Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History

University of California Press

A: What is the great world-historical event of 1875?
B: Vladimir Ilych Lenin turned five!
A characteristic Russian joke
during the Brezhnev era

Early in The Brothers Karamazov, we are offered a series of speculations about the paternity of Smerdyakov, born after the rape of an impoverished and feeble-minded orphan, "Stinking Lizaveta." Since Smerdyakov ends up murdering Fyodor Karamazov, the whole narrative and intellectual thrust of the novel depends on Smerdyakov being Fyodor's bastard son. But astonishingly, for a writer so dependent in his political journalism on a cosmos of pre-ordained plots and historical destinies, Dostoevsky, for a brief moment, deliberately allows Smerdyakov's parentage to remain unclear. Suspicion falls on a certain Karp, an escaped convict, and on various other drunken "gentlemen" of the town, until it finally dissolves into the forever undecidable past. Here, in the heavily forestructured universe of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky points to the radical freedom of human beings from any kind of determinism, and his technical, literary way of showing this is to throw into doubt the time-honored device of foreshadowing. Smerdyakov may grow up to be his father's killer—indeed, without that resolution there would be no story to tell—but he is not predestined for that deed, and the man he does murder may, in fact, not even have been his biological father. Such a strategy can be defined as a kind of sideshadowing: a gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple, and mutually exclusive, possibilities for what is to come.1 In narrative terms, sideshadowing is best understood

in opposition to the familiar technique of foreshadowing, a technique whose enactment can vary tremendously in its degree of intricacy, but whose logic must always value the present, not for itself, but as the harbinger of an already determined future. The Russian joke quoted above is a fine jibe at the remarkably crude foreshadowing that habitually characterizes any global and monolithic way of thinking, and it is probably salutary to insist that all foreshadowing is vulnerable to the kind of irony that the Russians learned over the decades to direct at their own institutionalized version of the topos .

Although we usually think of them as discrete categories, there are intimate and mutually elucidating similarities in how we make sense of literary fictions, historical events, and individual biographies. These similarities are both formal (a book's language and structure) and ethical (its significance in human terms). Hence, applying the same analytic scrutiny to historical accounts and literary texts provides a powerful way to understand the underlying principles governing both kinds of writing. And because the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and one another are a central portion, perhaps even the core, of who we are and, more technically, because the ways we narrate and order those stories are as significant in their effect as is their thematic content, the implications of foreshadowing go far beyond what strictly formalist literary considerations suggest.

At its extreme, foreshadowing implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made, in which human free will can exist only in the paradoxical sense of choosing to accept or willfully—and vainly—rebelling against what is inevitable. This is the case whether the foreshadowing takes place at the theological, historical, or psychological level. Christian apologetics, Marxist teleology, and psychological determinism are striking instances of how powerful our impulse toward foreshadowing can be, and make clear how it is bound to seem arbitrarily colonizing of, and condescending to, any moments that threaten to exceed its interpretive grasp. Thus, the Christian Church Fathers' reduction of the Hebrew Bible to a cycle of prefigurations of and preparations for the Gospel story is, for all its intellectual dexterity and inventiveness (especially the elaboration of figural allegory), rightly viewed by Jews as a brutal impoverishment

of the original texts. "Supersessionist" theology necessarily reduces the predecessor text to an "Old Testament," whose independent significance is fundamentally annulled once it is construed as only the first stage of a process culminating in the annunciation of a "new" and more complete truth. Think for a moment of the Pauline Epistle in which the wandering of the Jews in the desert is read as a figura of the challenges facing the first Christian communities, or the ways in which the Christian exegetical tradition interpreted the story of Jonah as a prefiguration of the Savior's Passion, with the three days in the belly of the whale foreshadowing the three days when Christ harrowed Hell between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. In its encounters with the Hebrew Bible, Christian hermeneutics read the central events of Jewish tradition as "witnessing," in the sense of foreshadowing, the authority of its own stories. Hence, for example, the pressure in the Christian tradition to rename a narrative like the Hebrew Bible's Akedah, or "Binding," of Isaac as the "Sacrifice" of Isaac, a self-conscious refiguring designed to make the Jewish story interpretable as an anticipation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.2 Indeed, there is a strong sense in which the very idea of history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward light, and from ignorance toward truth, is rooted neither in Jewish nor in Classical thinking but, as Jonathan Boyarin has argued, entirely in "the early church fathers' idea of the progression from Judaism to Christianity."3 And much as the Jewish and pagan world found the claims of the first Christian missionaries incomprehensible, to someone not already persuaded of the truth of their secular revelations, the conventional Marxist explanations of why the working classes stayed so loyal to their national governments at the outbreak of the First World War, or of why large sections of the German proletariat adhered to Nazism, often against their own economic interest, can seem astonishingly dismissive of the peculiarities of each specific circumstance.

Sideshadowing's attention to the unfulfilled or unrealized possibilities of the past is a way of disrupting the affirmations of a triumphalist, unidirectional view of history in which whatever has perished is condemned because it has been found wanting by some irresistible historico-logical dynamic. Against foreshadowing, sideshadowing

champions the incommensurability of the concrete moment and refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master-schemes; it rejects the conviction that a particular code, law, or pattern exists, waiting to be uncovered beneath the heterogeneity of human existence. Instead of the global regularities that so many intellectual and spiritual movements claim to reveal, sideshadowing stresses the significance of random, haphazard, and unassimilable contingencies, and instead of the power of a system to uncover an otherwise unfathomable truth, it expresses the ever-changing nature of that truth and the absence of any predictive certainties in human affairs. Or in Robert Musil's more subtly ironic formulation, what we need to recognize is the reality of underdetermination, the fact that events do not occur because of any logical or historical necessity. As Ulrich, Musil's Man Without Qualities, explains with his "Principle of the Insufficient Cause," even the laws of probability are regularly transgressed by the course of events, and the unlikely outcome can take place as often as the more plausible one: "You know of course what the principle of the sufficient cause is. Only, people make an exception where they themselves are concerned. In real life, by which I mean our personal and also our public-historical life, what happens is always what has no good cause."4

Because so many of our greatest fictions seem, in the confidence of their massiveness and sweep, like monuments of inevitability, effortlessly enfolding each turn of events, each narrative "accident," into the larger structure of the whole, many readers have responded to works like Philip Roth's The Counterlife or Borges's Ficciones with a feeling of liberation at the text's playful acceptance of contradictory possibilities. A sense of readerly delight is often triggered by a work that self-consciously plays with the certainties of what used to be called "major form." In one of his working notes to The Counterlife, Roth provides a schematic formula for a novel that will resist any closure based on models of biographical fixity: "Life can go this way or life can go that way. The alternative, the alternative to the alternative, etc."5 Put so starkly, Roth's directive to himself is both a literary commonplace and one of the cornerstones of imaginative creation at least since Don Quixote . Particularly in modern literature, the

kind of experimental playfulness that Roth's dictum encourages has been fundamental for an ever-growing canon of technically adroit and epistemologically probing explorations by writers ranging from Georges Perec and Italo Calvino to Vladimir Nabokov and John Ashbery.

And yet it is worth stopping for a moment to register how, quite beyond the challenge posed by contemporary experimental fiction, any account of literary creation that takes the structural coherence of the classical novel as its privileged model is itself already historically blinkered. As soon as the paradigmatic structure for an extended narrative is not limited to the well-wrought novel developed over the past two hundred years, it becomes clear that many of the fundamental storytelling conventions of our culture have never fallen under the sway of a single story unfolding along an irreversible temporal continuum. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso gives eloquent voice to this realization: "Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this way they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo."6 Commenting on this passage, Jasper Griffin notes that "the novel, restricted to a single version, makes it more dense, more detailed—to compensate for its lost variants. . . . [But some modern novels] struggle to reclaim that openness, to regain indeterminacy; in the novel such antiquarianism is regarded as experimental, avant-garde. The reader is dizzied by the variants, just as 'the mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo.'"7 But "the single version" of a tale, even the single life lived once and once only, is no longer the unchallengeable narrative assumption of the novel, and works like Yehuda Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963), Roth's The Counterlife (1986), or Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine (1992) seek precisely to include the numerous "lost variants" of their stories within a single book. Yet perhaps, rather than eliciting the kind of dizziness, whether exuberant or irritated, that Griffin describes, the narrative's refusal to stay confined within the hierarchy of a fixed timetable and strict causality, both based on a conception of linear and irreversible historical progres-

sion, can be felt as deeply consonant with a layer of self-understanding that more closed narrative forms have been unwilling to engage. Even at the level of an individual's momentary thought rather than entire life, we instinctively recognize the force of the counter-story, the never articulated, but also never discountable, possibilities that any too strictly fixed interpretation risks foreclosing. So, for example, throughout Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers (1930–32) there is a series of arresting moments when, after someone has been described as having certain ideas, the narrator corrects himself and concludes that, in all likelihood, the character thought nothing of the sort.8 In literature, especially in novels committed to an intense psychological interrogation of individual characters, an assertion of the form "of course x wasn't really thinking this" is habitually taken to signify "these sentences do not transcribe x's exact sentiments because x couldn't voice them so clearly, but they do embody the essence of what x would have said he thought if he were able to express himself with greater precision and self-awareness." But, more interestingly, the sentence could also give voice to a recognition of the extraordinary diversity and unpredictability of human reactions. In this sense, which, I believe, is precisely what Broch intends, the proposition would mean something like "here is one of the many strands of thought x might have entertained, but others are equally plausible in this context."

It is worth stressing how different this idea is, in spite of its apparent kinship, from Freud's concept of "overdetermination." In Freud, overdetermination is "a consequence of the work of condensation" and signifies that "formations," like dreams or symptoms, must be attributed to a plurality of determining factors.9 For writers like Broch, Musil, or Roth, however, the multiplicity of motivations of a dream, thought, or feeling is not the primary issue; instead, the focus is on the multiplicity of the "formations" themselves. In reading these novels, we become trained not to search for ever more deeply intertwined chains of signification intersecting at the "nodal point" of a single expression, but to recognize that a whole orchestration of complex sentiments and concepts might be occurring, not, as it were, archaeologically beneath the surface ones as their foundation, but in-

stead, topographically alongside of, and temporally concurrent with, the one we notice and upon which our attention and interpretive acumen are focused.10 Novels like these show us how each counterlife is composed of countless counter-moments, and how each thought takes shape as only one realization amid the counter-thoughts that hover as its sideshadows, multiple alternatives existing in a potential space and ready to be brought, by the quickening of imagination or desire, out of the shadows and into the light of formal expression.

It is important to specify that nothing I have said so far argues for any radical relativism or questions the existence of definable concepts and sentiments. To stress the claims of sideshadowing and counterlives, far from undermining the authority of the concrete instance, is its most radical guarantor precisely because it insists on the primacy of human freedom. It is between the antithetical but twin reductionisms of teleological determinism and radical undecidability, between, to give as examples two of their recent local names, Marxism and Deconstruction, that the prosaics of sideshadowing positions itself, in principle equally at odds with both of its more widely canvassed counter-models.

With these positions, as in all debates with either dogmatism or relativism, a real dialogue is impossible because, to echo Bakhtin, in dogmatism the only "true" answer is already known in advance, and in a thoroughgoing relativism no answer can have any more significance than does its antithesis. To concentrate on the sideshadowed ideas and events, on what did not happen, does not cast doubt on the historicity of what occurred but views it as one among a range of possibilities, a number of which might, with equal plausibility, have taken place instead. The one that actually was realized, though, exists from then on with all the weight afforded by the singularity of what we might call its event-ness. Only the brightness of an actual event can cast sufficient shadow for sideshadowing to matter, and only the felt force of a life can give impetus to the counterlives that seize the imagination. A prosaics of the quotidian requires a willingness to remain receptive to the voices from the shadows in order to safeguard itself from becoming either a new kind of reductionism or a blind affirmation of whatever has triumphed sufficiently to flourish in the

glare of actuality. Counterlives count because they are a constituent element of the lives we have, just as it is often by the shadows the sun casts, not by its direct light, that we can best calibrate where we stand.11

To keep the claims of both the event and its unrealized alternatives in mind may be more perplexing as a theoretical formulation than as an ongoing act, and problems that critical habit and grammar often urge us to see cleanly divided are in practice usually vitally, and even messily, intertwined. To show just how crucial is the conjunction of life and counterlife, event and its shadow, requires not so much a global schema as a sequence of careful acts of local scrutiny. An investigation such as mine must be cautious not to force a single, limited horizon on a number of radically different texts, much of whose power stems directly from their seeming incommensurability and from their resistance to any generalizable interpretive formula. The more interesting a work of art is, the more it will evade being treated as merely an instance of a general principle, and a project like this, if it is to avoid arbitrariness, must maintain a constant readiness to adjust the balance between its larger assertions and its local evidence with sufficient tact. Ultimately, it is this readiness itself, the willingness to engage what lies outside the direct field of its own proclaimed aim that, more than anything else, stands as both the test and the practice of sideshadowing.

Excerpted from Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic Historyby Michael André Bernstein Copyright © 1994 by Michael André Bernstein. Excerpted by permission.
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