my reading of Coetzee’s novel will to a large extent revolve around the distinction between the mode of existence that Glissant calls Being, and the mode of existence he entitles Relation. Speaking to the difference between the Western, imperial mode of understanding the world as opposed to the de-totalizing logic of nations that either have been or still are suffering under

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colonization, this binarized frame serves a productive means to understand the intricate and shifting conditions depicted in Disgrace. Centering in on the realm of historical construction, I will argue that Disgrace illustrates the need for a shift in the way history is narrated in South Africa: in the place of Being, Coetzee’s novel is attempting to situate Relation.

The first part of the chapter explores the ways in which Coetzee’s novel addresses the limits of language. Language is a central concept for much of Coetzee’s writing, especially when it comes to the relationship between human beings. What we find in Disgrace, I will argue, is a conflict of relationality that has its locus in the use and implications of language.

Presented in a binarized frame between the totalizing logic of the West and the anti-

essentialist dynamics of South Africa, language is depicted as a significant and continual site of conflict when it comes to the underlying dynamics of social recognition and national understanding. The second part of the chapter will incorporate the foregoing discussion on the disconnect between Western logic and the logic of South Africa in a discussion on the relevance of location, ownership and the official structures of history. I will argue that a big contributor to the manifestation of official history in South Africa is the way in which the landscape is structured. By ways of Glissant’s thesis on the logic of language in the postcolonial context, I will argue that the power structure of official history is manifested in the structure of the landscape. What Coetzee is attempting to do in Disgrace, then, is to

reconfigure these firm boundaries. So much about colonial occupation was about location, and what Coetzee is illustrating in Disgrace is an attempt to redraw the maps of official history.

The third and final chapter will center in on Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road from 2006 in an attempt to approximate a broader understanding of role of history in the institution and perpetuation of civilized humanity. In this chapter, I will look at the ways in which the novel confronts the overarching purpose of history more generally; what is history supposed to do for us? What is the role of history in the institution and perpetuation of what we today understand to be properly human? To answer this question, I will examine how the novel appears to situate history at the node between civilized human behavior on the one hand, and animalistic instincts on the other.

At the heart of this discussion, then, is the question of the human, and the

fundamental limitations of what can be said to be human. The Road, I will argue, addresses this problematic in very fundamental ways, most prominently by ways of history. Drawing from the terminology offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis, my discussion will accentuate the role of language in the realm of historical construction. I argue that Lacan’s psychoanalytic

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framework, in particular his tripartite presentation of the subject’s different modes of existence – the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real –, constitutes a very productive

framework for understanding McCarthy’s novel, both for the way in which it explains for the subject itself as well as its account of the subject’s encounter with the world. Of specific interest to my reading of The Road is Lacan’s thesis on the chains of signification; as that which grounds and perpetuates the linguistically structured realm of the Symbolic, these signifying chains serve as the dominant way in which subjects make sense of and navigate the world. What we find in The Road is a deep investigation into the relationship between the human experience and the process of historical construction, and I would argue that this inquiry occurs by way of a quest into the stability of chains of signification that govern the realm of historical construction. The chapter aims to elucidate the various ways in which this exploration is depicted in the novel, a process of examination that manifests itself as three different approaches to and understandings of the role of history in these creation of ‘the human’ as a stable category: history as an Imaginary narrative, the repercussions of detaching from history, and a site of potentiality for how to better approach a mode of historical

construction that opens up for a broader, more flexible understanding of the relationship between the past, the present, and our interpretation of them.

Methodology

While being ostensibly different both in content, nationality and time of publication, these three novels connect in very interesting ways. In a simple sense, they all resist the purported stability and validity behind the structure that encapsulated the governing mode of historical narration. They way they do this, I will argue, is by attempting to reconfigure the established power structure of historical construction from the inside. The power structure referred to here is to be understood as the combination of mechanisms and processes that ground and legitimize the official story of the past as true. Taking these structures as their point of departure, each of the novels discussed here situate themselves inside the governing structure in an attempt to reveal their flaws and shortcomings.

My general understanding of this process of historical reconfiguration aligns with the logic that grounds Derridean deconstruction. In a simple sense, deconstruction refers to a mode of understanding language where difference and writing are combined. Initially presented as a critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, the idea behind Derridean deconstruction is to illustrate the inherent instability in language. Derrida argues

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that there is no firm link between the signifier and the signified, as Saussure had proposed.

Rather, there is an endless gap between the two; a ceaseless play of free-floating signifiers preventing meaning from ever stabilizing or settling down. To indicate this unyielding process of how meanings scatter, spread and multiply, Derrida introduces the term

dissemination. Even though Derrida himself refused to define the term in any concrete way, as doing so would inevitably limit its meaning, dissemination speaks not only to the

multiplication of meaning, but also to the ways in which, in this process, meanings can also get lost. The most important point to notice here, from the perspective of this thesis, is

twofold. The first point relates to Derrida’s emphatic attention to language itself. It is not that which is external to language that is Derrida’s focus, but rather the inner logic of language itself. We need to work from within language, Derrida argues, within the structure in order to get a better understanding of it. I would argue that, in relation to the novels addressed in this study, a similar logic can be identified. Analogous to the ways in which Derrida worked from within the structures of language to recognize the multiplicity and differànce, these novels aim to introduce difference into the power structure that governs and perpetuates the norms of historical construction. The second point of interest speaks to the inevitability of lost meanings. The purported coherence of historical construction is forced to undergo a

fundamental process of dismantling if we take Derrida’s thesis seriously: if meanings get lost in the process of trying to make words and concepts cohere, then the attempt to produce a unified history will inevitably mean that certain elements of the events of the past will scatter and get lost in the process of constructing a seemingly cohesive narrative.

Based on the Derridaen emphasis on working within the structure, this study aims to illustrate the various ways in which the three different novels encounter the established structure of historical narration, and how these structures serve to delimit the range of the human experience. As novels, these works have a relatively unique position in relation to the field of historical narration. As opposed to the generalizing logic of historical construction, the novel has more of an ego, it stands on its own, and it exerts a form of individualism. At the same time, however, the novels discussed in this study manifest their individuality in an arguably unconventional sense; driven by an inherent distrust of the unified logic of a universal and totalizing history, they open up an arena for thinking critically about the structural process that grounds the rules and regulations of historical narrativization. In so doing, they inaugurate and promote a mode of thinking about historical construction that destabilizes, dislocates and shatters the unified logic of historical narration.

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1 The Book of Daniel

There is a limit, at once internal and external, on which I would like to insist here: although the experience of an event, the mode according to which it affects us, calls for a movement of appropriation (comprehension, recognition, identification, description, determination, interpretation on the basis of a horizon of anticipation, knowledge, naming, and so on), although this movement of appropriation is irreducible and ineluctable, there is no event worthy of its name except insofar as this appropriation falters at some border or frontier.

- Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in Times of Terror, 90

This chapter discusses the ways in which the 1971 novel The Book of Daniel by E. L.

Doctorow addresses the inevitable presence of subjectivity in the logic of historical

construction, and the role that this element of subjectivity plays in the relationship between historical construction and the human experience. At the center of The Book of Daniel is the protagonist Daniel Isaacson’s attempt to re-visit a string of events that led to his parent’s execution some 15 years before. When his younger sister Susan is admitted to a mental institution after an attempted suicide, Daniel finds himself at a crossroad. Susan had been wholly convinced of their parents’ innocence, a conviction that drove Susan’s energized and persistent persona. Her attempted suicide came as a shock to Daniel, an unexpected

occurrence that leads him to question both the relationship between Susan’s understanding of the execution of the Isaacsons and the understanding held by the established reality, as well as the impact that the past has on shaping the present. Part desire to find out about what drove Susan to her attempted suicide, and part desire to find out the truth about what really

happened to their parents, Daniel picks up the fragmented path left by Susan in an attempt to get closure on the past, the present and the future.

Daniel’s attempt to approximate the past through the reality of the present occurs by ways of subjective memory. The official story of the Isaacsons attests to their guilt, but as Daniel forces himself to explore his subjective memories of the past, he begins to question the validity behind the purported truth of the establish account. Driven by both his attachment to Susan as well as his own conflicted relationship to both the past and the present, Daniel’s journey into the past juxtaposes his subjective experiences with the rigid logic of the

established reality. Embedded into this difficult process of making sense of the futural logic that drives our temporal perception is a significant critique of the dominant structures of both time and language. Centered in on major themes such as language, time, truth and

subjectivity, Daniel’s book illustrates the structural difficulties of historical construction and subjective experience and, in so doing, opens up for an arena in which we can see and discuss the repercussions of historical construction on the subjective experience in the present.

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Modeled after the infamous Rosenberg case, Doctorow’s novel instigates a critique of the rules and regulation that govern the construction of history at two intertwined but separate levels: the individual and the global. The Rosenberg case is a famous and enigmatic one in the field of American history. During the height of the Cold War, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were accused and arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union; they were believed to have passed on information about nuclear technology to the Russians. After a long trial, they were found guilty and sentenced to death. On June 19^th 1953 the two were electrocuted. Their case has spurred much debate, both in terms of the validity of the verdict as well as the verdict itself. Virginia Carmichael’s 1993 book Framing History: The

Rosenberg Story and the Cold War, for instance, offers an in-depth analysis of the Rosenberg case and its relation to the logic of the public Cold War narrative issued by the US. Her particular point of interest is located in the logic of the ways in which the public narrative was constructed and perfected: based on a dynamic in which “language precedes and exceeds material events” (35), the Cold War narrative “both selected and selectively ignored [events]

in favor of the development of the interpretive narrative culminating in the Truman Doctrine”

(35). A big part of this national narrative of the Cold War, she says, was that “the United States owned the atomic bomb and the secret to its production” (49). It is in this context that the significance of the allegation against the Rosenbergs becomes particularly important;

accused of leaking information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet, the married couple constituted a direct threat to the stability of the public narrative. Doctorow’s decision to take the Rosenberg story as the point of departure for his critique of the processes of historical narration is not surprising, asserts Carmichael, predominantly because this story “provides a particularly apt occasion for a consideration of the function of storytelling – or narrative – in history” (xii): the official narrative of the Rosenbergs attests to their guilt, but with the limited evidence in the case against them, the understanding of this purported truth is split between a form of ‘truth’ that pertains to the preservation of the status quo, and a form of truth that speaks to an accurate depiction of the past. The 1971 novel can thereby be seen in its twofold project; while being centered in on one particular event, Doctorow’s discussion on the operations that govern the realm of historical construction can be extrapolated into the construction of history more broadly, and does as such offer insight into what Doctorow understands as the problematic logic that grounds the field historical construction.

This chapter is interested in the way in which The Book of Daniel depicts the impact of historical narration of the subjective experience of the past, the present, and the future. To do so, I will center in on what I will call the politics of historical representation; speaking to a

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combination of the process of narrative construction, the resulting narrative as well as the perpetuation of this narrative, the politics of historical representation is relative to the way in which history is constructed and subsequently manifested as truth. The purpose of this

chapter, then, is to investigate the extent to which we can trust the truth-value of the politic of representation that govern the field of historical construction.

1.1 The Politics of Historical Representation

Representation, as I understand it, deals with a form of narration. It is a form of construction in which specific images, signs and symbols are sutured together so as to engender a unified whole. Jacques Rancière speaks to this idea of narration when he identifies the function of the representative as a way to manifest a specific mode “of doing, making, seeing and judging”

(17). For him, representation deals with a process of making certain ways of doing and seeing legible, ideas that are subsequently brought into the field of social visibility. Similarly,

Fredric Jameson claims that the concept of representation speaks to both “some vague conception of reality and also a specific sign system” (Postmodernism 123). For him, the process of representation relates to an institution of a specific connection between the signifier and the signified, a process of manifesting specific realities. In short, it is about the organization of certain interpretations of reality. For my understanding of the concept, I will depend on these two; for the purpose of this thesis, the idea of representation speaks to the suturing together of specific signs and symbols that are manifested and accepted as true in the consciousness of the established reality.

History, I would argue, is about representation. History is about the suturing together of documents; about instituting a firm connection between the signifier and the signified in ways that result in a unified whole. For critic Jean-François Lyotard, this process of

unification is most productively interrogated as “the narrative of myth” (Inhuman 67). For him, the narrative of myths speaks to one of the most ancient means by which humans expressed their desire to control time. “Myth allows a sequence of events to be placed in a constant framework in which the beginning and the end of a story form a sort of rhythm or rhyme” (Inhuman 67), writes Lyotard, indicating the ways in which the manifestation of an ostensibly cohesive presentation of the past became a way to stabilize the contingencies of the present and the future. For Lyotard, then, the project of constructing a cohesive history relates to the logic of myth, and the myth speaks to an attempt to master time, to force our

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temporal understanding into a structure of linearity. History, in this sense, is about the suturing together and perpetuation of a unified narrative that eliminates the contingencies of time. The ultimate aim of the human race, Lyotard argues, is to achieve a complete control of time, to become, in his words, “the ‘great monad’” (Inhuman 69), to make time one. I would argue that the creation of a unified history is directed at the same objective. The established mode of historical construction operates with a form of narration that aims for totality, for control of the past, the present, and, ultimately, the future. It is, in a word, a way to manifest an imaginary stability. In The Book of Daniel, this idea of a unified history is manifested in the official story of the Isaacsons, and my discussion will investigate the logic of the politics of representation that grounds the encapsulating power structure of this story.

A significant portion of the existing criticism on The Book of Daniel centers in on the political undercurrents of the novel.^v One of these critics is Jieun Kwon, whose 2014 article

“Redeeming the National Ideal: Revisiting E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and its Political Implications” proposes the underlying logic of ideological systems as a way to understand the political significance of the 1971 novel. Kwon’s understanding of ideology is grounded in Louis Althusser’s thesis on the logic of ideology, with particular emphasis on how his theory “acknowledges both the representative and the incorporative dimensions of ideology” (83). That is, the way ideology both constitutes a social symbolic as well as the dynamics that serve to indoctrinate subjects into this particular symbolic. As opposed to the dominant focus on the protagonist’s ostensible withdrawal from political life found in other readings of Doctorow’s novel, Kwon holds that “the text conveys a fundamentally political gesture in its seemingly private retreat” (85). I agree with Kwon here; it is precisely in taking such a personal focus that the novel locates its greatest strength in terms of social criticism. In revealing the subjective repercussions of the political system, Doctorow is able to offer a subversive critique of not only the dynamics of the political status quo, but also of political activism and understanding.

Even though my reading does not aim to engage directly with the political nature of Daniel’s book, I would argue that this emphasis on the personal is of particular significance to understand the importance of what the novel says about the subjective repercussions of historical construction. The relationship between political ideology and historical

construction is a close one, wherein the logic behind the writing of history serves to both stabilize and perpetuate the illusion imposed by the ideological structure. This specific connection is important to my reading of The Book of Daniel, and I will thereby spend some time with Althusser’s idea of ideology as a form of social suturing.

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In his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser famously defined ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (450). Drawing from the Lacanian understanding of the Imaginary, this definition reveals how ideology speaks to a process of constructing and representing a reality that does not correspond to reality as reality actually is. Instead,

ideology is a system of representation, a set of images and symbols that engender a totalizing perception of reality from which subjects cannot escape. Althusser’s primary point of interest here is the relation between men and the imaginary reality presented to them in the

ideological system. For him, the imaginary reality engendered by the ideological structure does not so much accentuate the reality itself as it expresses an imaginary relation between the subject and its conditions of existence. That is, the basic function of ideology is to engender an imaginary relation to the subject’s real relations. The reason why these

imaginary relations can exist, Althusser says, is because ideology is grounded in materiality.

Materiality, for Althusser, is most evidently manifested in “an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” (452). This positioning of materiality in actions and rituals as opposed to the more conventional understanding of ‘physical’ materiality is revealing, particularly for the ways in which it shows the naturalizing process by which the ideological structure is maintained.

One of the most important points to note about this process is that it is entirely

unconscious. As subjects, we are interpellated into the ideological structure without our being consciously aware of it, Althusser holds. Presented as an unavoidable part of social totality, ideology simply is the structure in and through which we become subjects. This process is both continual and unyielding; it occurs in our social relations, both with other subjects and in our interaction with social institutions. As such, the ideological structure of any given nation is not something that can be escaped, but rather the omnipresent and invisible structures of the conditions that we are born into. Indeed, it is only within these structures that one can locate social recognition. This particular aspect is accentuated by the fact that Althusser does not work with the human as a self-sustaining category as such, but is rather grounded in the notion that the subject only comes into being in its encounter with the ideological structure itself. “There is no practice except by and in an ideology” (454), writes Althusser, accentuating the indispensible and intimate attachment between subjectivity and the ideological structure in which this subjectivity is realized. Presented as the unconscious operation in and through which man recognizes his attachment to the cultural imaginary of their national collective, the Althusserian theory of ideology describes the foundational structure for communities and collective recognition.

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This idea of collective recognition is of specific interest to me, particularly for the way in which it aligns with the idea of history as a basis for community. In his delineation of the dynamics of history, Michel Foucault emphasizes the significance of the connection between community and historical narration. “The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory,” he says, “history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation in which it is inextricably linked”

(Archaeology 7). While Althusser’s thesis on ideology and Foucault’s delineation of history hold notable differences, they are nevertheless mutually concerned with the significance of the collective in the perpetuation of their respective theses. They do, each in their own way, delineate the logic of their respective structures in ways that elucidate the way in which each structure accentuate the stabilization and naturalization of the collective, and I would argue that it is the combination of these respective focuses on the collective that allows for the perpetuation of the established reality. Indeed, it is the point where these two different ideas encounter one another that the most significant site of power is located: in aligning the logic of the conscious creation of history with the overarching, unconscious structure of ideology, the construction of history serves as a site in which the ideological structure is both validated and consistently stabilized.

Of additional importance here is the way in which the connection between history, ideology and collectivity amalgamate in an attempt to structure and govern the human experience. Drawing from Heidegger, I have argued that temporality constitutes the basis of the human experience. Moreover, I have argue that the construction of history comprises a direct means to exercise a form of control over the human experience; history, as a textual account of the past, serves to bring the temporal basis of the human experience into the dominant mode of human understanding, namely language. So, if ideology is the framework within which subjectivity is realized, I would argue that the construction of history is one of the predominant means by which these subjects are governed; in taking control of someone’s past, one is necessarily also impacting that someone’s present and the future. What is being made particularly evident in this delineation is the way in which the construction of history can be used as a means to ensure the stability of the status quo; in structuring the past in a certain way, we are in corollary also instituting a specific form of power over the present and the future. History, then, is not simply an attempt to textually manifest the past. More

pressingly, it becomes a way to manifest and perpetuate the validity of the established reality.

Doctorow’s novel confronts this problematic by ways of an investigation into the politics of historical representation; centered in on the narrative power-structure that

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encapsulates the official story of his parents, Daniel’s book constitutes an attempt to reconfigure the structure that grounds the status quo of the politics of historical representation. As one critic notes, “only a deconstructed narrative can destabilize the

hegemony of official history enough to open up new possibilities of interpretation. A strategy of disconnection must precede any sort of reconnection” (Parks 36). I agree with this

assessment, and would argue that The Book of Daniel depicts a form of reconnection that is based in a combinatory of subjective memory and official facts. What Daniel is attempting to do, then, is to engender a new form of narration, a reconfigured narrative of the past.

Illustrated by ways of a process of fragmentation, of multiple modes of narration, the departure from established structures and the insistence on an alternate form of

representation, The Book of Daniel engenders a way to approximate a process of writing history that does not cement us into a specific understanding of the human experience.

1.2 Outline and Methodology

The aim of this chapter is to address and discuss two of the dominant ways in which The Book of Daniel critiques the established logic of historical construction, and what the novel proposes we do instead. The first section will deal with two separate but intertwined

concepts: time and language. These two concepts will be dealt with both as individual

concepts, as well as in their combined state. The second part of the discussion will accentuate the significance of subjective memory in the field of historical construction. The overarching aim here is to use these concepts as a means to approximate a clearer sense of what The Book of Daniel tells us about the relationship between the realm of historical construction and the human experience. Both language and time are illustrated as points of critique for Daniel, while the interception of subjective memory functions as a means to engender a site of potentiality for a more flexible approach to historical construction. So, before going on to the discussion proper, I will spend some time with each of these three concepts in order to emphasize their productive significance in my reading of Doctorow’s novel.

The first section of the ensuing discussion will center in on the significance of language in the process of historical construction. Drawing from the linguistic heritage of post-structuralism, I will ground this part of my discussion in the idea that specific uses of language result in specific modes of seeing and understanding the world. “The social subject is produced through linguistic means” (5), asserts Judith Butler in her 1997 book The Psychic

(Re)conceptualizing History: Temporality, Language and the Human Experience