Among the many responses summoned by Kenneth W. Warren’s controversial polemic, What Was African American Literature? is Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s critical review essay, “Wasness,” which appears within a printed symposium in the June 13, 2011, issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books. As the title of his essay suggests, Nielsen is wary of Warren’s proposed periodization schema, and in his response, he seeks to trouble the points of initiation and closure Warren delineates. Whereas Warren defines African American literature as a “postemancipation phenomenon that gained coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation,”1 Nielsen retorts, “Why would anyone be satisfied with such a procrustean definition of the field of African American literature?” (Nielsen’s italics).2 For Nielsen, the claim of “wasness” is arbitrary and ideologically motivated: Despite its capacity to inspire impassioned response, its ultimate aim is to narrow or foreclose the future of African Americanist literary inquiry. “Wasness,” Nielsen argues, works to re-tool a conservative literary establishment that once exerted its regulatory power through pejorative questions about “isness” (i.e., is there an African American literature?).
Nielsen captures some of my skepticism toward Warren’s periodizing hypothesis but stops short of examining what most interests me about the rhetorical uses of “wasness.” In what follows, I argue that “wasness” serves as Warren’s antidote to the object of his most virulent critique: a literary and critical rejection of linear, objectivist history in the years since the decline of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Taking particular umbrage at the post–Civil Rights vogue in historical fiction, Warren identifies and derides what he sees as the pervasive, misguided desire of African American writers and critics to dissolve the fact of historical distance. Such desire, he argues, gains traction from its promise to position “present-day” actors “in the role of potential hero, or even freedom fighter, on behalf of a past that almost magically becomes our contemporary in terms of what it needs or demands from us.”3 Warren’s claims against such aspirations to literary heroism are those of the pragmatist. Countering fantasies of trans-historical identification and agency with an appeal to epistemological metrics of discrete periodization (such as chronology, progress, and fact), he rests his case on the decisive claim of “wasness.”
What Was African American Literature? exemplifies a growing body of criticism that casts black studies’ powerful orientation toward the past as the new and misguided dominant of creative and intellectual culture. This criticism contends that proliferating representations of the past as a timeless, living, moralizing force offer a wrong account of history because they hinge on knowledge claims that deny temporal differentiation, “divesting history of movement and change.”4 No figure is more frequently invoked as the face of this perceived threat than Toni Morrison’s voracious, beloved ghost who speaks the famous words, “all of it is now it is always now.”5 And, the argument goes, the collapse of what was into our understanding of what is isn’t just wrong; it’s dangerous. Through this act of chronological defiance, history ceases to be about the facts of what happened and instead comes into view through the “radical expropriation” of subjectivity and meaning.6 The experiential authority of the past’s “true” victims is usurped by a contemporary discourse that presumes to speak in their place, on behalf of modern resentments and desires.
The principle of temporal collapse that so offends critics such as Warren, Stephen Best, Douglas Jones, Walter Benn Michaels, and Robert Reid-Pharr is the very principle that defines the reading strategy I call “therapeutic reading”—a hermeneutic premised on the reader’s capacity for psychic transformation, by way of powerful textual encounters with the traumatic past. Michaels, for example, recasts the promise of therapeutic reading as its danger when he writes, “Setting out to remember ‘the disremembered,’ [Beloved] redescribes something we have never known as something we have forgotten and thus makes the historical past a part of our own experience.”7 In his view, books like Beloved are historical fiction in that they are novels about the past, but they are an insidious something more because they work to indoctrinate contemporary readers through the ventriloquized call of a pained and unappeased racial past.
The idea of “wasness” asserts itself as an epistemological check on contemporary authors and critics like Morrison, who in the name of impossible reparative desires, would compromise the singularity and boundedness of the irrecoverable past. Yet, as Nielsen anticipates, the critical mobilization of “wasness” works less to illuminate than to invalidate and end literary and critical interest in fantasies of historical return. As we will see, the point, for Michaels, is not to read Beloved in another way but to establish Beloved’s complicity in a toxic cultural formation. To describe this emergent mode of reading that compels the zealous rejection of an unfinished, accessible, or demanding past, I coin the term “prohibitive reading.” Authored as a global rejection of therapeutic reading, prohibitive reading regards “narratives of historical continuity and temporal compression”8 as strategies of inauspicious political conversion. On this basis, it aims to decenter—and often, to discredit—black literary studies’ enduring preoccupation with the topics of racial memory and the history of slavery.
My critique of prohibitive reading is extensive but not unsympathetic; it is also distinct from an endorsement of therapeutic reading. In fact, I contend that both of these reading strategies are built on foundational misperceptions about how trauma manifests and circulates in literary discourse, and I turn to trauma theory to offer a third alternative. Trauma theory is informative not only because of the self-evident truth that slavery was traumatic but, more specifically, because it enjoins the psychic structure of trauma to an epistemological critique of conventional modes of historical representation. By describing historical catastrophe’s disorienting effects on how we give and receive accounts of the past, trauma theory offers unique insight into the motives that compel the structure and style of black historical fiction and its criticism.
The fundamental effect of trauma, as it is theorized in contemporary, cross-disciplinary humanistic thought, is the profound disruption of the “narrative unity of life.”9 This conceptualization begins with the assumption that human life is made intelligible, and thus meaningful, through cohesive, temporally organized stories that we tell about ourselves and, through this process, master. One’s sense of self, and of her place in history and the world, is determined in some measure by her grasp of history—the degree to which she achieves a sense of narrative continuity in, and narrative authority over, her life. Traumatic events interrupt the stories we tell about history and identity by introducing to our imagined life trajectory cognitively inassimilable circumstances of grand-scale horror or loss. Confronted by the unimaginable within the domain of the real, the traumatized subject becomes unable to wield history in the service of self-story. She can no longer coherently narrate her life because the crisis event renders her life incoherent to her. Thus, as opposed to the normative pattern in which people appropriate and arrange historical facts to tell their stories, the trauma victim becomes, to borrow a word from Cathy Caruth, “possessed” by history, haunted and claimed by a past that not only breaks from existing narratives of self but, moreover, appears to foreclose the very terms of conventional narrativity, such as chronology, self-consistency, and causality.10
I define traumatic time as a structure of narrative temporality prevalent in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century African American literature that defies chronological mapping and instead takes shape through repeated, affectively charged references to an original traumatic event. Traumatic time is non-linear, dis-unified, and re-generated by the impossible desire for a redemptive return to the past. Contemporary black writers emplot these psychic and temporal characteristics through “formal disturbance[s]” or “narrative rupture[s],”11 as well as various figures, including but not limited to haunting, possession, time travel, fantasy, dreams, and flights of the imagination.
Nearly thirty years after its publication, Morrison’s Beloved (1987) remains the best-known example of an African American novel structured by traumatic time, its influence manifest in the degree to which the figure of the sacrificed child of slavery returning in ghostly form has become a familiar trope within a broadly conceived American cultural imaginary.12 In her foreword to the novel’s 2004 reissue, Morrison describes her intention to reproduce for the reader trauma’s core experience of unresolved shock: “I wanted the reader to be kidnapped,” she writes, “thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population.”13 Beloved, in other words, is not only a novel about the trauma of slavery; it is a text whose very structure reproduces trauma’s disruptive gesture. A brief review of the novel’s plot illustrates this point.
Although the historical premise from which the book derives is Margaret Garner’s act of infanticide in the panic of being pursued under the Fugitive Slave Law, the reader does not encounter this tragedy in real time. Rather, as is characteristic of most accounts of post-traumatic memory, the reader realizes the catastrophe belatedly, partially, and in fragments. We first encounter the protagonist, Sethe (whose past is modeled on Garner’s), in 1873, seventeen years after she fled a Kentucky plantation, slit her daughter’s throat, and bartered sex for a tombstone engraved with the word “Beloved.” Her experience of the present, metaphorized as the home she shares with her surviving daughter, Denver, is haunted first by an invisible, restless spirit and later by that spirit made flesh. In her human form, the ghost announces her claim to Sethe’s past when she gives her name as “Beloved.”
Insatiable, compulsive, and bound to a catastrophic past that defies comprehension, Beloved is the embodiment of Sethe’s traumatic memory. Beloved’s characterological core, and the core of Sethe’s trauma, consists in the failure of mother love against the assaults of slavery. Unable to assimilate this failure to a plausible narrative of logic or meaning, Beloved obsessively mines Sethe’s memory for a maternal response to a wish that has already been foreclosed—a wish for the saving grace of “enough” love. “She left me behind. By myself,” Beloved’s complaint goes. “She is the one I need” (89). Or again, “She don’t love me like I love her. I don’t love nobody but her” (137).
Much as trauma is said to operate through the “possession of the one who experiences it,”14 Beloved threatens to consume Sethe, to overwhelm Sethe’s day-to-day life with her impossible, too-late demand to be remembered, loved, saved in time. Through the incessant force of Beloved’s grievance, Sethe herself becomes obsessed with the task of satiating the ghost. Her psychic life comes to mirror Beloved’s singularity of focus, excluding the social and the possibility of a livable present as an act of fidelity to a past that refuses to be forsaken. “There is no world outside my door,” Sethe claims as Beloved’s hold on her approaches the absolute. “I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?” (217).
“The scar” is at once the daughter’s fatal wound and the aporetic core of maternal memory that the wound produces. Sethe cannot escape the gravitational pull of the horrific past, but neither can her memory articulate or fully confront the original traumatic event. Instead, she “circle[s] the subject,” “round and round, never changing direction” (189). The core of the “circle” that Sethe—and the text—asymptotically approach is, in Ann Snitow’s words, “the vacuum, the absence” of “a gap in history, a blank in consciousness.”15 Although Snitow does not explore this line of thought further, her reference to the commanding power of an absence resonates with Shoshana Felman’s influential description of post-traumatic consciousness as “a missed encounter with reality, an encounter whose elusiveness cannot be owned and yet whose impact can no longer be erased, in taking hold of the [witness’s] life which will henceforth unwittingly, compulsively strive toward an impossible completion of the missed experience.”16 Emplotting just such a patterned dance between fear and longing, re-experiencing and forgetting, Beloved reveals traumatic consciousness as its psychic and narrative infrastructure.
It is by now commonplace to say that Beloved is a book about traumatic memory—yet, in an apparent paradox, many critics also cite Beloved to claim that the term “trauma” is categorically inadequate to the cultural and historical specificity of African American affective life. This criticism adheres to a different logic than the case for “wasness,” which holds that traumatic time is inherently and problematically opposed to the “truth” of periodization. Rather, it points to the medical establishment’s traditions of misperception, exclusion, and abuse to question the applicability of psychopathological terminology for discussions of African American expressive culture. Barbara Christian, for example, proposes that Morrison’s “unique accomplishment” in Beloved consists in her recognition of an Afrocentric cosmology as the most appropriate prism through which to explore the phenomenon of intergenerational psychic damage in black communities.17 And indeed, Morrison’s own writing, in and beyond the oeuvre of her fiction, tends to disavow psychoanalytic language in favor of vernacular descriptions of black historical consciousness and mental distress. For example, her neologism “rememory,” coined in dialogue between Sethe and Denver, describes something very much like the psychoanalytic concept of trauma but also registers the importance of indigenous claims to naming and explaining psychic experience.
Such resistance to medicalizing discourses, including psychoanalysis, must be taken seriously, as an interpretive orientation grounded in protracted historical precedent. Indeed, “race” itself—a Western cultural trope that produces the otherness it purports to name—has frequently marshaled its authority through false assertions of medical “truths.”18 An example famous for its unabashed absurdity is the nineteenth-century diagnostic category of “drapetomania,” a psychiatric condition unique to enslaved African Americans, symptomatized by a pathological compulsion to run away! Finding ample evidence of such instances in which racial “sciences” of “psychic damage” are leveraged against the rights and freedoms of African Americans, the historian Daryl Michael Scott voices a popular view when he concludes, “Experts who study social groups . . . should place the inner lives of people off limits.”19
Indeed, even the modern discourse of trauma theory, though it carries no egregious history of anti-black use, has habitually neglected or tokenized African American experiences, thus inadvertently alienating a significant contingent of contemporary black writers and critics. As Michael Awkward observes, despite the growing scope and influence of trauma studies over the last twenty years, “The psychic upheavals resulting from slavery and Jim Crow [remain] parenthetical asides and afterthoughts” in the field’s most significant texts.20 For example, Caruth’s highly acclaimed and hugely influential two-volume special issue of American Imago, later consolidated as the edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), includes seven essays on post-Holocaust Jewish memory; one essay on women, rape culture, and sexual assault; one essay on the AIDS crisis; an essay about Hiroshima; and an essay about a community’s response to a catastrophic, underground gasoline leak. Its anthologized essays make no mention, even in passing or as a relevant intersectional coordinate, of African American psychic life.
The diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder famously took shape through lobbies for veterans’ rights and sexual assault survivors, but trauma as a field of humanistic inquiry has most energetically emphasized the historically and culturally specific experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. My point, of course, is not to diminish the horror or the widespread cultural effects of the Holocaust, nor is it to downplay the extraordinary intellectual and moral value of the prolific literature on trauma that has come out of Jewish studies. On the contrary, my ultimate position amounts to advocacy for exploring how the extant oeuvre of trauma theory produces widely applicable models for re-encountering black historical fiction in new and revelatory ways. Yet, as I turn to trauma theory, I wish to proceed with a cautious eye toward the ways in which trauma theory as a discourse has frequently, if tacitly, positioned black histories outside the purview of such foundational human categories as “historical crisis” and “modern consciousness.” Such a tradition requires not only expansion but also critique, a point that Morrison may be said to underscore if we interpret her dedication of Beloved to “Sixty Million/and more” as an aggressive counter to trauma theory’s systemic—though not all-pervasive—silence on the topics of black genocide, enslavement, and subsequent suffering.21
Morrison is not alone in her assertion of a black claim to trauma discourse: Trauma’s recognizable idioms of loss, rupture, repetition and aporia saturate the genre of the contemporary narrative of slavery, and in recent years, black literary scholarship has increasingly looked to trauma theory as one tool for deciphering the psychic landscape of African American subjectivity, past and present. Scholars including Awkward (Philadelphia Freedoms), Keith Byerman (Remembering the Past), Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (Remembering Generations), Lisa Woolfork (Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture) and Arlene Keizer (Black Subjects) have performed extensive trauma-based readings of the psychologically mediated relationship between contemporary black life and the history of slavery, and in related studies, Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother), Samira Kawash (Dislocating the Color Line), David Marriott (Haunted Life), Fred Moten (In the Break), and Christina Sharpe (Monstrous Intimacies) have more subtly invoked the psychic structures of traumatic consciousness to explore what Marriott calls “the occult presence of racial slavery, nowhere but nevertheless everywhere.”22 My readings of traumatic time and my corollary intervention into the governing assumptions of therapeutic/prohibitive reading join this growing body of criticism, offering an application of trauma theory that works neither to discipline nor to cure but to contextualize and decode narrative patterns that emerge from world-shattering psychic experiences.
“It would not be going too far,” Best asserts, to say, “that [Morrison’s] Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 positioned Beloved to shape the way a generation of scholars conceived of its ethical relationship to the past.”23 If Beloved is prohibitive reading’s exemplary antagonist, then the critique it inspires hinges on two basic assertions. The first is that it is impossible to transmit memory, especially across inter-generational expanses. The second is that the narrative premise of inter-generationally transmitted memory operates as an insidious vehicle for the eternal reproduction of an unappeased, black political identity. According to Michaels, “If Beloved’s characters,” enmeshed as they are in the real-time suffering of slavery and its aftermath, “want to forget something that happened to them, its readers—‘black people,’ ‘white people,’ Morrison herself—are supposed to remember something that didn’t happen to them.” Slavery, he says, is “the thing they are supposed to remember,” and the idea that its ancient, unappeased horror never dies is the force that consolidates contemporary black political identity as such.24
But Beloved is a curious focus for prohibitive reading’s definitive object lesson. Its narrative action confines itself to the antebellum and postbellum periods, and although its youngest character, Denver, never experiences enslavement firsthand, she is born before Emancipation and under the threat of the Fugitive Slave Law. Thus the inter-generational and inter-personal transmissions of memory that Morrison stages are contained within a temporal stage of contemporaneity. True, in extra-literary venues, Morrison has spoken of her authorly desire to induce in readers a sense of slavery’s arbitrary brutality, but it is hardly uncommon for fiction writers to willfully manipulate the affect and identifications of their readers. Strictly speaking, Beloved presents no technology for collapsing the present into the past, as do time travel novels or plots of mystical trans-historical identification, which explicitly encourage the colonizing gaze of the late twentieth or twenty-first century. Why, then, Beloved? It seems that what proponents of prohibitive reading find objectionable, presentist, and uniquely illustrated in Beloved is the structure of memory through which Sethe describes her and Denver’s relationships to her past.
In a much-analyzed scene, Morrison coins the term “rememory” to describe the spatio-temporal qualities of traumatic memories that appear to become permanent and fixed. “Memory,” Sethe explains, consists of a selective chain of recalled events: “Some things you forget. Other things you never do” (43). By contrast, “rememory” is beyond the scope of cognition. Solid, inassimilable, unchanging and unchangeable, it is “a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened” (43). Moreover, rememory is voraciously redundant and feared to be transmissible. Thus, Sethe tells Denver, “If you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you” (44).
This promise of eternal repetition is the curse that prohibitive reading wishes to dispel. As Michaels frames it, the possibility that “Denver might bump into Sethe’s rememory”25 is tantamount to the threat that, because “nothing ever dies,”26 contemporary blacks must live in fear of their enslaved ancestors’ recurring pasts, which persist in damning and invariable exactitude. But in fact, Morrison differentiates between Sethe’s sense that the past is fixed and re-inhabitable by others and her daughter’s persistent feelings of exclusion from that past and its memory. Despite Sethe’s vivid fears, Denver cannot “bump into Sethe’s rememory.” Indeed, even when Sethe’s past materializes as Beloved, the ghost—while visible to Denver and even an object of her desire—is only interested in Sethe. “The two of them,” Morrison writes of Sethe and Beloved, “cut Denver out of [their] games” (282). “She [Denver] came to realize that her presence in that house had no influence on what either woman did. She kept them alive and they ignored her” (296).
In Beloved, the intergenerational transmission of trauma is not the literal return to a durable site of original suffering. It is something more nebulous, like a shadow of the parental past that colors the early development of the child’s fears, desires, and identifications. In a passage that could double as a description of Morrison’s surviving daughter figure, Marianne Hirsch coins the term “postmemory” to describe the experience of trauma’s second generation: “To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happen in the past, but their effects continue into the present.”27
Born in the fugitive space of Sethe’s northward escape from slavery and literally nursed on the blood of her sacrificed sister (Beloved), Denver is profoundly marked by a past she cannot remember. Morrison characterizes her as “[stepping] into [a] told story” (36) of de-humanization, fear, and murder, and she is haunted by “monstrous and unmanageable dreams” that ultimately induce her own symptomatic deafness (121). Nevertheless, Denver is not a creature of the past. She despises the past, rejecting all stories that do not or cannot make a bridge to her future. “The present alone interested Denver,” Morrison writes (141). Or again, “Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself” (74). The past is the force that excludes her, not only because she did not experience it but also because, presently, she does not feel it. “Closed off from the hurt of the hurt world,” Denver’s affect and identifications are produced by a “[hungry] imagination” and a “loneliness” that “wore her out” (35).
Dominick La Capra has noted in passing a point that I wish to stress here: namely, that Michaels’s hyper-vigilance in the face of Morrison’s “haunting revenants” blinds him to the novel’s “exploration of postmemory.”28 Generalizing outward, I am arguing that prohibitive reading apprehends the story of the re-appearing past to the exclusion of the story of familial continuance, when in fact the legacy of trauma always consists in both the astonishing force of the desire to return to and rectify the past and the infuriating impossibility of that desire. Thus Denver longs to feed and tend to Beloved, but she also rages against the stories that precede her existence or capacity to know. Denver’s complex relationship to her maternal past does not amount to appropriation or incorporation of Sethe’s trauma, even as Denver surely must forge a relationship to an inter-generational past in order to imagine a viable self that can step outside the haunted house. Like Hirsch’s postmemorial subject, Denver’s identification with Sethe’s past is ambivalent and partial, characterized by a sense of displacement that conjures both resentment and desire.
Prohibitive reading casts the idea that trauma can be transmitted as a kind of false consciousness, based on an implicit disavowal of the distorting effects of mediation. Thus its proponents differentiate, again and again, between trauma’s “true” victims and those who come upon traumatic experience secondhand. But in fact, Hirsch’s definition of postmemory—and Morrison’s emplotment of it—foreground the work of mediation. Postmemory, Hirsch writes, is “defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by the unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after.”29 It is as much a product of the succeeding generations’ absence of memory as it is a product of the powerful narratives of un-making that pre-exist and interpellate the postmemorial subject. If, as the hermeneutic of prohibitive reading suggests, Sethe and Denver model the inter-generational transmission of trauma that is meant to extend further, to implicate the contemporary reader, then that model of transmission may hardly be characterized as fixed, transparent, or predictable. For what Morrison describes is not the immutable endurance of post-traumatic identity but the ever-mutating force of history as it produces new subjects, constrained by and straining against the ascribed terms of their legibility.
We can approach prohibitive reading more generously if we turn our focus from the “technology” of memory and its transmission to the potential political consequences of certain forms of memorial discourse. At the heart of prohibitive reading, there are warnings we would be wise to heed: that the meanings of “race” are historically contingent and in need of an adaptable rhetoric,30 and that the moral rigor that sustains the dictate to “never forget” may also host a narcissistic presentism that un-self-consciously blots out the specificity of the very past it seeks to memorialize.31 Moreover, these critics share a sense of skepticism about the political and psychical efficacy of imagining the self through the prism of past pain. The political philosopher Wendy Brown may well speak their mantra when she argues that to “will backwards” is to “[rail] against time itself”—and through this impotent gesture, to “install” the pain of one’s “unredeemed history in the very foundation of [the demand for recognition].” Predicating a contemporary “I am” on an injurious “it was,” the desirous return to an irredeemable past “can hold out no future . . . that triumphs over this pain.”32
It is difficult not to be stirred by this line of thought, which enlists not only a substantive political case for recognizing historical contingency and change but also a seductive, unapologetic will-to-power.33 But I remain wary of the extraordinary vigilance with which proponents of prohibitive reading tend to condemn traumatic time’s recognition of historical desire. The real history, they seem to say—the history that we can calenderically measure and record—is being threatened, overwritten, or dismissed in favor of an imposing fantasy of history that defies temporality, rationality, and objective study.34 As Warren puts it, within contemporary African Americanist discourse, “Discrete periodizations” have been rendered “beside the point” and, more, have undeservedly acquired “a taint of injustice.” The upshot of his complaint is that affective attachments to the past may persist, but they are beyond the rightful domain of academics or politics. They cloud and distort knowledge, obscuring the self-evident truth that, in order “to understand both past and present, we have to put the past behind us.”35
But perhaps the truth of history is not so simple. If “wounded attachments”36 to an injurious past undergird the writing of traumatic time, what kinds of attachments ground the ostensibly opposite desires for a clearly demarcated, discrete, or non-residual past? Is it in fact more true to read history as a conquerable object of knowledge than as an animating force that consists in both the events of the past and the desires—affective, narrative, political—that those events produce? My sense is that Beloved becomes an (imprecise) avatar for identity politics and its “poisonous” resuscitation of the past in large part because of a zealous, countervailing desire to intellectually secure the past as a fixed and detached object of study. Beloved, in particular, and the idea of postmemory, more generally, provoke foundational anxieties of conventional knowledge projects that work in part through colonizing and taxonomizing time. I do not mean to diminish the value of periodization as a way of knowing and encountering the past; of course, the idea of a future-oriented, progressive chronology gets at an enduring and compelling sense of historical truth. But I am interested, too, in how—and with what kinds of anxieties, desires, admissions, and foreclosures—periodization organizes and asserts the truth claims of prohibitive reading.
Whereas Beloved depicts the transmission of traumatic memory within the temporal range of legal slavery and its immediate aftermath, The Chaneysville Incident imagines the reach of slavery’s postmemorial effects extending into the present. The novel was published in 1981, and its narrative present is 1979. David Bradley’s title references a fictional sequence of resonant, catastrophic events, for the titular incident is not one incident but an intergenerational series of traumatic historical events that the protagonist, John Washington, discovers as his inheritance.
Recalling Sethe’s idea of the spatio-temporal fixity of “rememory,” Chaneysville, Pennsylvania, is a site of repeated racial trauma that exceeds normative ideas of linear chronology. Here, John’s father, Moses Washington, commits suicide in a cryptic re-enactment of his grandfather’s (John’s great-grandfather’s) death. Moses’s ritualized suicide memorializes the tragic heroism of his own forebear, a former slave turned liberator shot in the act of guiding smuggled slaves to freedom, but it does so by forsaking futurity for the moral righteousness of memory. What Moses leaves for his son is not a pathway to the future but a mysterious collection of clues leading back to the ghostly and aporetic origins of the Washington patrilineage. Willing his massive archive of family history to John, Moses dictates the following instructions: “The only restriction is that you [John] are not permitted to sell, bequeath, or otherwise divest yourself of their ownership until you have examined all volumes, including personal memoirs.”37
In spite of his portentous family history full of unassimilated feelings, John is a professional historian of Revolutionary America who adheres to a conservative, documentary model of historiography: Nearly all of Chaneysville’s readers have remarked upon his obsessive habit of collecting and organizing facts, in his attempt to capture a “truth” that inheres in the most basic articulation of what happened. Psychic experience and affective context are, for John, at best an unwelcome diversion. “There’s no imagination in [historiography],” he tells his girlfriend, Judith. “You can’t create facts” (268). This is how he describes his method:
I went to work with my fountain pen and my india ink and my cards, going through the documents and leeching out single events, tearing them away from the other events that surrounded them, recording them in bare, simple, declarative form on the white lined cards, in a hand as precise and unemotional as I could make it. I dated each one carefully as precisely as I could, with a string of digits—year, month, date—in the upper-left-hand corner. Then each one was an incident. A single event placed precisely in history, but apparently free of any cause. . . . The only truth—and that only a degree of truth—lies in the simple statement of the incident. (223)
Unlike Sethe’s mystical declaration of the permanence of the past, John’s attachment to facticity and order is easily reconcilable with critics who reject traumatic time on the grounds that it is phantasmatic, narcissistic, or un-provable. In similar, if exaggerated fashion, John posits that the sole route to historical truth consists in the sequential stringing together of unvarnished facts. This “true” history proceeds like an ordered stack of index cards: discrete, declarative, and decisive.
Yet ironically, although John attempts to exclude “emotion” from his research through a kind of numerical “precision,” his neurotic method comes to bear a striking resemblance to a widely observed symptom of post-traumatic consciousness. Consider the striking similarity between his index card method—which takes as its hallmark a stubborn literality effected through de-contextualization and rigorous detail—and Caruth’s depiction of “traumatic dreams and flashbacks.” Caruth writes, “Modern analysts . . . have remarked on the surprising literality and nonsymbolic nature of traumatic dreams and flashbacks, which resist cure to the extent that they remain, precisely, literal. It is this literality and its insistent return which constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”38
Like Caruth’s stipulated trauma survivor, John insistently favors a vision of truth as the mimetic representation of the past. Moreover, both insist upon the moral value of such truth. For the Caruthian trauma victim, “truth” disallows the production of meaning because traumatic experience does not surrender, in the process of happening, to comprehension. Thus meaning can only be an amendment, a threat to the integrity of traumatic recollection. So, too, for John, the scene of archival discovery is “perfect” and vulnerable: “Anything I did, one false step, would destroy that perfection, would probably obscure whatever message might be in the scene” (140). In both cases, “the simple statement of the incident” is the only gesture that can legitimately approach and approximate the truth of the past.
Unexpectedly, then, John’s very desire to periodize, to produce shape and certainty by putting the past behind him, mirrors the ostensibly opposite compulsion to re-experience the past—to go to the past, like Sethe, and “stand in the place where it was [where] it will happen again.”39 Like the traumatic flashback and Morrisonian rememory—those figurations prohibitive reading cannot abide—objectivist documentary historiography, with its essential feature of periodization, entails an impossible desire for exactitude, a compulsive and ever-unconsummated longing for mastery over the past.40 Might we read the extremity of John’s desire for objectivity as itself a symptom of trauma’s overwhelming force?
John himself wonders, intermittently and reluctantly, about what his methodological approach may obscure or leave out. For although fact is his ultimate authority, he does not assume that its authority is comprehensive. Its truth, he concedes, is “only a degree of truth” (223, my italics.) What John misses, to his own chagrin, is a capacity for imagination. In one moment of self-doubt, he goes so far as to deride the very model of documentary historiography to which he is so inflexibly committed. Charging that documentary historiography misguidedly proceeds from the premise that meaning is to be found in documents, rather than the living context from which such documents arise, he scoffs, “Historians [lose] sleep over documents that they deem precious, but which, in the evaluation of people who have reason to know, are most useful as tinder, or mattress stuffing, or papier-mâché” (43). In flashes like this one, John’s desire to know colludes with his desire to empathize, to imaginatively inhabit the psyche of historical actors, that he might interpret their actions with certainty.
The tension between John’s seemingly inassimilable approaches to historiography builds when he learns of the immanent death of a surrogate father figure called Old Jack. Forced to face the mortality of his paternal line, John’s curiosity about his historical inheritance is rekindled. He abruptly turns away from his professional, generalist work on early American history and resumes, with impassioned fervor, a previously discarded project of family historiography. Immersed in this work, John can no longer claim the disaffected stance of the objectivist historian-observer. He is forced to re-imagine historiographical work as a “dialogic exchange” between past and present, in which “knowledge involves not only the processing of information but also affect, empathy, and questions of value.”41 Initially, John is ill equipped for such a task, but the necessary process of methodological supplementation is helped along by the dying Old Jack, who reminds John of the epistemological foundations of African American oral traditions, and by Judith, John’s psychiatrist-girlfriend, who insists upon the possibility of human knowledge that exceeds facticity.
Ultimately, Chaneysville is neither an endorsement nor a refutation of conventional historiography; it is an ambivalent engagement with it. It says: There are tangible and consequential limits to one’s ability to know the past, there are facts and missing facts and “you can’t create facts” (268). There is also a huge and inevitable transferential risk for the African American subject—perhaps for any subject—looking back in time. “One of the greatest fallacies that surrounds the study of the past,” John tells us, is “the notion that there is such a thing as a detached researcher, that it is possible to discover and analyze and interpret without getting caught up and swept away” (140).
How can, and how should, accounts of the past address this Heisenbergian quality that haunts both history and memory? In his reading of Chaneysville, Warren argues that John’s negotiation of conventional historiographical methods, ethical considerations, and his own transferential desire remains imperfect throughout the novel. On this point, I agree. But I disagree with the ways in which Warren’s reading tends to strip the novel of its essential equivocations, its uncertainties, its unwillingness to “really, truly, utterly, absolutely, completely, finally, know” (264, Bradley’s italics). For Warren, Chaneysville epitomizes the beguiling trick of traumatic time when it rejects the rational authority of conventional historiography in favor of a fantasy of the past as re-inhabitable, living, and seeking appeasement. He writes, “John Washington cannot finish the story so long as he persists in his thinking like a historian. The lesson of the narrative is that truth, in the final instance, demands belief, a belief that enables one to experience death as a passing and to hear songs born on the wind.”42
But we may alternatively view the novel’s ending as intentionally cryptic and inconclusive; Bradley himself has described the book as “a detective novel,” whose mysterious ending compels the reader to “make of it what [he or she] will.”43 Indeed, the novel’s final sentence lends itself to precisely such interpretive flexibility. Upon striking a match to sacrifice either the historical archive he has inherited or his own body, John pauses to wonder if Judith—and perhaps, by proxy, the reader-as-witness—“would understand when she saw the smoke go rising from the far side of the Hill” (432). What is it that John would want Judith to understand? That the finitude of bodily life is a Western myth from which African Americans may extricate themselves at will? That the rigidity and sheer mass of archival facts become barriers to the psychoanalytic process of working through historically accumulated racial wounds—but also, that the barrier can be burned? That historical “messages” consist in both context and intent on the one hand (the emotional experience of collecting materials, the purposeful lighting of the pyre) and reception and interpretation on the other? (What will Judith understand?)
Chaneysville makes plausible each of these interpretations but subordinates them all to Bradley’s broader assertion that the idea of history may itself function as a kind of fetish object for the historian. In the novel, John proposes a model of the past as an incomprehensibly vast living organism, a sauntering dinosaur that we can encounter only in pieces. Against this imposing image, conventional historiography anxiously produces the fantasy of a visibly coherent whole that would hide from consciousness history’s unconquerable immensity: its hordes of unusable facts, and its transferential production of excessive and impotent affect. By acknowledging historiography’s fetishistic desires, Bradley does not suggest that the “facts” of history and their basic chronological arrangement are not true. He suggests, instead, that historical knowledge projects take shape as an encounter between a human subject—the historian, always burdened by the limitations of his knowledge and the particularities of his psychic need—and history—the unknowable animal that no amount of knowledge can fully subdue. No historiographical practice, Chaneysville implies, fully escapes the taint of non-neutrality, with which traumatic time has been so pejoratively painted.
We may accept this basic premise but still feel moved to ask, What is the role of the literary in traumatic time’s historiographical critique? What kind of epistemological work do writers like Morrison and Bradley perform when they set out to “kidnap” us from the present or fill our ears with ghostly voices of the past? How do these novels re-envision the reader’s, as opposed to the historian’s, relationship to history? Here, after all, is the ideological crux of prohibitive reading. For its proponents position “literariness” as the propagandistic tool that curates, politicizes, and prescribes a narrow and specific affective relationship to the past—a relationship that turns on idioms of loss, injury, attachment, and irresolution. Best argues, for example, that “literariness is key” in establishing the moral-political agenda of what he calls “Morrisonian poetics.” He contends that historical loss, as it is expressed in contemporary black studies, “is a feeling that literature produces” and sustains “because literary texts, as intentional objects, possess silences and ellipses that are structural, whereas silence in nonliterary discourse is not always the sign of an intention.”44 In a similar vein, Warren approaches a register of political alarmism when he describes the novelistic use of traumatic time as follows: “These fictions are defined by their commitment to making the past present to us by any representational means necessary . . . . [Their] vision of history . . . is one of recollection, which also becomes one of resurrection, as the dead are pictured standing outside their graves.”45
Warren’s polemicism is self-evident, but even if we understand these passages as a hyperbolic staging of his argument, such a reading does not dissolve its most basic implications. He suggests, in the first place, that any ideological desire embedded in traumatic time nullifies the truth claims of stories told in this mode. Furthermore, and reflecting the constitutive position of prohibitive reading, he posits that literature’s representational “means” must be vigorously policed when literature encounters the past. Such a position makes sense if we understand traumatic time as a site of profoundly political controversy over the ethics or dangers of representing an oppressed group through the pained retelling of unresolved historical trauma. But to approach black literary study’s historical turn in this way is also to overlook literature’s generic capacity for self-consciousness—its implicit awareness of the non-fixity, perhaps even the capriciousness, of its truth. How else might we understand the literary truth claim, particularly in relation to a haunting racial past?
Beloved’s sequel, Jazz, is a book about a book—the material artifact—that envies humans, especially for our capacity for tactile and reciprocal love. Its narrator conceals its non-human identity until the final page, when it claims its desire in a sensuous address to the reader: “Look where your hands are. Now.”46 In this very explicit way, Jazz is about literature’s constitutive lacks and longings. It is about how literature imagines, wields, and frets over the productive power of language, and it is about how literature envisions its intersubjective relationship with the reader as an embodied other.
Jazz is also a book about historical memory. Set in jazz-age Harlem, it is, in a traditional sense, historical fiction. More important for my purposes, it is a novel that attempts to look backward from its own narrative present, to contextualize and “know” the postmemorial foundations for its characters’ formative traumas. An unconventional voyeur, the novel/narrator describes itself, not as omniscient, but as “curious, inventive, and well-informed” (137). In remarkable contrast to Bradley’s historian, who only belatedly comes to appreciate an epistemology of imaginative empathy, Morrison’s narrator begins with imagination, though it later worries that it has over-valued this creative way of knowing.
Famously inspired by James van der Zee’s post-mortem portraiture, Jazz begins with a love crime. Joe Trace, a middle-aged beauty product peddler, silently murders his betraying, adolescent ex-mistress, Dorcas. This sensational act, in turn, is quickly revealed as a story of displaced passions. “From the very beginning,” Joe’s wife, Violet explains, “I was a substitute and so was he” (97). For the narrator, who, throughout most of the novel, appears as an unidentified onlooker, the idea that love and desire operate through a substitutive logic motivates a turn to genealogical investigation. It becomes preoccupied with the task of seeking out the respective roots, or original referents, of Violet and Joe’s erotic desires. Significantly, the past that the novel/narrator seeks out is not a history of evidentiary truths. Instead, it looks for “evidence” in the psychic traces of the past as they manifest in the present—especially in the protagonists’ fears of abandonment, ephemerality, and undesirability. Like a psychoanalyst, the narrator observes the redundant repetition of Joe and Violet Trace’s failed desires in the present to vivify “coded stories about what [they] wanted in the past, and about what was missing in that past.”47
An extensive and largely incredible origin myth ensues, in which the narrator’s simultaneous efforts to understand and to fantasize a plausible history of the sensational love triangle yields an ancestral figure called Wild. Naked and pregnant, homeless and “berry-black” (144), Wild is the literary resuscitation of Beloved’s exorcised ghost. Like Beloved, she appears to live outside the domains of language and society, even as her mysterious, haunting power is central and constitutive. She is believed to be Joe Trace’s abandoning mother, as well as the unexpected seductress of Violet’s first true love, a mirage of a tragic mulatto named Golden Gray.
Perhaps it would be more precise to say that Wild is Morrison’s re-imagining of Beloved from a position of meta-literary self-consciousness. If Beloved was a meditation on the psychic and identitarian devastations of black enslavement, then Jazz grapples with the question of how African American literature—particularly, the novel—belatedly approaches the unknowable history of slavery through its scattered traces. We must track and find Wild, the novel posits, not because she is a character in the story per se, but because present-day black identification and desire, as the presumptive objects of black literary representation, remain caught up in patterns of compensatory, substitutive attachments that stem from an original, unreconciled violence. Violet obliquely approaches this epiphany when she names the displacement at work in her marital love (“from the beginning I was a substitute and so was he”). But true to Felman’s conceptualization of trauma as a missed encounter, the substitutive chain that the narrator follows leads back to a stunning non-presence, a missed encounter with a phantasmatic and unknowable character who leaves in her wake nothing more than an abandoned cave, used crockery, and a discarded dress.
In her famous essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes in harrowing first person about her authorial desire to unveil a historical black subjectivity obscured from contemporary recognition by the rhetorical norms of the day. The genre of the slave narrative, she reminds us, was over-determined in style and content. “In shaping [black] experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, [the authors of antebellum slave narratives] were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things.” For example:
Whenever there was an unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something “excessive,” one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary conventions of the day. “I was left in a state of distraction not to be described” (Equiano). “But let us now leave the rough usage of the field . . . and turn our attention to the less repulsive slave life as it existed in the house of my childhood” (Douglass). “I am not about to harrow the feelings of my readers by a terrific representation of the untold horrors of that fearful system of oppression. . . . It is not my purpose to descend deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the hell of slavery (Henry Box Brown).”48
Following the postmemorial traces of these autobiographers’ silences, Morrison argues that the “job” of the contemporary black author is to find a way to “rip down that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’”49 Surely, this is a kind of historical desire: Morrison’s wish to “rip down that veil” articulates a longing for accuracy, detail, and richly textured information. In this sense, her characteristic deployment of traumatic time (in both her essays and her fiction) would hardly seem anti-historiographical. Rather, and as in The Chaneysville Incident, traumatic time subsumes historiographical desire, recasting the latter as a symptom of its constitutive missed encounter. Historiography, in other words, is produced as a compensatory effect of the overwhelming feeling of belatedness that so pervasively marks traumatic consciousness.
But Morrison is also—indeed, most of all—interested in how the literary imagination reworks historical desire. Jazz in particular, with its unusual subject-making focus on the novel as such and its tenuous claims to the past as it was, deliberately puzzles through literature’s affective relationship to the past. Literary historical desire, for Morrison, is related but not reducible to the historical will to knowledge that I have explored above. The seductress may be similar: In Wild, we find a figure reminiscent of the slave narrators’ silences, whose absence is at the core of her enchanting power. With her stunning darkness and obstinate illegibility, Wild also harbors the cross-disciplinarily enticing idea of blackness before its Western encounter, untainted by the traumas of violence, acculturation, and objectification. But Wild most persistently references a uniquely novelistic fantasy of black origins. For we access her not through testimony, legal documents, or even family lore but through a series of literary clichés that the novel/narrator invokes to “track” Wild, that coveted and impossible subject, the foreclosed figure of African “purity” in the New World. Attempting to find Wild through the path of the “wound”—which is to say, through a survey of Western literature’s offenses against blackness—the narrator leads us through various stock formulations of what Morrison elsewhere calls “the Africanist presence” in American literature.50 There is a tragic mulatto, a primitivist heroine, a passing bourgeois, and a miscegenation scandal.
The narrator willfully envisions Wild but ultimately fails to produce her. Jazz’s fantasy matriculates, not to historical retrieval, but to an allegory for Africa’s lexical encounter with the New World. This allegory begins with a symbolically saturated character called Golden Gray: a white-skinned, mulatto child of a Virginia aristocrat who has only recently, to his vengeful horror, discovered his black parentage. It is he who “discovers” Wild, startles her into a concussive fall, and abducts her in his ostentatious carriage. Wild, the love object that the narrator wants but cannot access, is to Golden Gray “not a real woman but a vision” (144). Her blackness blots out the possibility for her subjectivity, as she becomes, instead, a figure of his imagination. When she loses consciousness, he hopes that she will not regain it, that she will not threaten to become “something more than his own dark purpose” (146).
Reading Jazz alongside Morrison’s nonfiction writing, Golden Gray comes into view as a symbol of the American literary establishment: an ostensibly, or at least, overwhelmingly, “white” enterprise that Morrison has described as ghosted by blackness, haunted by its constitutive yet disavowed hybridity.51 In a gesture of paranoiac disassociation, Golden Gray (American literature) casts Wild (blackness) as “everything he was not”: barbaric, grotesque, animal. Yet his assertion of difference is conspicuously compelled by his anxiety of self-identity, his need to “contain” and “identify” his internal wilderness. Golden Gray wonders, Might the “awful-looking thing lying wet in the weeds” be reconstituted through imaginative will as “proper protection against and anodyne to what he believed his father to be, and therefore (if it could just be contained and identified)—himself?” (149). This moment, when Golden Gray stumbles upon and captures Wild, is the moment of African American literature’s missed encounter, that irrecoverable point of origin at which blackness is inscribed and subjugated within Western languages, idioms, and symbolic orders. It is a moment that the narrator (quite like Joe Trace) is frustrated by, grasps for, but always misses.
The encounter between Golden Gray and Wild—that primal encounter that the narrator misses and cannot resurrect—becomes the scene that the narrator cannot stop rewriting. It starts and stops. It holds a mirror to itself. It berates Golden Gray and then tries to appease him: “He is lying, the hypocrite” (154). “Aw, but he is young, young and he is hurting, so I forgive him his self-deception and his grand-fake gestures” (155). It “[sets], then [misses], the mark” (219). It worries that it “may be doomed to another misunderstanding.” It takes imaginative risks nonetheless. It determines that “not hating him [Golden Gray] is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter things” (161).
Here, in the novel/narrator’s concession of its own fallibility, and in its articulation of a world-altering fantasy, we find an important clue about the nature of the literary truth claim. Literature’s truth, Jazz seems to say, lies in its explication of “[missing] the mark,” in its nuanced engagement with affect and the unconscious, and in its desirous and imaginative reclamation of the irretrievable “trace.” It is interested in the role of fantasy, and it can deploy fantastical modes to put pressure on the question of how to activate, or make productive, the desire for the inaccessible past. Might such desire matriculate to something other than delusional traumatic cathexis? Might it, alternatively or additionally, chart new and joyous possibilities for inhabiting identity and experiencing desire?
After all, the novel/narrator neither claims to achieve an accurate rendition of the past nor does it assert (as Michaels, Warren, or Best might fear) the fixity of black identity as an effect of the traumatic past’s immutable force. To the contrary, the narrator’s great discovery about historical trauma and postmemorial desire is that history does not—cannot—replay like an “abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack” (220). Jazz’s past is a tragically lost object removed by an unbridgeable divide, but it is also a space of creative potential, an absence that fantasy reactivates in the service of a changeable present (“I have to alter things”; 161).
Jazz’s ending is utopian. The novel/narrator imagines Wild’s seduction of Golden Gray, as the dark woman stirs in the passing anti-hero “some brief benevolent love . . . and there is no reason [for him] to stay but he does” (161). What should we make of this seeing and staying, this quietly radical recognition? Wild is not only the narrator’s impossible love object; she is also a mirror in whom the novel/narrator glimpses the image of its own non-humanity, its disavowed existence. The possibility, made speakable by fantasy, of someone looking at Wild with “her looking eyes looking back,” thus emboldens the narrator’s own pursuit of recognition, of the conferral of subjectivity by the knowing gaze of the other (221). “Look, look,” the novel summons the reader on its final page. “Look where your hands are. Now” (229). Jazz thus culminates with anticipation: Its ending is the beginning that recognition initiates.
Let me attempt to voice a rebuttal from the perspective of prohibitive reading, one that begins with the claim that a different understanding of “recognition”—recognition as lucidity, or the capacity for unobstructed sight—is precisely what is foreclosed by the narrator’s fantastical manipulation of the past. On this view, Wild overtakes and obscures the drama of the narrative present (murder, infidelity, desecration, racism, sexism, the economies of modernity). Moreover, the narrator’s fantasy of Wild is itself an obfuscation of the truth of the past. Wild did not seduce Golden Gray, and more fundamentally, neither of these characters appeals to known standards of historical truth. Traumatic time, we must conclude, is doubly wrong. It is intellectually wrong in that it refuses the most self-evident principles of history: truth’s necessary correspondence to documentary evidence and the linear progression of time. It is ethically wrong because it seeks to replace the unfolding story of the present with a moralizing and recriminatory narrative loop, grounded in an untenable fantasy of the past. “The real action of both politics and culture,” Reid-Pharr insists, “always takes place at the surface and in the present.”52 From this perspective, Wild, John Washington’s lost fathers, and Beloved are but sirens beckoning us away from the progressive course of socio-economic justice. They prey on our enchantment with the past, they bear false promises of redemption, and they leave us to starve on a desire that cannot be consummated.
This is not an argument I set up only to tear down. The ineffectuality of a present politics based on the past, the speciousness of claims to inter-generational “memory” as such, the self-obliterating poison of obsessive recrimination—these are clear and present dangers, evidenced in part by the degree to which they have concerned a wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary field of distinguished critics, theorists, and cultural workers. As the broader arc of my argument corroborates, I take seriously prohibitive reading’s misgivings about trauma discourse and contemporary African American literature, even as I remain unconvinced of some of its corollary prescriptions.
Most of all, I am wary of the tendency of the proponents of prohibitive reading to frame their own desires not as desire but as positivism, anti-sentimentality, or common sense. Such rhetoric masks the probability that the will to eradicate affect from the domains of intellectual and political life is summoned by its own sirens, its own impossible desires: the desire for intellectual mastery over an affectively charged, often unpredictable or even incomprehensible social world; the desire for release from uncomfortable feelings of guilt or impotence; the desire for a present whose possibilities are radically unhinged from the constraints of the past. Such desires are not to be dismissed. Indeed, they are both timeless and timely. They appeal to a universal register in their longing to be unburdened of the past, even as they claim historical specificity in their demand for political presentism—for justice now, in and on the terms of the twenty-first century. But they are also made disingenuous by claims to objectivity and by their exaggerated projections of pathology, self-indulgence, or false consciousness onto competing articulations of historical desire.
What if prohibitive reading is not the conceptual antonym but the anxious mirror image of therapeutic reading? Like its purported opposite, prohibitive reading works from the premise that we may accept or reject in toto the embrace of the “historical past” as “a part of our own experience”;53 my argument has been that this premise sidesteps the messier and more interesting propositions of traumatic time and postmemory. In the latter formulations, the past permeates the present by producing the formative conditions for contemporary experiences of agency and constraint, lack and longing, identity and anonymity. Simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, obscured and revealed by our projective investments in it, traumatic histories persist, for the contemporary reader, not as the ghost daughter Beloved but as the unharnessable dream of her, whom Morrison calls Wild.
What traumatic time longs for is a reparative telos of inter-generational cohesion; its desire, to borrow a phrase from Reid-Pharr, is “tradition-bound desire.”54 Powered by the catastrophic loss of memory, culture, home, and family, traumatic time articulates an impossible yet ineradicable desire to return to a pre-contaminated site of racial origins and a foreclosed promise of progressive continuity. Caryl Phillips offers a succinct illustration of this concept in his neo-slave narrative, Crossing the River—a novel punctuated by a refrain that diasporic descendants direct to a guilty, paternal Africa: “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Yet such an ideal is not the only or inevitable response to trauma. There are other ways of telling the story of trauma and its aftermath that replace the fantasy of a reconstituted generational time—the fantasy of a different “before”—with the fantasy of a different aspirational horizon. Exposing generational time’s powerful attachments to hetero-patriarchal models of social organization, queer and feminist scholarship, in particular, has generated sites for new theories of post-traumatic reparative, liberatory, or utopian temporalities.
José Esteban Muñoz, for example, idealizes “a modality of ecstatic time in which the stranglehold [of straight time] is interrupted or stepped out of. Ecstatic time is signaled at the moment one feels ecstasy, announced, perhaps, in a scream or a grunt of pleasure, and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future.”55 Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman proffers an ideal of “queer time” as an un-co-opted alternative to “chrononormativity,” the processes through which “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation,” as in the time of courtship and reproduction, “work time,” and “family time.”56 For both of these theorists and others, queer time is a utopian imagining of the otherwise that emerges in part from the traumas and hostilities of the now. Thus it is most often experienced as a fleeting, private, or phantasmatic glimpse of possibility, bounded by the trauma of its own negation. “The present,” Muñoz writes, “is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of normative belonging.” Yet it is precisely this toxicity of exclusion that forms the precondition for his utopian vision. “Queerness is always directed at that thing that is not yet here, objects and moments that burn with anticipation and promise.”57
In Ann Cvetkovich’s queer feminist critique, the problem with extant theories of trauma is not only their limited conception of reparative desire but also their limited conception of the shape and texture of traumatic suffering. She notes, for example, that trauma theory’s archetypal references to the Holocaust as the original, extraordinary, aporetic event are inadequate to explain sexual trauma, which is often experienced as an occurrence within the range of normal, day-to-day experience. In this case, the notion of the “event” can prove less compelling than an understanding of trauma as concentrated in historically specific sexual encounters but also diffused into everyday experiences of gender and sexual identification and the negotiation of relationships and attachments. Without discrediting the prevailing idea that trauma may ensue from a singular or concentrated, originary rupture, Cvetkovich seeks to awaken trauma studies to “the way trauma digs itself in at the level of the everyday.” She argues that if trauma theory is to make sense of what it means to feel trauma in late modernity, then it must address not only the structure and fallout of catastrophe as such but also “the persistence of the everyday in the encounter with trauma.”58
Cvetkovich’s move to privilege the ordinariness and minutiae of daily life in her theorization of trauma is broadly applicable but has unique value for describing traumatic experiences that are underscored by social marginalization and its attendant effects, from micro-aggressions to institutional discrimination to social and historical erasure. Because African American collective trauma is inscribed in both the incalculably vast historical “event” of slavery and the “ordinary” effects of systemic oppression, the concept of everyday trauma provides a useful theoretical supplement—and challenge—to the present chapter’s central idea of traumatic time.59 Specifically, it encourages the critic to connect the meaning of memory, “rememory,” or the wish to remember the past, with a sense of what it means to live in the mundane and plodding present, alongside the often inaccessible but stubbornly recurring after-effects of the traumatic past.
Revising conventional understandings of trauma with a studious eye toward the present’s material context and the future’s untold promise, Cvetkovich’s notion of everyday trauma resonates meaningfully with Hirsch’s postmemory. Both theories supplement the logic of historical catastrophe’s proximate psychic effects to account for heritable feelings of resonance, pain, or vague familiarity with historical trauma that do not matriculate to full identification with that past. But whereas postmemory holds a conceptual frame of familial insularity in place, queer theories of everyday trauma weaken that privatizing impulse, registering a more diverse and heterogeneous multiplicity of ways in which the interface of historical trauma and contemporary sociality is lived. In this regard, queer studies’ intervention into trauma theory may mitigate some of prohibitive reading’s most damning indictments of trauma’s potential for myopic recursiveness. For, if what most rankles prohibitive reading’s adherents is trauma’s capacity to lure us away from the political through its aggressive imposition of private and privatizing memories, then Cvetkovich, too, resists such a trajectory in which injury can only devolve into impotent, anachronistic desire. Yet, unlike proponents of prohibitive reading, she encourages a perspective in which queer theories of everyday trauma amend (sometimes antagonistically), but do not disavow, event-based formulations of trauma that carry a deep investment in generational time. How might we imagine the poly-vocal emplotment of these competing temporal frames—the traumatic and postmemorial time that interpellates African American subjectivity, the mundane, daily time of late modernity, and the ecstatic time of queer fantasy? How do they echo, consolidate, obscure, and renounce one another? How do their narrative inscriptions of trauma yield multiple, at times antagonistic, forms and objects of desire?
Published in 1989, Randall Kenan’s Visitation of Spirits is a novel born of dissonant and competing temporalities.60 Its protagonist, Horace Cross, is a modern teenager raised by his extended family among an aging community of North Carolina’s rural black poor. Over the course of the novel, Horace grapples with his sense of obligation to a community forged through a legacy of racial injury, his ambivalent feelings of group belonging and dis-belonging, and his simultaneous desires to express and repress his emergent queer identity. Like the other texts examined in this chapter, A Visitation of Spirits is about historical trauma and its residual force, but Kenan is unique in the degree to which his engagement with history is relentlessly framed by the imperatives of the present. The postmemory of slavery, as depicted here, is potent but waning.
“A son of the community, more than most” (188), Horace is interpellated by both the old and the new. He is raised with the expectation that he will extend the Cross family tradition of theo-political race leadership against the dehumanizing legacies of the slave past, and to this end, his elders indoctrinate him with stories of a “terrible past they all had to remember” (71), in which “the evils of the world” appear “solidly and plainly” (89). But although their views take on a righteous and prescriptive rigidity, they are simultaneously watching their “way of life . . . [evaporate]” into a daunting and unknowable postmodernity (9).
In one of the novel’s most poignant scenes, Horace’s grandfather, Zeke, is flummoxed when he drives past the dilapidated remains of an antebellum slave market. He remembers “hearing his grandpappy telling tales of slave markets” and is bewildered by the idea of the unimaginable humiliation his ancestors suffered, but his psychic response is diverted, unconsummated. Throughout the rest of the day, he feels a heightened sensitivity to his own, smaller, seemingly unrelated “humiliations,” but at the traffic stop where the slave market stands, he is unable to assimilate or make sense of his own felt injury. His stream of consciousness dissolves into traffic noise. “He didn’t know what to think.” He “wondered when his joints would begin to hurt again” (65).
In this way, the novel casts slavery as a wound whose infliction precedes the known world of the twentieth-century South, even as its pain and shame reverberate in passing thoughts, in the enduring and often mundane reproduction of socio-economic disparity, and in community members’ calcified racial animus. Horace is heir to this stubborn but elusive psychic legacy, yet he is also a child of integration, technology, and 1980s popular culture. So while the past powerfully ascribes meaning to his embodiment as an African American in the rural South, its prescriptive lexicon falls short of apprehending the world’s “new and hateful monsters that exacted a different price” (188).
A Visitation of Spirits is set largely in the present and near past, with much of its plot unfolding as a sequence of proximate memories of daily life: school science projects, church services, family meals, teenage crushes. The scale of traumatic time finds only one, compact articulation, though its singular instance is also the plot’s most essential, pivotal scene. Late in the novel, Horace is confronted by a racial-religious vision of the history of slavery that intrudes aggressively and explicitly upon his lived present. It seizes and claims Horace, demanding of him an impossible, retroactive racial redemption. Overwhelming Horace like a traumatic memory, the vision reveals an unfinished, intergenerational narrative of African American suffering and yearning for redemption. He sees “men and women hunted by their own on the shores of a great land . . . shackled up and loaded onto ships like barrels of syrup and made to sit there crouched in chains.” Many of them die; many of their lives are worse than death. The vision progresses through Emancipation, but legal freedom fails to produce a teleological triumph. Instead, “the sons of oppression are freed only to be bound up again and again, with invisible chains and ropes and painful snares.” They endure “work, toil, endless, uphill.” They “try to sing but find no voice.” Looking to Horace, they ask, “Who will be the savior?” (232–234).
In a starkly dissonant juxtaposition, the historical vision is triggered by Horace’s memory of a cast orgy, following the production of a community play called “Ride the Freedom Star.”61 Offering an opposite rendition of the shared referent of racial slavery, the play is loosely based on the dynastic rule of the white Crosses (the enslavers of Horace’s ancestors) from the Revolution through the Civil War. Privately funded by family wealth accrued in large part through slave labor, “Ride the Freedom Star” is a garishly inaccurate nostalgia play written by the comically stupid “last male of the white Cross line” (212). The play is exceedingly bad: It is over-populated, “cliché-ridden,” and “many of the historical facts were just plain wrong” (213). Furthermore, the play’s narcissistic historical revisionism recasts black historical trauma as melodrama and slapstick. Throughout the play, black existence itself appears to be summoned for the purpose of white audience members’ emotional release: “The blacks were mainly there for buffoonery and hijinks that brought laughs and chuckles from the audience, for the church scenes with their raw and dynamic singing, and for the minister’s sermon, which was the most passionate, hell-raising moment in the entire play” (213–214).
Initially, the play works to underscore Horace’s affective ambivalence toward the slave past. Knowing that it is “more than a little inaccurate,” he is nevertheless curiously tentative and uncertain in his reaction to the play (224). He wonders what the actors think of it, and he is offended by their dismissiveness. He ventures, cautiously and not entirely convincingly, that the play makes him feel “proud” “to know how far we’ve gotten,” though this vague and hackneyed assertion of racial progress unwittingly betrays the very limits of Horace’s ability to imagine the generational redemption he is meant to bring (224).
Further complicating things, the set of “Ride the Freedom Star” provides Horace with his first glimpse of viable queer life. Its actors “were mostly gay, which haunted and taunted Horace, for to him they were physically beautiful” (216). They are irreverent, cosmopolitan, and casually seductive, but they are also the men who, with cynical detachment, enact the distortion and erasure of Horace’s family history. Thus Phillip Cross’s fantasy of slavery as a benign and blissful golden era of American history collides with Horace’s fantasy of a queer lifeworld, envisioned as an undiscovered terrain that would allow him to “[understand] the truth behind the lure of the flesh” and, indeed, to “[touch] . . . ecstasy” (223). These ostensibly incongruent fantasies of nostalgic white supremacy and aspirational queer identification are uncomfortably juxtaposed in the space of the play but not made reducible to one another.
Horace’s elders fear just such a collusion: They express concern that he will be emasculated by integration, turned into “some little girl” or “one of them perverts” by his ready acceptance of white socio-cultural mores (184). But while it is true that his affairs on the set of the play are at times characterized by racial insensitivity, the links between Horace’s racial and sexual identifications and desires are not so transparently causal. Instead, they collide to produce a profoundly conflicted affective site, marked by the entanglement of shame and desire, anger and euphoria, identification and rejection.
At times, periodically and ephemerally surfacing throughout the book, queer sexuality offers Horace a fleeting glimpse of a different, utopian mode of being in time. Like Muñoz’s time of queer ecstasy, this temporality is realized in moments of intense, transcendent pleasure that stand outside the recognizable rhythms of both daily life and generational time, although the disciplinary force of hetero-normative sociality repeatedly reins them in. For example, Horace describes his first gay sexual experience as follows:
I remember finally touching a man, finally kissing him. I remember the surprise and shock of someone else’s tongue in my mouth. I remember the taste of someone else’s saliva. I remember actually feeling someone else’s flesh, warm, smooth. I remember the texture of hair that was not mine, thighs that were not mine, a waist that was not mine. I remember the gamy smell of pubic hair. I remember being happy that I was taking a chance with my immortal soul, thinking that I would somehow win in the end and live still, feeling immortal in a mortal’s arms. I remember then regretting that it was such a sin. I remember the feeling I got after we climaxed, feeling hollow and undone, wishing I were some kind of animal, a wolf or a bird or a dolphin, so I would not have to worry about wanting to do it again. (250–251)
In this passage, the “chance” that is opened up by the “feeling [of immortality] in a mortal’s arms interrupts the presumptive order of both daily life and redemptive (hetero-normative, theological, generational) time. Briefly inhabiting a hyper-presentist time of “surprise and shock,” Horace forsakes the priorities of continuity and reproduction that inherited, historical trauma ostensibly demands. The proscriptive force of religion returns quickly—asserting itself in the very moment of climax—but it does not fully reinstall hetero-normative or generational time at the level of desire. For what Horace wants is not to be straight and holy, or to live in a straight and holy time of historical repair, but to find a technicality through which to elude castigation. The glimpse of a different way of being fuels his obsessions with the genres of science fiction and fantasy, his fascination with foreign cultures, and his post-coital wish that he “were some kind of animal, a wolf or a bird or a dolphin, so I would not have to worry about wanting to do it again.” Such variations on knowledge and human or sentient possibility “all called to him, speaking to him of another, another, another . . . though he could never quite picture that other, the thing that called him so severely. Yet he labored and longed for it; as if his very life depended on knowing it; as if, somehow, he had to change his life” (88).
Horace’s glimpse of the time of queer ecstasy becomes a vehicle through which the novel distinguishes itself from other postmemorial narratives of slavery, for it is through longing for this mode of being in time that he abnegates the reparative ideal of progressive, generational time. Bearing a kind of family resemblance to the literary structure I have called “traumatic time,” A Visitation of Spirits’s moment of epiphany registers the psychic force of an unresolvable, irredeemable racial past, a past that accosts contemporary subjects unawares with its insatiable but always too late demands. But Horace turns away from the ancestral call. When summoned to redeem a panoramic view of traumatic racial history, he “saw clearly through a glass darkly and understood where he fit. Understood what was asked of him. Horace shook his head. No. He turned away. No. He turned his heart away. No” (234).
Horace turns away from what he perceives to be the rigid and voracious demands of the past, but his turning away does not toe the line of prohibitive reading: He does not turn away to embrace the future or to escape a fate of endless recrimination. Rather, he turns to resignation. Riven by the demands and desires born of competing temporal modalities whose assimilability he cannot imagine, Horace determines that “the rules were too hard for me to keep” (251). He thinks of the generational time of family, race, and religious community, which compels him to redeem a lost history of unimaginable horror, to become “somebody who’s gone make us proud” (187). He thinks of the everyday time of queer black life, scattered with ordinary pleasures and pains, and the occasional, inassimilable encroachment of the traumatic. He thinks of the anticipatory time of sexual desire and fulfillment—the time outside of time where he is energized by the possibility of “taking a chance with [his] immortal soul” (250). Hoping to “exorcise his confusion,” he “[writes] his autobiography” but finds no possibility for narrative cohesion outside of the tragic telos of death. “In the end, after reams and reams of paper and thousands of lines of scribble, he had found no answers” (239).
Does this final, tragic culmination suggest that the time of queer ecstasy is an ineffective product of trauma, a form of denial that provides temporary escapism but no real prospect of transformative change? Or might we read the novel’s emplotment of the time of queer ecstasy as a modality of hope whose defeat need not be a condemnation of its value? The very concept of trauma, after all, is meant to make sense of psychic injury that does not allow for neat resolution or closure. By definition, trauma takes shape through its compulsive desire for the elusive and unattainable. Thus, its reparative gestures can only be partial, which is not the same thing as saying that its reparative gestures are futile or delusional. Judith Butler has written that the “critical promise of fantasy . . . is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality,” and I would argue that this is precisely the labor of Kenan’s novel.62 Revising traditional models of trauma that depict a repetitive obeisance to the injurious event, A Visitation of Spirits represents an exploratory, inventive approach to past and present, interrupting normative patterns of sociality, trauma, and repair, to reveal the finitude of their reach.