University of Oklahoma Graduate College

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE INCORPORATING MULTIPLE HISTORIES: THE POSSIBILITY OF NARRATIVE RUPTURE OF THE ARCHIVE IN V. AND BELOVED A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By LEANN MARIE STEVENS-LARRE Norman, Oklahoma 2010 INCORPORATING MULTIPLE HISTORIES: THE POSSIBILITY OF NARRATIVE RUPTURE OF THE ARCHIVE IN V. AND BELOVED A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY _____________________________________________ Dr. Timothy S. Murphy, Chair _____________________________________________ Dr. W. Henry McDonald _____________________________________________ Dr. Francesca Sawaya _____________________________________________ Dr. Rita Keresztesi _____________________________________________ Dr. Julia Ehrhardt © Copyright by LEANN MARIE STEVENS-LARRE 2010 All Rights Reserved. This work is dedicated to the woman who taught me by her example that it was possible. Thank you, Dr. Stevens, aka, Mom. Acknowledgements I am and will always be genuinely grateful for the direction of my dissertation work by Tim Murphy. He was thorough, rigorous, forthright, always responding to my drafts and questions with lightening speed. Whatever is good here is based on his guidance, and whatever is not is mine alone. I know that I would not have been able to finish this work without him. I also appreciate the patience and assistance I received from my committee members, Henry McDonald, Francesca Sawaya, Rita Keresztesi, and Julia Ehrhardt. I have benefitted greatly from their experience, knowledge and encouragement. Henry deserves special recognition and heartfelt thanks for sticking with me through two degrees. I would also like to thank Dr. Yianna Liatsos for introducing me to ―the archive.‖ I most sincerely thank (and apologize to) Nancy Brooks for the tedious hours she spent copy-editing my draft. My friends Nathalie Jaëck and Pascale Sardin also copy-edited for me and talked me through some of the concomitant stress! Orit Rabkin, my dear friend, I thank for her level-headed advice, kind encouragement, practical support, and, above all, for making me laugh. Jerôme Puckica was kind enough to share his knowledge of linguistics with me in a few discussions and emails. Thanks also to Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Courtney Hopf for their words of encouragement and technical help. I have nothing but admiration for my children, Scarlett, Wyatt and Alyénor, who have endured and surmounted enormous change/challenges over the years it has taken me to finish my degree. Their strength, humor, intelligence and love inspire me. I am in awe of them. My parents, David and Wanda Stevens, deserve recognition for iv making my studies possible both practically and theoretically. To list what they‘ve done to help me would be longer than this manuscript. Christian and Michèle Larré, my parents-in-law, have patiently endured my work, supporting me and my family in so many ways. Thanks to them for all the food and bricolage. To my husband, Lionel Larré, to whom I owe a debt I will never repay. My story is next to his. v Table of Contents CHAPTER 1: The Archive: Truth and/or Certainty……………………………….….1 CHAPTER 2: The Profane Space of the Street………………………………………73 CHAPTER 3: Stencil in the Hothouse………………………………………………120 CHAPTER 4: Rememory within the House at 124…………………………………168 CHAPTER 5: Reading Beloved‘s Body…………………………………………….215 CHAPTER 6: V. v. Beloved………………………………………………………...262 CHAPTER 7: Conclusion…………………………………………………………...324 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………...336 vi Abstract Novels of the twentieth century are grappling with the questions of identity in relation to history, but a self-reflexive history, a history that is always suspicious of itself. Alienated from cultural, religious and physical identities, we try to find this identity in the inanimate dust of memory, like architecture or the material debris of lived lives, to discover our own place and ground our identities. Therefore, we live in a time of memory. This work draws upon Vico's notion of the True and the Certain, Derrida‘s conceptualization of the Archive as a metaphorical construct, and the body as the locus of memory and language and applies these concepts to Thomas Pynchon‘s V. and Toni Morrison‘s Beloved. These two canonical works provide a case study for the cultural function of memory in the novels of the twentieth century. The elements of memory are corporeally manifested in the body of the title characters whose function is the same, to mirror this process of the archival function within the realms of narrative. They represent the connection between mere thought and physical manifestation, the dead come to life, the word made flesh. Archives in the literal sense and the archive as a metaphor define an emerging and expanding area of inquiry across many disciplines. This work attempts to extend the tendrils of archival theory into American literary criticism by identifying ―archival characters.‖ vii CHAPTER ONE The Archive: Truth and/or Certainty The storyteller takes what he tells from experience— his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations Storytellers, whether speaking or writing, engage in the paradoxical activity of non-material construction—they build something from the intangible realm of memory which nevertheless has an objective existence.1 Drawing upon sources as disparate as stories they were told, individual experience, and/or intellectual research, the storyteller can produce both a subjective individual reality and an assumed objective historical reality. Stories, although intangible, exist and are, therefore, artifacts which can be approached and studied in the sense that one can gain knowledge from analyzing their various attributes whether in written or oral form. The historian can review the who, what, when, where, and how, and draw conclusions about the why regarding the artifact‘s production and is therefore engaged in interacting with the material. The linguist can judge the historical aspects of the language choices and development, again noting the materiality of language in its 1 For the purposes of this study, ―storytelling‖ encompasses the oral and the written. Therefore, there are three levels of the ―story‖: the oral, the written (physical, tangible), and the ephemeral existence of the ―idea‖ of the story one has once it has been experienced. As for the tangible story, William Kuskin makes the important foundational point that ―[the book‘s] shape magically rationalizes the ephemera of literature into a physical form‖ (79). 1 textual form. The literary critic, or the theater critic, or the film critic can point out the stylistic problems and achievements, focusing on the tangible existence of the artistic product. The story, in whatever form it takes, in whatever genre it is placed, is an artifact. These fairly obvious points lead to the original and guiding question of this study. What is the link between the purely intangible, subjective, ethereal quality of the idea of a story and the political, real-world, corporal power that these loosely defined gatherings in material form of organized language have? There is a manifest union—points of intersection—where the immaterial and the material meet, and these moments or places of meeting create historical consequences which double back on the processes of storytelling. At this intersection, both objects and documents and the imaginary collaborate in the creation of knowledge. This place of union is best understood as an archival space.2 Within an archival space, the material artifact may be summoned to enter into the intangible narrative, thus animating the traces of the past. The characters/entities of Thomas Pynchon‘s V. and Toni Morrison‘s Beloved provide case studies for the application of archival theory. These two novels have entered into the canon although their thematic concerns are overtly about different kinds and scales of alterity. Thematically, behind the obvious differences in setting 2 Pierre Nora explains that ―Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continutity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory‖ (7). 2 and tone, the novels are similar: the struggle to deal with turbulent, mysterious and tragic pasts and the obstacles that the memories and stories about those pasts present to forming a stable identity and healthy community. The dispossessed, fringe groups in V. and the ex-slaves in Beloved are separated by vast differences in their own histories, their eras, and the causes of their psychological and cultural struggles. Yet what is provocative about these two texts and what makes a comparison intriguing is that despite these marked disparities both novels need narrative to ameliorate these struggles as well as the consequential malaise that encompasses those who cannot narrate. Furthermore, V. and Beloved are both constructed in similar ways, both incorporating multiplicities and providing the guiding metaphor for this study—the archive. By focusing on two very specific texts and two very specific characters, a close reading of the two novels through the prism of archival theory allows both a novel reading and a novel approach to the cultural function of fiction. The archive itself, and V. and Beloved as the archive in character form, presents us with issues of control/power because of its association with hegemonic powers and their ability to create and sustain master narratives which often eventually lead to destruction of community. Morrison and Pynchon specifically address these issues in the context of colonial labor and financial interests which resulted in slavery and world conflict.

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