Throughout this book, then, I argue that it is crucial to see that Mirek may be right, despite his own compromised subject position. The fight against power is predicated upon the accessibility of the past, even if those accessing it may also be guilty of asserting discourses of power. Kundera’s own assertion of ethics, both in The Book and elsewhere, however, initially seems to more closely resemble that of poststructuralist thinkers than a more traditional model of a guidebook for prescribed behaviors. In The Art of the Novel, for instance, Kundera champions the novel form precisely because of its capacity to deny notions of metaphysical truth and to instead insist on “relativity, doubt, questioning” (14). Indeed, in that book Kundera argues for seeing the “world as ambiguity . . . not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradic- tory truths” (6–7). In this, the only “certainty” is the “wisdom of uncertainty” (7). Kundera’s “wisdom of uncertainty” sounds strikingly similar to contem- porary ethicists’ injunctions to acknowledge the otherness of the Other. That is, if the Foucauldian “will to knowledge” is a “will to power,” the only ethical response is an acknowledgment of the degree to which we cannot “know” things in their entirety, to resist totalization, or, for Kundera, “Totalitarian Truth” (Art of the Novel 14).
A similar position is forwarded in The Book, where the “circle-dance” is a recurring image of an agreed-upon univocal meaning that excludes and/or oppresses any Other who is not part of the dance. For Kundera, those who put their faith in Communism are victims of ideological essentialism, or, in
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his more user-friendly terms, are “circle-dancers.” While Kundera acknowl- edges the attractions of essentialist ideological discourse (“I too once danced in a ring” [91]), he clearly rejects it when he describes the idyll, another ver- sion of the circle-dance.
I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is . . . caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. (11)
The attempt to reduce the Other to the self is clearly seen here, as anyone who refuses to be subsumed within the singular discourse, narrative, or circle- dance is eliminated. Kundera, then, seems to deny any totalizing narrative, even a master narrative premised on equality (“justice for all”), because the closed circle of the idyll will “crush” those it does not encompass.
For Kundera, however, this rejection of a singular vision of Truth is not inherently linked to a rejection of historical reference. Instead, the historical real, as we have seen, is precisely that which slips through the proverbial fingers of ideological unity. Mirek’s imprisonment eludes the idyll of Com- munist Bohemia, just as Zdena’s letters elude Mirek’s. In this, the “wisdom of uncertainty” is itself linked to materiality. It is the truth of past events that prevents the circle from being irremediably closed. In fact, as in White’s theory, the only truth of reality is its resistance to such attempts at unity.
It is perhaps for this reason that The Book ends with a meditation on “the border” between the postmodern “withdrawal of the real” and the confident assertion of Truth. On one side of the border resides “love, convictions, faith, history,” while on the other side these things “no longer ha[ve] meaning” (281). This meditation repeats the comparison of angelic laughter with its diabolic counterpart earlier in the novel. Angelic laughter is configured as a celebration of “how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and mean- ingful everything is” (87), while devil’s laughter “refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world” (86). While much of this section of The Book seems to be dedicated to the mockery of the angelic laughers, just as much of the novel is devoted to a critique of idylls or circle-dances, here, as in the final section, the Kundera-narrator insists not only that if “there were too much incontestable meaning in the world, . . . man would succumb under its weight” but also that if “the world were to lose all its meaning . . . we could not live either” (86). Postmodern meaninglessness, then, comes under
36 | Introduction
a critique equal to the attack on totalizing meaning. Indeed, the claim that there is no meaning, no truth, and no reference is a version of totalization that denies the tools we do have both to access the past and to construct an ethics in response to our encounter with it.
Like Mirek, in fact, Kundera insists upon the capacity of language to represent the past, although he does so in a less binary and simplistic fashion than his character. In Testaments Betrayed (1993), Kundera asserts that “[w]e know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment, when it’s happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remem- bering is a form of forgetting” (128). It would be easy to read this statement as a simply “postmodern” one, asserting, even mourning, the “withdrawal of the real,” but to do so would be to deny the statement itself, as well as the subject matter of the essay in which it appears. Rather than offering that the evanescent “present” is the real and the past is irretrievably missing, Kundera asserts the opposite, that the present is unknowable but that reality is know- able, if only in its past form. While Kundera does observe the instant conver- sion of present materiality into “abstraction” (or, perhaps, signifying prac- tices), he simultaneously sees literature as a variably successful effort to resist the “loss of the fleeting reality of the present” (129). All of this is part and parcel of Kundera’s assertion that literary criticism, in imposing moralizing or theoretical homogenization on literature, reduces it to kitsch, “throw[ing] a veil of commonplaces over the present moment, in order that the face of the real will disappear” (146). For Kundera, the “face of the real” is found in liter- ature, and particularly, the novel, while theory inevitably totalizes meaning, even when it is a theory that denies totalization. As such, he would no doubt object to my effort to see literature in the context of historiographic theory. Nevertheless, I argue that postmodern literature is dedicated to unveiling the “face of the real” and not to merely declaring that there is nothing beneath the veil. Indeed, Kundera’s conception of the “present moment” as a crucial element in revealing reality is addressed by both Woolf and Swift, who try not merely to recover the present, but to establish its peculiar character.
The Real, The True, and The Told, then, operates from the assumption that the ties between ethics and history are not merely ones derived from despair at the impossibility of reference. While it may be “ethical” within the historical profession to acknowledge the impossibility of complete, transparent reference to the past, the ethics of history should go beyond the ethics of the practice of history and also entail some understanding of how, in a more general sense, ethics can only be derived from past experience. Since the present is so fleeting as to be gone the instant it has arrived, the past becomes that vast repository for nearly all human experience, and the
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capacity to access that past and to base future actions upon them is not a combination of reactionary politics and epistemological impossibility, but is instead a difficult necessity.
The mere necessity for the capacity to transfer both observations about the world and construct a workable ethics based upon that observation does not, of course, guarantee that such reference is possible. I do not then sug- gest that the texts I study here guarantee the possibility of reference, but that they both insist upon it and offer new ways to think about it that contribute to the discourse about these matters in important ways. The theoretical hege- mony of poststructuralism has led to the widespread interpretation of post- modern texts as merely rearticulating poststructuralist dogma in regard to historical reference. These texts do no such thing. Instead, the postmodernist historical fiction I analyze takes both political and ethical positions based upon the events of the past, but does so only after acknowledging the bar- riers to historical reference and theorizing some possible ways to overcome these barriers, particularly that of narrative. The first three chapters of this book look closely at novels that offer versions of nonnarrative or antinar- rative as a means of accessing the past. Woolf’s Between the Acts focuses on women’s oppression at the hands of patriarchal history and narrative and offers alternative forms of historical representation as a means of telling the truth about women’s oppression. Similarly, Swift’s Waterland explores how narrative works to repress the past of the working class, as well as of trau- matic events, and offers representational forms that might ethically recover such events. Finally, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children provides a critique of both colonial England’s and Indira Gandhi’s management of the historical truth. Rushdie takes the ethical position that a truer history can, and must, be told, through a critique of these hegemonic narratives, and a turn to alternative forms of historical representation. Like White, these authors critique nar- rative as a form that misrepresents the past, but do so from a position that insists that a more accurate version of the past is both possible and ethically necessary.
In chapter 4, I turn to a discussion of the single most debated area of historical representation, that of the Holocaust. Through a close reading of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I explore recent theoretical models, like that of Frank Ankersmit, which advocate historical representation as a means not merely of presenting epistemological truth but also as a medium for con- veying the affect of past experience. Ankersmit’s division of truth and expe- rience helps explain why a text like Maus can be dedicated to an ethical witnessing of the Holocaust, while simultaneously highlighting its own dis- tance from and mediation of that event. From this perspective, I will indicate how postmodern form can be read as a type of mimeticism in relation to
38 | Introduction
the Holocaust, and how this model might be applied to historical studies more generally. To read postmodern fiction (and, in this case, nonfiction) as mimetic, and as theorizing mimeticism, may be counterintuitive, but it has the advantage of revealing both the ethical imperative in these texts and the dependency of ethics upon reference. While I do not, then, claim that these writers have untied the Gordian knot of historical reference, these works do have much to teach us about the social, political, and ethical importance of accessing the materiality of the past, and about the formal capacity for doing so. Each chapter of this book, then, suggests how the text in question has been typically read as postmodern in its complication and ultimate rejection of the possibility of historical reference. By contrast, I argue that these books deploy nonnarrative and antinarrative strains in order to critique narrative as a means of accessing the past, while proposing alternative means to historical referentiality, particularly out of ethical necessity. These texts highlight the degree to which narrative itself may be seen as a barrier to historical accuracy and suggest several different ways of hurdling that barrier.
39
W
ritten by one of the most canonical modernists, Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941), has been more recently identi- fied as a forerunner of postmodernism, and particularly of postmodern attitudes towards history. In fact, as Werner Deiman notes, it has “an almost obsessive preoccupation with history on virtually every page” (56). However, as in most of Woolf’s work, locating one position that the novel takes on the conceptualization of history is extremely difficult, as she is a master of ambiguity, playing each character’s perspectives off of all the others. What is clear, however, is that the novel does not accept traditional histories uncritically, equating their representations with the truth of past events.Over the course of this chapter, I will show how Between the Acts both foresees and challenges the problems of historical representation