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Sublime Desire
         -               
 

Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner

 
 Sublime Desire

History and Post-s Fiction

Amy J. Elias

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore and London
©  The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
        

The Johns Hopkins University Press

 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland -
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Elias, Amy J., –
Sublime desire : history and post-s fiction /
Amy J. Elias
p. cm. — (Parallax: re-visions of culture and
society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 --- (acid-free paper)
. Historical fiction—History and criticism. I. Title.
II. Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)
 . 
.′—dc -

A catalog record for this book is available from the

British Library.

An earlier version of chapter  appeared in Contemporary

Literature , no.  () under the title “The
Postmodern Turn on the Enlightenment.” It is reprinted
here, with revisions, by permission of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
Space and Time are the names of the exterminating
angels that expelled us from Eden. They must be
watched with great cunning. Only they can indicate
to us the return path to the desired Gates.
—Abel Posse, The Dogs of Paradise

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,—Tops and

Hoops, for-ever a-spin. . . . Alas, the Historian may
indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not
Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,—nor is it Re-
membrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People.
History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one,
as claim the Power of the other,—her Practitioners, to
survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy,
and Taproom Wit,—that there may ever continue more
than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day,
losing our forebears in forever,—not a Chain of single
Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,—rather, a
great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak
and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with
only their Destination in common.”
—Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Kant begins his logic, his last book, by saying that “the
source of all error is metaphor.” Well, too bad. He is
wrong. Metaphor is maybe the source of all error but it
is also the source of all truth, too.
—Hayden White
 Contents

Preface ix
Introduction xvii

 Theory 
 Sorting Out Connections: The
Historical Romance in Hyper-reality 
 The Metahistorical Romance and the
Historical Sublime 

 Analysis 

 Cracking the Mirror: Spatializing
History in Metahistorical Romances 
 Metamodernity: The Postmodern Turn
on the Enlightenment 
 Western Modernity versus
Postcolonial Metahistory 
 Coda: The Sot-Weed Factor and
Mason & Dixon 

Appendix: A Listing of Some

Metahistorical Romances 
Notes 
Works Cited 
Index 

vii
 Preface

The present volume examines late-twentieth-century examples of the

historical novel in relation to recent postmodern cultural assump-
tions and the traditional historical novel form, which was (at least in
Walter Scott’s novels, the most famous case) predicated on epistemo-
logical and historiographical assumptions of the Age of Reason. By
examining only novels published after  in “First World” nations,
I assume cultural and aesthetic definitions of postmodernism as a
post- social phenomenon and artistic sensibility. By examining
these texts in relation to the historiography of their time, this study
upholds the assumptions of cultural critics who claim that postmod-
ernism is the zeitgeist of postindustrial, late-twentieth-century capi-
talism. Likewise, by almost exclusively examining novels by authors
from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, I high-
light the difference between First World postmodernist literature and
literary movements and developments outside of these nations, such
as the development of postcolonial literature or the perpetuation of
underground political arts movements throughout the world. Fredric
Jameson was correct to identify postmodernism with late capitalism,
and this study assumes, for example, that while it is possible to dis-
cuss Charlotte Brontë’s feminist or politically oppositional sensibility,
it is not accurate to discuss her “postmodernism.” Perhaps contradic-
torily, however, my linking of these post- novels to the historical
novel tradition illustrates how these novels are also postmodern in an
epistemological sense, for they almost always criticize, undermine,
complicate, or try to position themselves against the precepts of En-
lightenment modernity.
The novels I consider are primarily those originally written in En-

ix
Preface

glish by authors who live in or identify themselves with so-called First

World capitalist nations. While tempted to put the phrase First
World and the term Western within inverted commas throughout this
book to indicate my discomfort with these geopolitical terms, I have
refrained for stylistic reasons from doing so. Nevertheless, there is a
difference in political agenda, origin, and narrative effect between
novels fitting these descriptors and novels that might be termed post-
colonial or otherwise outside the Western tradition and originally not
written in English. Thus, I do not treat works such as Carlos
Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Gabriel
Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jack Davis’s
Kullark/The Dreamers, V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage, Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Caryl Phillips’s
Cambridge, and many other texts that call for different or more ex-
tensive definitional parameters as postcolonial texts yet clearly share
affinities with the metahistorical romance.
This is sticky critical territory, however, for a number of reasons.
First, some literature, such as Native American fiction, stands in a
problematic relation to postcolonial politics and theory. Second,
there is a metahistorical continuity between the postmodernist and
postcolonialist metahistorical imagination. I have tried in this book
to respect cultural and political difference, yet certain texts I dis-
cuss—J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Leslie Mar-
mon Silko’s Ceremony—might easily be understood from one critical
perspective as postcolonial novels that clearly fall outside the param-
eters of First World metahistorical romance, as I define that term. The
editorial and political problem of naming—if not my solution to it—
will, I hope, stimulate further discussion.
Chapter  (“Sorting Out Connections: The Historical Romance in
Hyper-reality”) defines the classic historical romance and argues its
importance to what I call the “postmodernist metahistorical ro-
mance.” The first part of the chapter focuses on Walter Scott: the his-
toriographical influences on Scott’s fiction, particularly those of the
Scottish philosophical school, and then the paradoxical wedding of
romance and history in Scott’s work. A comparison between Leo Tol-

x
 Preface

stoy’s War and Peace and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry leads
me to define the implicit claims about history embedded in the clas-
sic historical romance that Scott’s work to a large extent engendered.
Thus, the discussion shows the relationship of Scott’s fiction first to
historiography and then to romance.
The second part of the chapter focuses on postmodernist fiction.
Inverting the order of ideas of the first section, I examine postmod-
ernist historical fiction in relation to romance and then historiogra-
phy. Important to my argument that literary fiction and historiogra-
phy are traversing similar historiographical territory is defining the
sublime (the term has different meanings in different eras) and illus-
trating the correspondences between Jean-François Lyotard’s theory
of the postmodern sublime, postmodern theories of the historical
sublime (most lucidly defined by Hayden White, F. R. Ankersmit,
and Jean-Luc Nancy), and the presentation of the past as a sublime
territory in metahistorical romance. My overall claim is thus twofold:
that the metahistorical romance reverses the dominant focus of the
classic historical romance genre from history to romance, and that it
does so because, like the postmodernist historiography and post-
modernist philosophy of its own time, it turns from belief in empir-
ical history to a reconsideration of the historical sublime.
Chapter  (“The Metahistorical Romance and the Historical Sub-
lime”) specifically defines the characteristics of metahistorical ro-
mance as a literary genre. The chapter argues four propositions:
. the postmodern historical imagination, as a post-traumatic
imaginary, confronts rather than represses the historical sublime;
. the metahistorical romance confronts the historical sublime as
repetition and deferral;
. the motivation for this confrontation is desire for and a con-
comitant distrust of the humanist value of fabula;
. the metahistorical romance learns from the texts of the literary
modernists to combine historicism with narrative form, but unlike
the modernists, the postmodernists reverse the dominant of classic
historical romance.

xi
Preface

Each is discussed with reference to critical discussions of postmodern

fiction, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred
Hunger, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Charles Johnson’s Dreamer,
Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), and
Eric Zencey’s Panama. My argument is that the metahistorical con-
sciousness models itself as post-traumatic consciousness, akin to the
state of mind of war survivors, and that as such it finds traditional
models for Western history inadequate to deal with the late-twentieth-
century realities it faces. Caught between its post-traumatic turn to-
ward the historical sublime and its obsessions with social realities, the
metahistorical romance is led to a compulsive, repetitive turning to-
ward the past that is a ceaselessly deferred resolution to the questions
of historical agency that it poses.
If chapters  and  discuss why metahistorical romance has devel-
oped, chapter  (“Cracking the Mirror: Spatializing History in
Metahistorical Romances”) examines how it reconstructs historical
models within the linear novel form. Metahistorical romances often
use avant-gardist narrative strategies to redefine post-Enlightenment
Western models for history. Specifically, the avant-gardist metahis-
torical romance subordinates time (or models of historical linearity)
to space (or spatializing models of history). A similar operation takes
place in historiography, such as in the work of Michel Foucault, who
often replaces linear models of history with what have been consid-
ered “spatial” models. Recontextualizing Joseph Frank’s theory of
modernist spatial form in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in
Modern Literature (), I argue that modernist spatial form be-
comes postmodernist spatial history in many metahistorical ro-
mances. The first part of the chapter defines this shift and its specific
relation to the metahistorical romance’s recuperation of the historical
sublime—what I see as a key feature of the genre. The two subse-
quent sections define how the metahistorical romance “spatializes his-
tory”: by replacing linear history with “paratactic history” and by re-
placing linear history with “simultaneous history.” I illustrate all of
these points with examples from contemporary fiction, such as Peter
Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Julian Barnes’s

xii
 Preface

Flaubert’s Parrot, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, and T.

Coraghessan Boyle’s World’s End.
Chapter  (“Metamodernity: The Postmodern Turn on the En-
lightenment”) examines a different kind of “metahistoricity”: the in-
terrogation by metahistorical romance of its own origin in Enlighten-
ment rationalism. This chapter correlates the post-s proliferation
of novels set in the eighteenth century to heated debates in postmod-
ern theory concerning the character and value of Enlightenment
modernity. These metahistorical romances rehearse debates in post-
modern theory concerning the value of the Enlightenment as a foun-
dational Western epistemology: some novels uphold a premodern anti-
rationalism, some construct a Habermasian defense of modernity,
and others align themselves with a Lyotardian postmodern figurality.
The metahistorical romances I examine here place different values on
romance, particularly when it is aligned with aesthetics as a sublime
realm of art. However, they have in common a discomfort with their
Enlightenment inheritance and a desire for an alternative to history
in the form of the aesthetic or historical sublime. Some of the novels
discussed include Francis Sherwood’s Vindication, Allen Kurzweil’s A
Case of Curiosities, Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary, J. M.
Coetzee’s Foe, Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X, John Fowles’s A Maggot, and
Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance.
Chapter  (“Western Modernity versus Postcolonial Metahistory”)
contrasts the novels discussed in chapter  (which looked back to an
Enlightenment “Father”) to other postmodernist fictions that stand
outside or attempt to escape from their Western inheritance. It illus-
trates a third kind of metahistorical focus in the metahistorical ro-
mance: the attempt to come to terms with the West’s own colonial
history and Others. The chapter first puzzles out the differences be-
tween postcolonial and postmodern metahistory. What has emerged
forcefully since , particularly in the s and s, are novels
written by First World authors that look at their own Western an-
drocentric history from the perspectives of women and of those peo-
ples of different, non-Western ancestry and cultures. Both postmod-
ernist historical fiction and postcolonial fiction share a metahistorical

xiii
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