Whoever Has Emerged Victorious Participates to This Day in the Triumphal Procession in Which the Present Rulers Step Over Those Who Are Lying Prostrate
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―Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.‖ Walter Benjamin, ―Theses on the Philosophy of History‖ University of Alberta Documenting Barbarism: The Violence of the Archive in Contemporary American Fiction by Theo Joseph Finigan A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies © Theo Joseph Finigan Fall 2011 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Abstract This dissertation analyzes representations of the archive in four late twentieth-century American novels: Don DeLillo‘s Libra (1988), Cormac McCarthy‘s Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985), Toni Morrison‘s Beloved (1987), and Bharati Mukherjee‘s The Holder of the World (1993). In depicting a series of distinct periods in American history—colonial settlement, westward expansion, Reconstruction, the Cold War—these revisionist, ―postmodern‖ texts all draw self-conscious attention to the process of representing the past by including archival documents, sites, and practices within the textual frame. The novels thus emphasize the necessarily mediated nature of historical knowledge by depicting both events that occur in the past and the deployment of the archive to represent and understand those events in the present. In emphasizing these novels‘ self-reflexive engagement with the archive as a crucial site for the production of knowledge about the past, this project takes its cue from the recent and widespread critical-theoretical ―refiguring‖ of the concept of the archive in the wake of Jacques Derrida‘s Archive Fever (1995). The novels analyzed in this dissertation engage in a similarly self-conscious—albeit fictive— theorizing and critique of the archive. Focusing on the representation of a range of troubling events in American history, including colonialism, genocide, slavery, sexual abuse, and political assassination, this project argues that there is, in fact, a fundamental connection between such scenes of violence and the turn to the archive as a trope for the representation of history. In these novels, the seemingly benign gesture of archivization—the collection, ordering, and recovery of traces of the past—is implicated in the more obvious material violence of the historical events contained within the archive. Thus, even as they strive to counter hegemonic understandings of the American past through the construction of fictional ―counterhistories‖ of resistance, these novels simultaneously seek to complicate any straightforward equation of revisionist historical undertanding with the redress of past injustices. By implicating what I call the process of ―archival recovery‖ in the very violence it is ostensibly designed to mitigate, these texts problematize the privileging of the ―historical‖ in late-twentieth century academic and popular culture, thereby casting doubt on the archive‘s ability to enable an ethical or redemptive encounter between present and past. Acknowledgements If, as Cormac McCarthy reminds us,―books are made out of books,‖ we should also affirm their origins in the people around us. I would like to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor Dr. Michael O‘Driscoll for his patient, unwavering support, his acumen as a reader, and for his generosity sharing with me his brilliant insights about both the archive and contemporary American fiction. I would also like to thank Dr. Ted Bishop and Dr. Tom Wharton for the considerable assistance and encouragement they offered me from the very outset. Dr. Jerry Varsava and Dr. Susan Smith both read a long manuscript at relatively short notice and subsequently posed challenging and productive questions. A particular word of thanks goes to Dr. David Cowart for agreeing to make the trip to from Columbia to Edmonton at a very busy time of year, and, most especially, for responding to my work with such rigour and warmth of spirit. My thanks to the administrative staff in the Department of English and Film Studies (especially Kim Brown, Mary Marshall Durrell, and Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll), not just for being fantastic at their jobs, but for being all- around great people as well. Many other friends, at various points along the way, helped make Edmonton a stimulating intellectual environment, and also, where necessary, distracted me from the books when everything got a bit too much. Special thanks to Paul Campbell, Carmen Ellison, Aloys Fleischmann, Ross Langager, Cody McCarroll, Jan Olesen, Mat Rea, Amie Shirkie, Keith Solomon, and Kevin Spencer. Maggie and Ripley provided fuzziness. I am, of course, lucky to have the (at present, long-distance) love and support of my my parents, Alison and Kevin, and my sisters, Rosie and Nina. The only thing I regret is that I haven‘t seen them with nearly enough frequency of late. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Melissa Stephens for always being there during the ups and downs of the doctoral ―experience‖; her love and encouragement made it all possible. Table of Contents Introduction Archival Fictions Exergue: Austerlitz 1 ―… So Familiar a Word‖: What is ―the Archive‖? 7 ―Our Inherited Concept‖: Theoretical, Critical, and Cultural Contexts 17 Alluring Archives 27 A Critique of Archival Violence 37 Chapter Outline 55 Chapter One “All the World in a Book”: Consigning the West in Cormac McCarthy‟s Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West In the Zone 62 ―A Taste for Mindless Violence‖: Problems of Interpretation 69 ―The Book of Absolute Knowledge‖: Judge Holden‘s Ledger 79 Scappling/Scalping 99 ―Whoever Would Seek Out His History‖: The Limits of Revisionism 110 Looking Awry 129 Chapter Two “Out of the Mouths of Witnesses”: Trauma and the Archive in Toni Morrison‟s Beloved Unarchivability 138 ―Remembering Seemed Unwise‖: Slavery and the Problem of Memory 145 Recovering (from) the Past 158 Lifting the Veil: Morrison‘s Historiographic Self-Consciousness 167 ―Revelation at the Slaughter Yard‖: Stamp Paid‘s Clipping 176 Trauma and the Archive 184 Taking Notes 200 History is What Hurts 210 Chapter Three “A Violation of … the Methods I Have Chosen”: Feminism and Subalternity in Bharati Mukherjee‟s The Holder of the World Lost Objects 218 What Happens When a House Becomes a Museum 225 The Lens of History 235 Feminist Critique and Historical ―Experience 245 ―We Are Talking About the Capturing of Past Reality‖ 254 ―She Does Not Exist‖: Theorizing the Subaltern 269 Perverse Enjoyment 277 A Primal Scene 286 Chapter Four “There‟s Something Else That‟s Generating This Event”: Fatalities of the Archive in Don DeLillo‟s Libra On the Sixth Floor 290 ―‗Your Museum of Contradictory Facts‘‖: The Branch Archive 300 The Postmodern Archive 314 The Event of the Archive 328 The Murder of the Real 347 Deferred Obedience 359 Conclusion On the Uses of Literary Violence Vandals and Ringmasters 364 Phantasms of the Archive: A Dialectic 369 Works Cited 380 Introduction Archival Fictions Thus, on the waste land between the marshalling yard of the Gare d‘Austerlitz and the Pont Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris. I believe they cleared some forty thousand apartments at that time … in an operation lasting months, for which purpose they requisitioned the entire pantechnicon fleet of the Paris Union of Furniture Removers, and an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men was brought into action. All who had taken part in any way in this highly organized programme of expropriation and reutilization … the people in charge of it, the sometimes rival staffs of the occupying power and the financial and fiscal authorities, the residents‘ and property registries, the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings,