Amy J. Elias

Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic History

‘Metahistorical romance’ is postmodernist historical fiction which is obsessed with historiographical questions in a self-reflexive mode. This fiction both continues and reverses the dominant of the historical romance genre associated with the work of Scott. It also rehearses many of the perspectives on history found in postmodern historiography. The central characteristic of metahistorical romance is pursuit of the historical sublime, which it confronts as repetition and deferral. After generally illustrating correspondences between this postmodern genre and postmodern historiographical perspectives, the article investigates correspondences between sublime history and dialogical history and explores ways in which the metahistorical romance may be said to construct history as dialogical. Dialogical history, while impossible in a literal sense, may still offer useful alternatives to dialectical models of history and radical postmodernist scepticism.

Art and the Commons

T his special issue of ASAP/JournAl takes as its starting point the growing body of artistic work addressing the need to rethink collectivity in the late Anthropocene, particularly in relation to what seems a very familiar idea: the creation of commons. The issue challenges us to consider how the arts and contemporary theory structure “the commons” anew: how the commons becomes both a goal and a trope in post-millennial art and cultural theory.

Tipping Point of Badness

Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endearment. All hipster, counter-culture, soul searchers love baad stuff, perhaps ever since Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That’s because it does the right stuff: it refuses conformity to the powers that be; it refuses to take seriously all the high-falutin’ ideals and pretenses; it gets down with the real folks, whoever they might be. And it’s a pretty rigorous taxonomy, best used, of course, for the contemporary, the latest baad stuff. But you could take it back a bit, using the same criteria and say that, for instance, Madame Bovary (1857) is baad—so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Henry Miller’s Sexus (1949) and Nexus (1960), Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone (1930), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and so on—you get the point, there’s a lot of baad stuff there that’s really good. But can a book be baad and bad at the same time given this taxonomy? The answer has to be: of course. The book can be hip, cool, revolutionary, code breaking on many levels, but just plain crappy. Examples will have to work here, and so I’m going to nominate for dual honors Bob Dylan’s 1966 classic baad book, Tarantula. If this isn’t baad and bad at the same time, I give up. So I’m just going to end with the first, well, let’s call it “sentence” of the book:

The Futureless Future

G. P. Putnams Sons www.penguin.com/book 496 Pages; Print,

Tense and Sensibility

28.95 into the Circle, Mae agrees to “go transparent” by wearing a visual recording device that live-streams her every move to followers across the planet. In doing so, she adds to the Circle’s rhetoric: “SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT.” These mantra, like the Party slogans in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) (War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength), are essentialist propaganda. The statements recast privacy, secrecy, and sharing, inflexibly, as things that they are not. Yet for those working at the Circle, a better world is being created and this world is transparent and lucrative. All knowledge is available and available knowledge provides commercial data; all actions are accountable and accountable actions are regulated by surveillance society. Not everyone in the novel, though, is beguiled by the Circle’s monetized utopia. Mae’s exboyfriend Mercer, for instance, is acutely aware that every new product from the Circle is marketed with “the usual utopian vision.” In a particularly striking scene, the Circle is demonstrating the capability of one of their newest tools, SoulSearch. Don’t be fooled by the name: SoulSearch is not a platform that helps you find your soul mate. Rather, it uses facial recognition software, surveillance cameras, and crowd-sourced data from Circle users around the world to track down renegade individuals. SoulSearch instigates a technologically-advanced manhunt, finding any person of your choosing, ideally within twenty minutes. Putting SoulSearch into practice, the Circle’s software demo locates the first target in 10 minutes, 26 seconds with the cameras revealing the target “trapped against a wall, surrounded by a dozen people, most of them holding their phones to her, aiming them at her. There was no possibility of escape.” The global popularity of social media and the widespread use of smart technology reduce the far corners of the world to searchable within twenty minutes. There can be no solitary retreat, no seclusion; for any one wishing not to be found, phones are social weapons: You are always findable, you are always contactable. Mercer fiercely denounces the Circle’s ideals. To his mind, the Circle and pervasive social communications are creating “a very different planet” and life on this other planet is life lived online. It is a life that is paradoxically “social,” whereby computer-mediated communication substitutes for real world experience. Through Mae’s subscription and Mercer’s rejection of allmod-cons, Dave Eggers asks readers of The Circle to consider how and where they live out their lives, and by what principles. Next time you’re on Facebook or Twitter, next time you send a tweet, a zing, or a like, take a moment to pause and consider what it is you’re really doing. As Eggers writes:

Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction

May–June 2013 As technology threatens to overwhelm our senses, globalization short-circuits equality, and commodities define lifestyle, we see the rise of speculative fiction that attempts to re-envision the human, engage the reader’s empathy, and awaken a respect for life. In Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the novel of sensibility returns, but clothed in the garb of futuristic satire. Both novels flirt with the easy joke and metafictional plotting but widely sidestep the snide and the twee. In HTLSiaSFU, there are in-jokes about Luke Skywalker and Star Trek, and there is the familiar nested narrative (Charles Yu’s novel tells the story of a time-machine repairman named “Charles Yu” who reads a book by “‘Charles Yu’”). In this book, we literally enter a universe of discourse, the “science fictional universe” of the title. Charles lives in the unfinished Minor Universe 31, built by “Time Warner Time, a division of Google,” where immigrants live in the border zone “between SF and reality,” and inhabitants are divided into “protagonists and back office.” Life is equated with fiction according to the “theory of chronodiegetics”: “Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.” Memory is the story we make of time; life is a time machine. Also rifle-trained on memory and regret, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story likewise can’t resist at one point the novel-within-a-novel technique and interlaces numerous intertextual references to film and science fiction, often played for sardonic laughs. Shteyngart is an expert satirist, having honed his vision two previous novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and Absurdistan, listed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2006. In Super Sad True Love Story, his target is the technodystopia produced by multinational capital in an age of globalization. The U.S. is a failing police state, and human worth is based on credit ratings. Real-time conversation is dead: everyone emotes online through “Globalteens” (a spoof on Facebook) and constantly consults an “äppäräti” (a mobile device nicely named to sit between “apparatus” and “appartchik”). Analog media and critical thought are both socially suspect (students in online colleges are taught to “scan” publications such as the New York Lifestyle Times). One character notes that while shopping at JuicyPussy, “One of the salesladies even verballed me if I were ok and I told her I was ‘thinking’ and she was like ‘why?’”