Rethinking History Vol. 9, No. 2/3, June/September 2005, pp.

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Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic History

Amy J. Elias

Metahistorical romance is postmodernist historical ction which is obsessed with historiographical questions in a self-reexive mode. This ction 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. Keywords: Historical novel; Postmodernism; Historiography; The sublime; Historical romance; Dialogism For all the recent discussion about history coming to an end, surely people with sense can see that human beings are not going to give up on history. At the most basic level, we simply cannot. People are inquisitive animals and they will always ask wh-questions, and the key one that they ask is Why? Anyone who does not think that this question is hardwired into human psychology need only tell a 4-year-old that she must brush her teeth before going to bed. Why? is a question that depends upon a historical sense. In order to answer the question, one must assume a reality that predates and offers keys to the wh-provoking present. One may quibble that this is cultural memory at work and not history per se, but the
ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13642520500149103

160 A. Elias important point is that the question is not whether history exists or whether we can choose to have a historical sense. The question is how we answer the Why? question, how we seek the history we are hardwired to desire. How we seek an answer to Why? shows what kind of society we are, what values we hold, how we think about the world. The primer account of Western intellectual history presents essentially three major ways of answering the Why? question, though these are broken down into nearly innite subgroupings and subcategories. The oneparagraph version goes something like this. One way of addressing the historiographical Why? is linked to premodern religious views, which assumed that there was an order to the universe controlled by a rational intelligence, or God. The old religions assumed that lived human history was chaotic and violent, but they had an idealist faith that behind this history was ontological order. This is what gave hope and the possibility of ethical action in historical time: in the face of the chaos of human history one need not despair, for behind the chaos was an order that dened ethical action in the present and made it meaningful. In Phase II, secular humanism and modernity attacked this view, and relocated the centre of ethics from God to human beings. Modernity replaced God with the possibility of god-like knowledge in men: history might appear chaotic, but the Newtonian universe was ordered and rational in its all of its operations, and humanity was capable of perceiving that order. History was given similar attributes: assuming that there was rational order to material historical processes beneath the apparent chaos of history, hope lay in humankinds ability to apprehend the masked patterns of historical progression and construct ethical and emancipatory political systems based on those patterns. Phase II was a long phasegiving us such things as liberal democracy, Kantian ethics and Marxismand we may still be in it. But it may also have been followed by a third phase of Western culture in which faith in secular rationalism has been destroyed. Postmodernity, if it exists, attacks the belief that humankind can perceive or understand anything beyond the language that denes it or the culture it constructs (and that constructs it in turn). Post-modernity retains one idea common to the other two phases of intellectual historynamely that history is chaoticbut it loses faith that a supra-historical vision of that history, either by God or by man, is possible. What seems to result in postmodern historical ction is construction of, or desire for, the historical sublime, which is a kind of warmed-up or negative idealism: it is a weak hope and desire that history, the space of ontological order, exists somewhere, but also the belief that human history will never reach it. When religion became myth, we needed history. When

Rethinking History 161 history becomes myth, all but the most diehard post-Marxist materialists seem to turn to negative theology. A religious return is a problematical paradox for secular modernity, which long ago explained religion on the basis of reason alone. For more than 300 years, secular modernity has been adept at constructing new religions and new gods that pretended they were not new religions or new gods but were the output of reasonable deliberation by brilliant people inspired by the noblest of desires for human emancipation. You cant swing a dead cat in the West after 1650 without hitting a new, reasonable god of one sort or another. But postmodernity shows us the return of the repressedan odd return in a material ageto idealist metaphysics in the form of the secular sacred sublime. The historical sublime is like the Lyotardian space beyond representation, a witness to an unrepresentable idealist History that cannot be spoken or reached or even imagined in representation. It is the site of the recognition that there is something that cannot be said which none the less undermines and contradicts the hubris of modern rationalism and must be acknowledged as foundational to human struggle and hope. This is not a supra-historical view, but it is a metaphysical one. Dislocated and shaken by the events of the twentieth century, forced to see the blood on its hands in the mirror of postcolonial reconstruction, called out by civil liberties politics, and attacked by poststructuralist language studies, the intellectual culture of the West stands frozen like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming Greyhound bus. Panicked, guiltridden, insecure and defensive, but also giddy, reckless, irreverant, and deant, the art of Western (post)modernity is caught in the dizzying hyperspace of late capitalism and seems desperately to scan the horizon of the past for some kind of orientation, some kind of value, some kind of self-validation. (The socio-economic culture of Western postmodernity is another thing, and this is important to note. The culture of late capitalism is not self-reexive in this way.) Positing itself as a post-traumatic cultural imaginary (traumatized by its own reection in the mirror of history), the intellectual and art culture of Western postmodernity searches the past ungrounded, without hope that a comforting coherence is to be had. Theorists of postmodernity break into two camps at this point. The rst aligns itself with the values of modernity and contests the existence and ethical legitimacy of the overall concept of postmodernism (often aligning postmodernism with the market culture of late capitalism) while recognizing its existence. This camp mourns this condition as an endgame of a bankrupt modernity that can no longer believe in anything, even itself, and so has succumbed to the chaos of history. The other side of the postmodernist debate celebrates this state of ungrounding as humankinds

162 A. Elias release from imprisoning metanarratives and into a realm of free play (of reason, of desire, of language). This side makes no attempt to reconcile truth with language, but instead gleefully dives headrst into the presentist pool. For the deconstruction camp of radical postmodernists, there is no recuperation of history outside of language, and so language is always the barrier to knowledge as well as the barrier of repression. For this group of theorists, postmodernism signals an almost Hegelian leap of consciousness into its recognition of its own (un)grounding; self-consciousness is language and vice versa, and this is the nal revelation for Man. It is often this group of poetic postmodernists that ironically returns to metaphysics in a recuperation of the secular-sacred sublime. Radical postmodernism does not return to the sublime of the British Romantics, but to the sublime of language, the sublime of Jean-Franc ois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida (whose late work explicitly worried the problem of religious belief), and to the lesser-remarked negative sublime of Michel Foucault. Radical postmodernism celebrates the loss of realist history much the way that snake handlers and evangelicals delight in the unprovability of evolutionary theory: the loss of certainty enables the possibility of radical individualism, singularity, epiphanic event and democratic participation in an enlightened community. While the enthusiasm and radical experiential singularity of the evangelical Christian, however, is tempered by a nonnegotiable ethics explicitly spelled out in The Book, the ethics of radical postmodernism must fall back upon Nietzsche, if only because of its foundational rejection of all foundational metanarrative and the belief that events as well as actions are unique, unrepeatable as such, singular. Thus the celebration of radical individualism, disobedience to orthodoxies and rejection of closure of any kind. For thirty years or more now, this has been the debate about postmodernism, but recently there has emerged a third way that hearkens back to pragmatist and Emersonian understandings of communicative action and truth. This realist voice in the debate aligns itself with a modied, provisional empiricism and attempts to recuperate history as the product of reasonable investigation and scientic method, but as historiography it is also careful to distinguish itself from naive or vulgar empiricism predicated on outdated beliefs about the truth of science. It cannot accept the notion of surety or empirical fact uncomplicated by the insights of poststructuralist language theory or social constructivism. Thus we see it doing backips to try to wed two seemingly incompatible ideas: that history is not true, but that it is reasonable. Its distinctively pragmatist avour derives from attempts to prove that absolute historical truth is different from the truth of consensus, and that history can be coherent and

Rethinking History 163 reasonable without being factually true or tied to purely empiricist methodologies. While I recognize the very different outcomes of these postmodern approaches to history and knowledge, they are to some extent two sides of the same postmodern coin. Realist historiography desires a historical truth that is not Truth but that is still binding, a pragmatist, robust history of reasonable belief. Radical postmodernist historiography desires a Dionysian playground of language and a historical ground from which to declare the end of historical grounds. Both are a long way from Hegelian dialectic or Kantian categorical imperative. What the two sides have in common is an obsession with the historical Why? and a resistance to essentialism and ontology that would grant any supra-historical or meta-ethical perspective on their subject. What they have in common is a desire to retain history without giving it essentialist content or subjecting it to covering law models of reasoning or logical-empiricist accounts of explanation. My earlier work focused on the movement in historical ction from the rst camp of postmodernist play to the second camp of postmodernist realism. In historical ction of the 1960s through the 1980s, I saw the play and yearning that characterizes poststructuralism creating a denition of the historical sublime that shared poststructuralisms heretical and deconstructive psychology. In later novels of the century, I saw a distinctive move towards an ethical negotiation with others in the pluralist atmosphere of contingency that resembled more what is now a realist historiographical perspective. Both kinds of postmodernist historical ction return to history with a vengeance, and they do so because their writers hail from countries that have experienced the postmodern crisis of faith in the historical narratives and values that had traditionally dened them. The postmodern turn on history, at base an assertion of the sublimity of History, is from this view a desire for meaning that paradoxically insists on an incomplete answer to Why? It is an ongoing negotiation with the chaos of history that continually strives towards completion and fullment, towards nal knowledge, and is continually thrown back from the barrier of language and culture. Thus what I call metahistorical romance to some extent repeats the contemporary debate about history in historiography. I claim that metahistorical romance is historical ction which morphs the historical romance genre into a literary form that is able to encompass the historiographical debates of its own time. Just as Scotts historical romance reected the historiography of his own time, the metahistorical romance reects the postmodern turn on history. Scotts novels illustrated a stadialist view of history perfectly in keeping with the Enlightenment

164 A. Elias historiography of the Scottish philosophes, and todays metahistorical romance illustrates our own historiographys lack of faith in, but continuing desire for, historical knowledge. Rather than historical romance, it is metahistorical, obsessed with historiographical questions in a self-reexive mode. While my work is deeply indebted to the brilliant and groundbreaking work of Linda Hutcheon concerning history and contemporary ction, I prefer metahistorical romance to historiographic metaction because the former emphasizes the dominant historiographic obsessions of the genre through the twenty-rst century and directly links this contemporary ction to the earlier historical romance genre. One of the reasons why the historical romance seems so congenial to a postmodernist moment is in fact that the former always incorporated the tension I am identifying as central to postmodern historiography. The very term historical romance gives the game away: to Walter Scott, one of the progenitors of the genre, the historical romance wed two incompatible literary genres (the romance, based in myth and magic, and history, based upon empirical truth) as well as two incompatible ways of looking at history (as romance or myth, evincing timeless truths about humanity and the world, and as empirically derived sociological hypothesis, which revealed specic truths about specic cultures in historical time). The metahistorical romance (one can see the inuence of Hayden White on my own work here) continues this oxymoronic tradition that sees history as romance and romance as historythat is, that sees the truth in both ways of looking at history without feeling the need completely to subordinate either to the other. Metahistorical romance just reverses the dominant of Scotts generic form: Scott privileged the historical side over the romance side of the equation, nally showing that the mythicized Highland cultures were doomed in the face of an epistemic shift to rationalist modernity; the postmoderns privilege the romance side of the equation, showing repeatedly how rationalist modernity fails in the face of the chaotic violence of history. Thus in Sublime Desire, I claimed four facts about metahistorical romance: 1. 2. 3. The postmodern historical imagination, as a post-traumatic imaginary, confronts rather than represses the historical sublime; The metahistorical romance confronts the historical sublime as repetition and deferral; The metahistorical romances motivation for this movement and unceasing deferral of a historical ground is a simultaneous distrust and assertion of poesis as a humanist value;

Rethinking History 165 4. The metahistorical romance learns from the texts of the literary modernists to combine metahistoricity with narrative form, but for the postmodernists this metahistoricity is situated differently as a tropological reversal of the historical romance genres traditional dominant. (Elias 2001, pp. 48 49)

The whole argument hinged on the idea that the postmodern, metahistorical imagination faces the chaos of history and yearns for something more, thus struggling continually to make sense of history but in its heart of hearts convinced that such surety is an impossible, rationalist dream. In novels by Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, J.M. Coetzee, Steve Erikson, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and many others writing after 1970 one can see an obsession with history, a struggle to gure out how it works and what went wrong and how to x it, but also a frustration with this search that leads again and again either to a stalemate of explanatory alternatives or a recuperation of values that the text itself seems to want to forgo. While mid-century metahistorical romances by nter Grass and others evinced some Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Gu of the motivated play advocated by poststructuralist, Derridean historiography, by the end of the century, with a new seriousness spawned by postcolonial critique and the end of the Cold War, the metahistorical romance was grappling with the meaning of history much more in a manner of pragmatist or realist historiography that was congenial to a postcolonial perspective. The metahistorical view is, I suppose, in this sense ironic rather than tragic. It yearns for the unattainable, it seeks the unrepresentable, it goes on. At the heart of my argument was the idea that the metahistorical romance confronts the historical sublime as repetition and deferral. What I meant by that was something different, I think, from what Keith Jenkins means by deferral in a Derridean sense, though clearly there are afnities between these ideas. For Jenkins, postmodernism rids itself of metaphysics and ontology. I disagree, based on my analysis of presentations of history in a large number of post-1960s historical novels. By deferral, I was referring to the movement towards the historical sublime by this metahistorical romance: if colonial history and empirical thought construct linear history dependent upon a gure-fullment paradigm (White 1999), metahistorical romance constructs history as a weirdly healthy repetition compulsion, a loss of the self and a journey from the center to the margins that is repeated endlessly because the borders of knowable history it seeks are themselves constantly receding. The crisis of postmodern history is the endlessly repeated movement toward the historical sublime/History (Elias 2001, p.

166 A. Elias 202). This is not a rejection of the possibility of certainty; it is a frustrated attempt to nd it. Which brings me to the point of this article. I am struck now by how my theory of the historical sublime in metahistorical romance mimics ethical dialogism dened, differently, by Martin Heidegger and Mikhail Bakhtin. The questions arise: what would be the relation between sublime desire and dialogic history? Does one gain anything by moving from the rst to the second concept? And is a dialogue with history even possible? I must admit that the last person I would have expected to align with my views would have been Martin Heidegger, whose writing I nd extremely frustrating most of the time. Yet Heidegger was fascinated by the idea of dialogue in ways that do map on to some of the claims I am making for sublime history, and given Heideggers ineffable hermeneutics, I suppose that this should not be surprising. The dialogue that Heidegger imagined was possible between human subjects was one that literally never arrived, and it could not be coerced to produce a meaning. His dialogue with a Japanese in A Dialogue on Language (1971) makes clear that the meaning of the successful dialogue goes beyond the intended meaning of the speakers of the dialogue; it also goes beyond the control of the speakers, precisely because it comprises language and is embodied in language. In this view, dialogue incorporates the play of language: The veiled relation of message and messengers course plays everywhere (Heidegger 1971, p. 53). But for Heidegger this is not innite play or ontological undecidability, as it would be later for Jacques Derrida. Language serves as both a medium and a guide for any good-faith dialogue and provides a hint to the speakers of what the dialogue is actually about. The hint is akin to Lyotards sublime: it is an unspoken, unrepresentable gure that is and is not meaning because it is and is not language. The hint is given by language to the speakers of a dialogue, but they do not register this hint as a paraphrasable meaning, a topic summary. The hint is akin to intuition, laying at the borders of conscious perception, yet it does not stem from consciousness but from language itself. The hint guides the dialogue and forms its conversational trajectory. In A Dialogue on Language, an Inquirer (Heideggers persona) and a Japanese speak about it thus: I: That is in keeping with the hints. They are enigmatic. They beckon to us. They beckon away. They beckon us toward that from which they unexpectedly bear themselves toward us. J: You are thinking of hints as belonging together with what you have explained by the word gesture or bearing.

Rethinking History 167 I: That is so. J: Hints and gestures, according to what you indicated, are different from signs and chiffres, all of which have their habitat in metaphysics. I: Hints and gestures belong to an entirely different realm of reality, if you will allow this term which seems treacherous even to myself. (Heidegger 1971, p. 26) Hints form a vital part of Heideggers ineffable dialogue where that which cannot be said is brought close (Rockwell 2003, p. 25). Dialogue is the interaction of human consciousness with language to form a meaning, a discourse, that is more than the sum of its parts and to some extent beyond the control of its interlocutors but emerging from their speech and interaction. What the hint allows Heidegger to explore is a middle ground between determinism and open-ended play in dialogue itself. The dialogues interlocutors both construct the dialogue and are guided by it. While stemming from a Kantian rather than a Hegelian philosophical tradition, the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin stresses the nonunitary character of the self as dialogue. As Michael Holquist (1990, p. 18) notes, for Bakhtin,
the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness. This otherness is not merely a dialectical alienation on its way to a sublation that will endow it with unifying identity in higher consciousness. On the contrary . . . it is the differential relation between a center and all that is not that center. . . . Center in Bakhtins thought [must] be understood for what it is: a relative rather than an absolute term, and as such, one with no claim to absolute privilege, least of all one with transcendent ambitions.

In this view, the self becomes a dialogic process rather than a singularity, and it is always dened by interaction with the other. Bakhtin asserts that Life can be consciously comprehended only in concrete answerability. . . . Life can be consciously comprehended only as an ongoing event, and not as Being qua a given. All life that has fallen away from answerability cannot have a philosophy: it is, in its very principle, fortuitous and incapable of being rooted (1993, p. 56). As his commentators note, Bakhtins unique contribution to poetics is that he correlates self/other dialogics to a kind of authorship. The dialogic engagement between self and other demands narration; as Eskin notes, It is through the others aesthetic productivity that I receive a body localizable and discernible in . . . a social, communal world (2000, p. 82). Moreover,

168 A. Elias the others narrativization of me demands that my consciousness answer, and this sets in motion an unceasing oscillation between the others aesthetic completion of me and my own assertion of incompleteness and innite potential (Eskin). For Bakhtin, this process of self-development through interaction with the other is parallel to other dialogical relations in the world dependent upon narration. Most importantly, it is parallel to novelness, an unceasingly dialogic and never-ending interpretation of the world by literary narrative itself. Novelness is a form of knowledge, and it puts ideas that claim primacy in dialogue with one another (Holquist 1990, p. 87). In the novel, the other is presented through social perspectives, characterization, voices, and points of view that Bakhtin calls heteroglossia: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specic environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue (Bakhtin 1981, pp. 276 7). Committed to the idea that the self is unnalizable and that reality is creative and open (Morson and Emerson 1990), Bakhtin formulated a theory of dialogism that encompassed the creative formation of the self, the text and the world. The perspective of the other, as Thomas Pynchon might say, keeps it bouncing. The question is, then: Can theories of dialogism such as Bakhtins be applied to history or historical understanding? Can we have a dialogue with history? We might fudge this answer by talking about our interactions with individual historical textsmanuscripts, records, etc.and how we enter into a kind of dialogue with them. Yet the problem is that these texts do not, cannot, answer us, and they were not written with dialogic interaction in mind. Even in the esoteric terms of Heideggerian ineffability, the answer to whether we can set up a dialogue with history is no. History is not a person; it is not a place; it is not even a text except in its traces. There is nothing with which to have a dialogue if one wishes to have a dialogue with history. Yet we strive to have a dialogue with history, perhaps because we perceive it to be not a thing or a sterile collection of written texts but rather a cacophony of voices of living beings who preceded us in time. If we hear and perceive history as human voice, then there is an odd logic to why we pursue a dialogue with the past, though clearly, since those voices cannot engage with us on their own terms in the present, there can be no real dialogue with them for us. What I perceive to be a yearning for the sublime space of History in metahistorical romance is, however, this movement towards the voices of the past, this desire to engage in a living dialogue with

Rethinking History 169 these once-living voices and thus to form ourselves and our reality anew. Stanley Aronowitz has written that Bakhtins categories (dialogue, chronotope, polyphony) may be seen as a critique of historicism from the perspective of a new conception of historicity (1995, p.121), and I agree. While dialogism makes no promises, it does offer a hint, a hope, a glimmer of possibility for self-knowledge through the interaction with another, even if that other is a voice from the past. How does this relate to the movement towards History, the sublime desire at the heart of metahistorical romance? We return again and again to the past not, perhaps, because we expect to nd the buried logocentric treasure there, the key to the kingdom of Why? We return to the past again and again, seeking perhaps not closure but creative openness, dialogue with the voices we hear there; we return seeking the creative living utterance that we need for self-formation. At least, understanding a return to the past this way helps to explain the desire at the heart of metahistorical romance, and why perhaps the genre is so prevalent at the end of the twentieth century. Dialectic does not offer us this possibility of interaction with the living voice. It presents a view of history not as lived voice but as mechanical process, and it therefore does not invite us into the space of the past as does dialogue. This is why Bakhtin determined that dialectic was essentially monological, and turned instead to a model (of self-formation, of poetics) that reinscribed the human voice, and thus the possibility for growth and ethical revelation, into our art and history. In Hayden Whites terms, it is only by understanding history as meaningless, inexplicable and sublimeand liberating oneself from the disciplined linear model of history of which dialectic is one examplethat there is a possibility of human dignity and freedom (White 1987, p. 81). In his discussion of the chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin specically cites the historical novel as the receptacle of chronotopic motifs; more importantly, however, towards the end of the essay he begins to explore the relationship between the chronotopes of a novel and the chronotopes of the lived reality of the reader. Out of the actual chronotopes of our world, he writes, emerge the reected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (1981, p. 253). If in fact the metahistorical romance is a postmodern form of the historical romance, and if the central characteristic of this postmodern genre is a desire for interaction with the voices of the past that it perceives as necessary to a selfformation and understanding of the world, then the constant, recursive movement towards history and back again in this postmodern narrative form understandably mimes the give-and-take of dialogism as both ethical and generic process. I think that this is what Ernst van Alphen means when

170 A. Elias he writes that to be comfortable and at home in his new house, which was once owned by Jews killed in the Holocaust, he must see the house not as his but as ours: he must somehow dialogue with the dead voices of the past in order to construct (not reconstruct, not understand) a new relation to the world around him and to his own self-understanding (Van Alphen 1997, pp. 204 5). I think this is what the metahistorical romance does by returning again and again to the historical past without resolution, without closure: it too seeks to dialogue with the past, to reconstruct its own (First World) relation to the world. I am more and more intrigued by the idea that sublime history is dialogic history, or at least an attempt to create such a thing by contemporary consciousnesses cut off from older periods methods for creating order, selfdenition and meaning in the world. If this is so, then sublime desire derives from a fundamentally different impulse than does radical postmodernism aligned with deconstruction and poststructuralism. Deconstructive, poststructuralist, anti-epistemological postmodernism glories in its refusals, its bad-boy promiscuity, its militant anarchism, its radical chic, its heroic Nietzschean insight about the blinders of convention that blinker the eyes of the oblivious cows masticating in the pastureland. This postmodern refrain is a familiar one because it stems precisely from the modernism it condemns (in the form of the modernist avant-garde), and we heard it echo in the 1960s street work of the Situationist International, in Lyotards 1979 clarion call to wage war on totality, in Deleuze and Guattaris schizopoetics, in Ihab Hassans paratactic postmodernism, in Judith Butlers performative gender, in Donna Haraways cyborg interfaces, in Richard Rortys neo-pragmatist irony, in Derridas attack on logocentrism, in cyberculture rhapsodies about connectivity. It is an enticing position that is also a necessary corrective to fundamentalisms of all types. But it almost always fails to take into account the current, nuanced account of the relation between belief and foundational logic which posits that the most entrenched orthodoxies are often based on reasons that are illogical, unprovable by empiricist methods, and anti-modern. And from a certain perspective, it is simply the obverse (underbelly?) of a modernist rationalism that demands to know all of the answers all of the time. A reversal is not necessarily a refusal; as Derrida in fact has shown us, negation and afrmation are usually just two sides of the same sheet of logocentric paper. At the current world-historical moment, it is imperative that we learn from but (historically?) contexualize the radical skepticism about history and the hermeneutics of suspicion that guided literary theory in the midand late twentieth century (and that is now apparently entering historiography with a vengeance) and conduct a more nuanced investigation of

Rethinking History 171 what an effective history can be. Perhaps provisional foundationalism is not the same thing as anti-foundationalism after all, and one simply does not have to choose between strait-jacket grounding and absolute openness. Perhaps it is possible even to see dialogue as a game as dangerous as radical refusal, not a domesticated form or a middle way as much as an alternative to the afrmation/refusal coupling integral to assertion (of science, of theory, of logic, of value). The Bakhtinian impulse towards dialogue is in fact perfectly in keeping with a postmodernist valuation of open-endedness, newness, freedom, indeterminacy. When self and radical other establish relationship and dialogue, history will be on the table and up for grabs. However, in order to talk, we will have to recognize some foundational starting point that will allow us to refuse foundations from that point on. We need perhaps to do a new kind of history that is a dialogue between possibly incommensurate alternatives and paradoxical chronotopes. As Michael Holquist has noted, biology shows us that all living systems are indeterminate, unconsummated, unnished, and to that extent, singular, yet humans living uniqueness is also, paradoxically, what we all have in common. Moreover, through our human mortality, our singular bodies are pervaded by history, and we have this in common as well (Holquist 1997, p. 233). A pluralist world culture may now be due for a postpostmodernism which has the courage to acknowledge that we have for too long constructed an either/or fallacy that forces us to choose unnaturally between the singular and the universal, the heterodox and the orthodox, the spoken and the unspoken, universalism and utter difference, History and history, meaning and play. The fact that these binary oppositions are false was in fact Derridas greatest insight. To say that history is tropological is not to say that it has no value or that it is nothing at all. It may be time to (re)acknowledge history as something we universally share, something that as Jeanette Winterson has noted is written on the body, even as we enter into experimental, ethical dialogue with it, in the full knowledge that that dialogue will remain unnalized, deferred, lled with hints that guide a conversation which never ends. Which is, perhaps, what metahistorical romance is all about. References
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Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, translated by V. Liapunov, edited by V. Liapunov and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin. Elias, A. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. Eskin, M. (2000) Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam and Celan, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Heidegger, M. (1971, 1959) A dialogue on language, in On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz, Harper & Row, New York. Holquist, M. (1990) Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routledge, New York and London. Holquist, M. (1997) Bakhtin and beautiful science: the paradox of cultural relativity revisited, in M. Macovski (ed.), Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Cultural Theory, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, pp. 215 36. Hutcheon, L. (1988) The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York and London. Ibbett, J. (2003) Our obligation to the past: a response to Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 51 67. Jenkins, K. (2003) On disobedient histories, Rethinking History, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 367 85. Rockwell, G. (2003) Dening Dialogue from Socrates to the Internet, Humanity Books, New York. Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory, Stanford University Press, Stanford. White, H. (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Understanding, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. White, H. (1999) Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.