The fantastical historic and representations of enslaved people's resistive violence【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The people who made this dissertation possible must have been moved by
something greater than duty because only providence can begin to explain for the
number of huge number of kindnesses that held me aloft and kept me on the path during
the years it took me to conceive and write this project. Nothing would have been
possible without Brooks Landon, who rescued me more times than I can recount.
Brooks gave to me a profound and valuable education about literature, life, and my
chosen profession. I am a better person for his gentle and constant friendship and
guidance. Horace Porter and Miriam Thaggert would not let me be a dilatant; they
shared with enormous generosity their considerable expertise about all things African-
American and American. I also want to thank Harry Stecopoulos who sat with me over
coffee every week for months, as I sweated through drafts of the first chapters. His firm
direction and mocha-scented good cheer set the tone that kept me working deep into the
night with the hope of meeting his expectations. Leslie Schwalm was generous, patient
and helpful. My friends Erin Mann, Deborah Manion, and Berneta Haynes listened and
weighed in as I developed my ideas. My sister Janice Alder introduced me to Bronte and
read my early versions of that chapter, offering invaluable advice. My father, Professor
Gilbert Raiford has read every word of this dissertation. My mother, Mildred Raiford,
was the better angel who reminded me of my duties when I forgot. With the assistance
of their unflagging attention, I came to believe that I had something important to say and
had better get it on the page. No child has every received so much for so long. All my
thanks.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
Notes ............................................................................................................. 20
CHAPTER
I. SELFHOOD, HISTORY AND FANTASY IN
WILLIAM FAULKNER’S ABSALOM, ABSALOM! ............................ 21
Notes ............................................................................................................. 59
II. TONI MORRISON’S SETHE AS A REBUTTAL TO
FAULKNER’S SUTPEN AND AS A FANTASTICAL
HISTORIC DESCENDENT OF BRONTE’S ROCHESTER ............... 65
Notes ........................................................................................................... 101
III. BELOVED AND THE ERASURE OF
MARGARET GARNER’S STORY .................................................... 102
Notes ........................................................................................................... 124
IV. SURVIVING CAPTIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF INTIMATE
VIOLENCE IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED ........................... 128
Kindred as a Captivity Narrative ................................................................ 140
The Franklin’s Marriage as the Primary Site of Violence ......................... 149
Insistence, Silence and Absence in the Creation
of Dana’s Predicament ......................................................................... 165
Participation and Refusal: Kindred and the
Tradition of African American Letters ................................................. 168
Notes ........................................................................................................... 175
V. SLAPSTICK SLAVERY AND SLAUGHTERED
SHIT-BELLIES IN JOHN SLADEK’S
ROBOT ROMP, TIK-TOK ................................................................... 177
Tic-Tok as Ellison’s Invisible Man and
Herman Melville’s Babo ...................................................................... 187
Misperception and Comedy ....................................................................... 190
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 197
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INTRODUCTION
The 1791 Haitian Revolution, taking place just 600 miles from U.S. shores, is
both the metaphor and the example of black militancy that has shaped the American
imagination on questions of racial backlash. Yet, Haiti’s influence is subtle, often
subliminal, since, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, the Haitian revolution “entered
history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” (73). At
the time of the Revolution and in the decades that followed, Haiti’s physical proximity
and the black rebels’ actualization of the American Revolution’s rhetorical insistence on
liberation from enslaving tyrants, made Haiti impossible to ignore and, for these precise
reasons, equally impossible to acknowledge.
The events of the Haitian Revolution occurred within the living memory of those
in this country who argued for and fought in defense of America’s independence from its
colonial masters – men whose names every American school child can recite. Why then
do so few people in the U.S., except of course academic historians, know even the most
basic facts about this black-led triumph over colonization and exploitation? The
temptation to imagine that this gap in knowledge is accidental or natural or easily
corrected by filling in the blank spaces with the missing information is forgivable. After
all, we Americans live in a country where 52 percent of respondents to a survey of basic
knowledge answered yes when asked if “the earliest humans lived at the same time as the
dinosaurs” (Ritter). And, 29 percent of Americans who participated in a 2011 Newsweek
Magazine poll couldn’t name the vice president (Romano). But our wholesale ignorance
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does not, I think, in and of itself, explain the silence around black resistive violence in
Haiti and here in the U.S. Something else helps to account for this silence.
My project argues that the Haitian paradox – that is, black resistive violence that
is impossible to meaningfully acknowledge and simultaneously too compelling to ignore
– persists in 20th century literary representations of enslaved people’s conscious militancy
in the U.S. This black violence is often invisible, composing an un-tell-able or at least
untold aspect of history that, when it emerges from the shroud that surrounds it, pops into
view for many as something of a surprise.
When black violence perturbs the peaceful plantation tableau – a scene of quiet
order that belies the often-invisible violence that sustains a slavocracy – it creates a
surreal terrain. Acts of black retributive violence reveal the limits and lies of a national
narrative that is inextricably intertwined with a way of sense-making that historian
Hayden White identifies as a society’s “cultural endowment” (86). Consequently, these
acts almost completely resist the kind of social/historical encodations of events that make
the unfamiliar, that which is distant in time and experience, familiar. Instead, acts of
violent black self-possession find expression in strangeness – what I call the fantastical
historic. The fantastical historic as a theory explains how, through the vehicle of the nonmimetic,
literature both buries and disinters the lived experience of enslavers and the
enslaved. The fantastical historic is a conceptual framework that identifies black violence
as the site where, in the text of the historical novel, the realm of realistic representation
breaks down and the fantastical/ supernatural/metaphysical erupt into the tale.
I use the word fantasy to denote an unrestrained and extravagant imaginative
element belonging to that literary genre identified as fantasy and also to denote
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fabrications invented to fulfill psychological needs and desires. The amplifications,
accommodations, omissions and insertions of non-mimetic elements, occasioned by a
character’s (or even the author’s) deliberate, or, just as often, un-mindful retreat to
fantasy provide commentary on how Americans choose to remember, in words, the
institution of slavery and the acts of violence, by and against the enslaved, that
accommodated it. When I speak here of a retreat to fantasy, I mean, of course, fantasy in
both the generic sense and psychological sense.
A prime example of the dialectic between evidence and narrative is the case of
William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom! (1936), which significantly employs Haiti as a
convenient and plausible location where, in the 19th century, a white man regardless of
his educational and economic disadvantages could make his fortune. In the novel, the
Republic of Haiti, a nation on the island of Hispaniola 600 miles off the Florida coast
forged from 1791 to 1804 through revolt and revolution by former slaves has been, in
significant ways, erased. The timing of the disappearance of post-Revolutionary Haiti is
particularly strange because the year Faulkner published his novel, 1936, sits in the
middle of a nine-year span that could be said to represent, by some metrics, a crescendo
in 20th century interest in Haiti.
Two years before Faulkner published Absalom, U.S. Marines left Haitian shores,
ending a 19-year occupation (1915-1934) – an occupation that brought back a
whitewashed slavery in the form of “massive forced-labor corvée use by the Marines to
build roads” (Schmidt, 11). U.S. critics of the invasion and occupation included W.E.B.
Dubois, Lovett Fort-Whiteman and James Weldon Johnson. And 1936 was the year the
dictator-run regime of Haiti’s neighbor on Hispaniola Island, the Dominican Republic,
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was ratcheting up sentiment to settle a border dispute with Haiti by resort to genocide. In
an event that came to be known as the Parsley Massacre, Dominican Republic strong man
Rafael Trujillo orchestrated the murder in 1937 of tens of thousands of Haitians.
Nineteen thirty-six also saw the crest of a swell of literary references to the
Republic of Haiti. It was in 1936 that black Louisianan, Arna Bontemps, a central figure
in the Harlem Renaissance, published Black Thunder, a fictionalized account of the 1800
Gabriel Prosser revolt in Virginia, casting the Haitian Revolution as the model and
catalyst for organized rebellion during the U.S. slavocracy. And during the decade before
Bontemps’s book, a wide American audience had been hungrily reading travel and
adventure stories penned by artists and occupying U.S. soldiers – among them, William
Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), Captain John Craige’s Black Bagdad (1933) and
Cannibal Cousins (1934), and Faustin Wirkus’s The White King of La Gonave (1931),
the story that could have come “straight out of [Joseph] Conrad’s imagination: an
ordinary boy from the colliers of Pennsylvania joins the Marines, lands in the tropics, and
ends up being crowned king of a Voodoo island” (Renda 4)1.
In 1936, William Faulkner published his magnum opus, Absalom, Absalom!, the
story of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a 14-year old boy from the geographic area
that would later be known as the West Virginia mountains, who barefoot and illiterate
sets out alone in the 1820s for Haiti and there, in a few years, secures his fortune by
working as a plantation overseer and subduing a violent black rebellion. He puts the
rebellion down, naked except for his trousers and unarmed except for his indomitable and
commanding white will. The story effects the reversal of the outcome of the Haitian
Revolution. To borrow from Sir Phillip Sydney, Faulkner “affirmeth not and therefore
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never lieth.” But what of the 50 years of critical examination of the book that fail to note
the text’s deletion of the 1827 historical post-revolutionary Haiti, governed by onceenslaved
blacks and deft substitution in that same location of an island nation by that
same name that resembles the Haiti of a century past? The invented late 19th century
Haitian stage where Faulkner’s Sutpen plays, looks like nothing so much as the early 17th
century Haiti. Caribbean historian C.L.R. James observes that in Haiti in 1729 “whatever
a man’s origin, record or character . . . his white skin made him a person of quality and
[men] rejected or failures in their own countries flocked to San Domingo, where
consideration was achieved at so cheap a price” (James 33).
The wholesale disappearance of the Haitian revolution from popular memory is
only part of the puzzle. I investigate the selective disappearance of that revolution from
even academic memory. The half a century of critical silence about Haiti and Absalom
were not years when discourse about real-world Haiti disappeared from academic and
political arenas. C.L.R. James published, Black Jacobins, his exhaustive history of Haiti
in 1938. The U.S. didn’t relinquish its hold on Haiti’s external finances until 1947
(Schmidt 232). The Cuban revolution of 1959 raised the specter of Caribbean Basin
revolution and that always means Haiti again. The 1960s Black Power movement was
awash in L’Overture iconography. So then, what accounts for the critical silence around
Faulkner’s erasure of Haiti – not magic, not witchcraft, but word craft.
In thinking about the interconnections between history, fantasy, and the narratives
that reflect (and perhaps shape) group identity, I consider the effects created by two sets
of stories. My first set of texts, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987), are samples from the literary canon, written in the tradition
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of historical realism but also containing discrete elements of fantasy. In both novels, the
fantastical historic operates to derail consideration of black violence as a conscious and
premeditated political act. My second set of texts, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and
John Sladek’s Tik-Tok (1983), take the fantastical historic in a different direction. These
narratives depend on science fiction conventions and yet are invested in the recorded
events of a recognizable past. In these examples, the fantastical historic operates to find,
rather than hide, the deliberations and calculations of the rebellious enslaved.
Two approaches have directed my inquiry into 20th century novels that negotiate
the often-silenced or distorted issue of resistive violence by the enslaved. As mentioned
above, there is Hayden White’s notion of cultural endowment, which posits, if not a
permanent, then, a lasting state of affairs, a continuity of thinking. The cultural views of
the 21st century rest on, and continue to express, the 18th century views present at this
nation’s founding. The literary products of a majoritarian interpretation of the nation’s
slaveholding history, although heterogeneous in many regards, are nonetheless
recognizable as belonging to a distinct category of thought and expression. For example,
Allan Gurganus’s novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and William
Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) approach the narration of enslaved blacks’
interior space and motivations quite differently, and yet we can see in both works the
thumbprint of a common worldview. Hayden White’s expression, “shared cultural
inheritance,” denotes a way of understanding and categorizing the world that makes some
events seem important for their typicality or momentousness and others seem anomalous,
comical or trivial and therefore unworthy of serious note or study. And shared cultural
inheritance is also at work when we judge some reports of events sensible and plausible
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and others deranged and unlikely. When these structures of meaning-making are boiled
down to a common archive of the possible and likely combinations that human
interactions might take, that archive is, for any culture, the inheritance that the majority
group receives from its forbearers and transfers to descendants. Retributive black
violence resists familiarization as part of a collective American cultural inheritance (that
is, the system of stories that cooperate with the dominant versions of American history)
and so, when such violence must be acknowledged, it is often un-narratable in
straightforward terms. To adopt White’s framework is to understand the current silence,
around, for example, the Haitian Revolution, as stemming from the persistent needs of a
shared cultural endowment into which black triumph over European imperialism
introduces discordance. More specifically, the Haitian Revolution offers troublesome
counterevidence that bumps up against the otherwise coherent stories of 18th century
revolutionary nation building, by revealing the hollowness of the words liberty and
fraternity when these words fail to extend also to enslaved Africans.
The second way of thinking about the silence comes from the recent philosophical
(and historical) inquiries into the nature of certain kinds of knowledge gaps. Susan Buck-
Morss, a professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, in her book Hegel, Haiti,
and Universal History (2009), distinguishes the sources of eighteenth century silence
(and simultaneous preoccupation) with Haiti’s implications from the silence of today.
Buck-Morss argues that 21st century silence is the product of a different set of errors. She
explains, “today when the Haitian slave revolution might be more thinkable [because
fewer white people contest the humanity of blacks], it is more invisible due to the
construction of disciplinary discourses through which knowledge of the past is inherited”
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(50). Buck-Morss urges refusal of “disciplinary isolation,” citing disciplinary boundaries
as the mechanism that makes it possible for counterevidence to the orthodox order to be
“pushed to the margins as irrelevant” (22). And while she may be right that the
institutional habits of the academy are among the culprits here, Buck-Morss only gestures
obliquely toward a structure that others indict with bold directness.
There is a growing school of philosophical thought that studies the causes of
ignorance and frames the issue of knowledge gaps in more political terms, inserting
purpose and intentionality into the mix of explanations for why some things are known,
worth knowing and/or knowable and others mysterious, undocumented, unreachable
through inference or extrapolation, and/or irrelevant. In 1992 scientific historian, Robert
N. Proctor, enlisted the help of linguist Iain Boal in coining a new word to invoke
discussion of the “historicity and artificiality of non-knowing and the non-known”
(Proctor 27). The word, agnotology (from the Greek “agnoia meaning ‘want of
perception or knowledge’ and agnosia meaning a state of ignorance or not knowing”)
indicates both the practice of manufactured ignorance and the study of this practice
(Proctor 27). Proctor explained the new word’s necessity:
We need to think about the conscious, unconscious, and structural production of
ignorance, its diverse causes and confrontations, whether brought about by
neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy, or suppression. The point is to
question the naturalness of ignorance, its causes and its distribution (3).

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