Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts strikes a chord that all critical readers and writers must address: how do we depict, speak for, critique, incorporate, think about, and represent those things that cannot do so for themselves? Hartman expertly questions how we might (re)write stories that were never allowed to be told. She wonders if we can retell, “the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom” (3).
Whether you’re writing about or critically reading historical accounts, there’s generally a desire for ‘accuracy.’ But what’s to be done when the facts are only half the story? A half that actively occludes the other; whose very existence denies the possibility of a whole? Archives, histories, ledgers, and narratives that represent what should have been subjects as commodities, cargo, or as means to an end are not just evidence of a corrupt past, they’re co-conspirators.
Hartman’s suggestion that the archive itself is conspiring with a particular view of the past is interesting because it suggests that a bias exists not just among the works that have been canonized, but also within the archives. The fact that the literary canon is curated is well established and, increasingly, oft-discussed. That the archive itself has been actively through the destruction, suppression, and violent preemption of accounts from particular populations presents a much more insidious problem. As Cohen discussed in Narratology in the Archive of Literature, it is possible to recover non-canonical works from the archive to examine different points of view, historical moments, and genres, and in doing so to reevaluate (and possibly restore works to) the canon. However, missing voices in the archive are unavailable for this sort of recovery and recanonization. More so, because they exist only as an absence, it is not only possible but likely that attempts to decolonize the Western literary canon can continue to exclude these voices without feeling their loss. Furthermore, if such a profound cultural bias exists in the archive itself, any new canon consisting of works that have been recovered from it will be tinged with that same bias.
This is a problem that cannot wholly be addressed. Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak outlines the pitfalls of trying to speak for traditionally Othered entities, illuminates how critics must identify their own positionality and privilege, and ultimately concludes that the subaltern cannot speak. Similarly, Hartman makes no bones about overcoming history: it cannot be undone. Dead girls cannot speak. “My own writing is unable to exceed the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive…[it] falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its omissions” (12). However, this doesn’t negate the work that was undergone to get here, and provides methods for moving forward. While we can’t overcome the history we find in the archive, we can rework it. “This is a productive tension and one unavoidable in narrating the lives of the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the enslaved” (12).
Toni Morrison’s Playing In the Dark reveals that texts must work incredibly hard to repress Othered entities - it’s not easy to erase an entire people - and that the absences they outline are actually filled with richness. Similarly, Hartman isn’t suggesting romance where there was only violence, but encourages a reimagination and (re)empowerment of the shadow, the phantasm, and the “haint” made possible by the very evils that created them: “the intent is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death--social and corporeal death--and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (12).
Even in this, the act of reimagining history is fraught. “I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant…without committing further violence in my own act of narration,” Hartman writes (3). In this, she presents the idea that the act of reimagining itself can become an act of violence. It runs the risk of reappropriating past narratives and forcing them into a new structure to fit the needs to the present. Rather than recovering the subjectivity of enslaved people, this imposition on their narratives gives the historian strict control over the ways that they are and are not allowed to enter the record. It also remains that whatever could be reconstructed is necessarily drawing off of the archive. If the archive is not inviolate and everything that the historian knows about the recovered subject is tainted by the subjectivity of hegemonic Whiteness, there is a layer of mediation that is worked into the foundation of the recovery that can’t ever be stripped away completely.
The motives of the historian themself present another problem. Hartman herself dismissed her attempt to reconstruct the history of the Venus when she realized that what she was actually making was not an attempt to recover Venus’s subjectivity, so much as an attempt to console herself (9). As Hartman notes, "The status of past bodies themselves is not an issue. They are dead” (7). When historians try to recover the subjectivity of the dead, it’s something that they do for the living. This suggests that any reconstructed account is necessarily colored by the moment of restoration as well as the historical moment at which it was first (partially) recorded.
As such historical truth, if such a thing can be said to exist, cannot be wholly reconstructed without adding further layers of mediation. The very idea of reconstructed history questions the fiction of historical accuracy, as well as the notion that the present can interact with the past in a way that recovers—rather than diminishes—accuracy. Hartman seeks a different solution in Critical Fabulation--the construction of acknowledgedly speculative accounts of the past.
Why feel fixed to a history that is not impartial, unbiased, or true and that has actively worked to corroborate and perpetuate the violence it describes? Writing about the past cannot be content with what history has left us, but can explore what could have been. Some of my favorite authors have done this through ‘magical realism’ or ‘speculative fabulation,’ and I think we can turn to the phantasmal to find even more.
As Hartman’s “recombinant narrative” begins with the imagination (12), it may be productive here to connect this process with Nicholas Watson’s analysis of the imagination in/of the past in “The Phantasmal Past: Time, History, and the Recombinative Imagination.” Both Hartman and Watson interestingly reference Michel de Certeau to think about ways in which the the past is entangled with the present and also to analyze how we make something, as scholars, of the past (Hartman 14).
Watson’s questions, “Where is the past? What has happened to the past?” (2), raise a main concern of his: that the past, specifically the medieval past, “is assumed to have purposes of its own” (3). It is thus misunderstood and “discarded” (4). For Watson, however, this past, even if we might attempt to disregard it, is always present: :“the past matters, not only because it underlies the present, nor only because its unsuspected sophistication challenges its dismissal by the present, but because it remains inseparably entangled with the present and will continue to be so however much this fact is forgotten or its relevance denied” (5).
This “unsuspected sophistication” takes shape in textual examples from Chaucer, Dante, John of Morigny, and Julian of Norwich. In varying ways, these examples show the complex workings of the imagination, which use a variety of images to draw a “clear relationship between facticity and fraud” (24). Religious visions of Mary, for example, were often described as containing both truths and deceptions, divine and demonic images (30). These images, Watson argues, were used and recombined as pieces of evidence that could be used to create a “meaning-bearing” fiction (29). Watson compares this process to the work of the historian: “Operators of the Liber florum, then, are very much like historical scholars, understanding the figurae they fashion for the Virgin and the meanings they find in her manifestations as models, hypotheses, always liable to be supplemented and corrected by new data once they are available” (30). Hartman’s own conclusion seems to push this uncertainty in historical work further: There will be “failure” and the work is “ongoing, unfinished, and provisional” (14).
The absences in the archive also function differently for Watson and Hartman. Watson’s articulation of these absences seems more across-the-board in terms of what kinds of materials are lacking: “our lives as scholars of archives or textual corpora tend to involve severe alternations of presence and absence” (36). For Hartman, certain images and narratives are absent--accounts outside of the torture and death of the enslaved. This distinction, I think, is closely connected with their views of the future. Watson’s analysis of the imagination draws the past to the present: “for belief in the imaginative constructs that allow visionary journeys to continue serve to link the other world with this one, reach out mysteriously to or from the past to renew the life of the present” (37). The future, however, appears left out, which makes sense since Watson takes on “modernity’s addiction to futurity” (3) in this text. What about Hartman here? The imagination of the past importantly cannot leave out the future: “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (13).
Watson’s questions, “Where is the past? What has happened to the past?” (2), raise a main concern of his: that the past, specifically the medieval past, “is assumed to have purposes of its own” (3). It is thus misunderstood and “discarded” (4). For Watson, however, this past, even if we might attempt to disregard it, is always present: :“the past matters, not only because it underlies the present, nor only because its unsuspected sophistication challenges its dismissal by the present, but because it remains inseparably entangled with the present and will continue to be so however much this fact is forgotten or its relevance denied” (5).
This “unsuspected sophistication” takes shape in textual examples from Chaucer, Dante, John of Morigny, and Julian of Norwich. In varying ways, these examples show the complex workings of the imagination, which use a variety of images to draw a “clear relationship between facticity and fraud” (24). Religious visions of Mary, for example, were often described as containing both truths and deceptions, divine and demonic images (30). These images, Watson argues, were used and recombined as pieces of evidence that could be used to create a “meaning-bearing” fiction (29). Watson compares this process to the work of the historian: “Operators of the Liber florum, then, are very much like historical scholars, understanding the figurae they fashion for the Virgin and the meanings they find in her manifestations as models, hypotheses, always liable to be supplemented and corrected by new data once they are available” (30). Hartman’s own conclusion seems to push this uncertainty in historical work further: There will be “failure” and the work is “ongoing, unfinished, and provisional” (14).
The absences in the archive also function differently for Watson and Hartman. Watson’s articulation of these absences seems more across-the-board in terms of what kinds of materials are lacking: “our lives as scholars of archives or textual corpora tend to involve severe alternations of presence and absence” (36). For Hartman, certain images and narratives are absent--accounts outside of the torture and death of the enslaved. This distinction, I think, is closely connected with their views of the future. Watson’s analysis of the imagination draws the past to the present: “for belief in the imaginative constructs that allow visionary journeys to continue serve to link the other world with this one, reach out mysteriously to or from the past to renew the life of the present” (37). The future, however, appears left out, which makes sense since Watson takes on “modernity’s addiction to futurity” (3) in this text. What about Hartman here? The imagination of the past importantly cannot leave out the future: “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (13).
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