Metahistorical Romance, theHistorical Sublime, and DialogicHistoryAmy J. Elias

‘Metahistorical romance’ is postmodernist historical fiction which is obsessedwith historiographical questions in a self-reflexive mode. This fiction both

continues and reverses the dominant of the historical romance genre associatedwith the work of Scott. It also rehearses many of the perspectives on history

found in postmodern historiography. The central characteristic of metahisto-rical romance is pursuit of the historical sublime, which it confronts as

repetition and deferral. After generally illustrating correspondences betweenthis postmodern genre and postmodern historiographical perspectives, thearticle investigates correspondences between sublime history and dialogical

history and explores ways in which the metahistorical romance may be said toconstruct history as dialogical. Dialogical history, while impossible in a literal

sense, may still offer useful alternatives to dialectical models of history andradical postmodernist scepticism.

Keywords: Historical novel; Postmodernism; Historiography; The sublime;

Historical romance; Dialogism

For all the recent discussion about history coming to an end, surely peoplewith 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 teethbefore going to bed. ‘Why?’ is a question that depends upon a historical

sense. In order to answer the question, one must assume a reality thatpredates 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

Rethinking HistoryVol. 9, No. 2/3, June/September 2005, pp. 159 – 172

ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdDOI: 10.1080/13642520500149103

important point is that the question is not whether history exists orwhether 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 todesire. 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 arebroken down into nearly infinite subgroupings and subcategories. The one-

paragraph version goes something like this. One way of addressing thehistoriographical ‘Why?’ is linked to ‘premodern’ religious views, which

assumed that there was an order to the universe controlled by a rationalintelligence, or God. The old religions assumed that lived human historywas chaotic and violent, but they had an idealist faith that behind this

history was ontological order. This is what gave hope and the possibility ofethical 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 defined ethicalaction in the present and made it meaningful. In Phase II, secular

humanism and ‘modernity’ attacked this view, and relocated the centre ofethics from God to human beings. Modernity replaced God with the

possibility of god-like knowledge in men: history might appear chaotic, butthe 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 materialhistorical processes beneath the apparent chaos of history, hope lay in

humankind’s ability to apprehend the masked patterns of historicalprogression and construct ethical and emancipatory political systems based

on those patterns. Phase II was a long phase—giving us such things asliberal democracy, Kantian ethics and Marxism—and we may still be in it.

But it may also have been followed by a third phase of Western culture inwhich faith in secular rationalism has been destroyed. Postmodernity, if it

exists, attacks the belief that humankind can perceive or understandanything beyond the language that defines 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 history—namely that history ischaotic—but 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 fiction is construction of,

or desire for, the historical sublime, which is a kind of warmed-up ornegative idealism: it is a weak hope and desire that history, the space of

ontological order, exists somewhere, but also the belief that human historywill never reach it. When religion became myth, we needed history. When

160 A. Elias

history becomes myth, all but the most diehard post-Marxist materialistsseem to turn to negative theology. A religious return is a problematical

paradox for secular modernity, which long ago explained religion on thebasis of reason alone. For more than 300 years, secular modernity has been

adept at constructing new religions and new gods that pretended they werenot new religions or new gods but were the output of reasonable

deliberation by brilliant people inspired by the noblest of desires for humanemancipation. You can’t 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 repressed—an odd return

in a material age—to idealist metaphysics in the form of the ‘secular sacred’sublime. The historical sublime is like the Lyotardian space beyondrepresentation, a witness to an unrepresentable idealist History that cannot

be spoken or reached or even imagined in representation. It is the site of therecognition that there is something that cannot be said which none the less

undermines and contradicts the hubris of modern rationalism and must beacknowledged 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 poststructuralistlanguage studies, the intellectual culture of the ‘West’ stands frozen like a

deer in the headlights of an oncoming Greyhound bus. Panicked, guilt-ridden, insecure and defensive, but also giddy, reckless, irreverant, and

defiant, the art of Western (post)modernity is caught in the dizzyinghyperspace of late capitalism and seems desperately to scan the horizon of

the past for some kind of orientation, some kind of value, some kind ofself-validation. (The socio-economic culture of Western postmodernity is

another thing, and this is important to note. The culture of late capitalismis not self-reflexive in this way.) Positing itself as a post-traumatic cultural

imaginary (traumatized by its own reflection in the mirror of history), theintellectual and art culture of Western postmodernity searches the pastungrounded, without hope that a comforting coherence is to be had.

Theorists of postmodernity break into two camps at this point. The firstaligns itself with the values of modernity and contests the existence and

ethical legitimacy of the overall concept of postmodernism (often aligningpostmodernism with the market culture of late capitalism) while

recognizing its existence. This camp mourns this condition as an end-game 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 thepostmodernist debate celebrates this state of ungrounding as humankind’s

Rethinking History 161

release from imprisoning metanarratives and into a realm of free play (ofreason, of desire, of language). This side makes no attempt to reconcile

truth with language, but instead gleefully dives headfirst into the presentistpool. For the deconstruction camp of radical postmodernists, there is no

recuperation of history outside of language, and so language is always thebarrier to knowledge as well as the barrier of repression. For this group of

theorists, postmodernism signals an almost Hegelian leap of consciousnessinto its recognition of its own (un)grounding; self-consciousness is

language and vice versa, and this is the final revelation for Man.It is often this group of ‘poetic’ postmodernists that ironically returns to

metaphysics in a recuperation of the secular-sacred sublime. Radicalpostmodernism does not return to the sublime of the British Romantics,but to the sublime of language, the sublime of Jean-Francois Lyotard and

Jacques Derrida (whose late work explicitly worried the problem ofreligious belief), and to the lesser-remarked negative sublime of Michel

Foucault. Radical postmodernism celebrates the loss of realist history muchthe way that snake handlers and evangelicals delight in the ‘unprovability’

of evolutionary theory: the loss of certainty enables the possibility of radicalindividualism, singularity, epiphanic event and democratic participation in

an enlightened community. While the enthusiasm and radical experientialsingularity of the evangelical Christian, however, is tempered by a non-negotiable ethics explicitly spelled out in The Book, the ethics of radical

postmodernism must fall back upon Nietzsche, if only because of itsfoundational rejection of all foundational metanarrative and the belief that

events as well as actions are unique, unrepeatable as such, singular. Thusthe 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 hearkensback to pragmatist and Emersonian understandings of communicative

action and truth. This ‘realist’ voice in the debate aligns itself with amodified, provisional empiricism and attempts to recuperate history as theproduct of reasonable investigation and scientific method, but as

historiography it is also careful to distinguish itself from naive or vulgarempiricism predicated on outdated beliefs about the truth of science. It

cannot accept the notion of surety or empirical fact uncomplicated by theinsights of poststructuralist language theory or social constructivism. Thus

we see it doing backflips to try to wed two seemingly incompatible ideas:that history is not true, but that it is reasonable. Its distinctively pragmatist

flavour derives from attempts to prove that absolute historical truth isdifferent from the truth of consensus, and that history can be coherent and

162 A. Elias

reasonable without being ‘factually’ true or tied to purely empiricistmethodologies.

While I recognize the very different outcomes of these postmodernapproaches to history and knowledge, they are to some extent two sides of

the same postmodern coin. Realist historiography desires a historical truththat is not Truth but that is still binding, a pragmatist, robust history of

reasonable belief. Radical postmodernist historiography desires a Dionysianplayground of language and a historical ground from which to declare the

end of historical grounds. Both are a long way from Hegelian dialectic orKantian categorical imperative. What the two sides have in common is an

obsession with the historical ‘Why?’ and a resistance to essentialism andontology that would grant any supra-historical or meta-ethical perspectiveon their subject. What they have in common is a desire to retain ‘history’

without giving it essentialist content or subjecting it to covering law modelsof reasoning or logical-empiricist accounts of explanation.

My earlier work focused on the movement in historical fiction from thefirst camp of postmodernist play to the second camp of postmodernist

realism. In historical fiction of the 1960s through the 1980s, I saw the playand yearning that characterizes poststructuralism creating a definition of

the historical sublime that shared poststructuralism’s heretical anddeconstructive psychology. In later novels of the century, I saw a distinctivemove towards an ethical negotiation with others in the pluralist atmosphere

of contingency that resembled more what is now a realist historiographicalperspective. Both kinds of postmodernist historical fiction return to history

with a vengeance, and they do so because their writers hail from countriesthat have experienced the postmodern crisis of faith in the historical

narratives and values that had traditionally defined them. The postmodernturn on history, at base an assertion of the sublimity of History, is from this

view a desire for meaning that paradoxically insists on an incompleteanswer to ‘Why?’ It is an ongoing negotiation with the chaos of history that

continually strives towards completion and fulfilment, towards finalknowledge, and is continually thrown back from the barrier of languageand culture.

Thus what I call ‘metahistorical romance’ to some extent repeats thecontemporary debate about history in historiography. I claim that

metahistorical romance is historical fiction which morphs the historicalromance genre into a literary form that is able to encompass the

historiographical debates of its own time. Just as Scott’s historical romancereflected the historiography of his own time, the metahistorical romance

reflects the postmodern turn on history. Scott’s novels illustrated astadialist view of history perfectly in keeping with the Enlightenment

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historiography of the Scottish philosophes, and today’s metahistoricalromance illustrates our own historiography’s lack of faith in, but

continuing desire for, ‘historical’ knowledge. Rather than historicalromance, it is ‘metahistorical,’ obsessed with historiographical questions

in a self-reflexive mode. While my work is deeply indebted to the brilliantand groundbreaking work of Linda Hutcheon concerning history and

contemporary fiction, I prefer ‘metahistorical romance’ to ‘historiographicmetafiction’ because the former emphasizes the dominant historiographic

obsessions of the genre through the twenty-first century and directly linksthis contemporary fiction to the earlier historical romance genre.

One of the reasons why the historical romance seems so congenial to apostmodernist moment is in fact that the former always incorporated thetension I am identifying as central to postmodern historiography. The very

term ‘historical romance’ gives the game away: to Walter Scott, one of theprogenitors of the genre, the historical romance wed two incompatible

literary genres (the romance, based in myth and magic, and history, basedupon empirical truth) as well as two incompatible ways of looking at

history (as romance or myth, evincing timeless truths about humanity andthe world, and as empirically derived sociological hypothesis, which

revealed specific truths about specific cultures in historical time). Themetahistorical romance (one can see the influence of Hayden White on myown work here) continues this oxymoronic tradition that sees history as

romance and romance as history—that is, that sees the truth in both waysof looking at history without feeling the need completely to subordinate

either to the other. Metahistorical romance just reverses the dominant ofScott’s generic form: Scott privileged the historical side over the romance

side of the equation, finally showing that the mythicized Highland cultureswere doomed in the face of an epistemic shift to rationalist modernity; the

postmoderns privilege the romance side of the equation, showingrepeatedly 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. The postmodern historical imagination, as a post-traumatic imagin-

ary, confronts rather than represses the historical sublime;2. The metahistorical romance confronts the historical sublime as

repetition and deferral;3. The metahistorical romance’s motivation for this movement and

unceasing deferral of a historical ground is a simultaneous distrust andassertion of poesis as a humanist value;

164 A. Elias

4. The metahistorical romance learns from the texts of the literarymodernists to combine metahistoricity with narrative form, but for

the postmodernists this metahistoricity is situated differently as atropological reversal of the historical romance genre’s 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 butin 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 otherswriting after 1970 one can see an obsession with history, a struggle to

figure out how it works and what went wrong and how to fix it, but also afrustration with this search that leads again and again either to a stalemate

of explanatory alternatives or a recuperation of values that the text itselfseems to want to forgo. While mid-century metahistorical romances by

Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Gunter Grass and others evinced someof the motivated play advocated by poststructuralist, Derridean historio-

graphy, by the end of the century, with a new seriousness spawned bypostcolonial critique and the end of the Cold War, the metahistoricalromance was grappling with the meaning of history much more in a

manner of pragmatist or realist historiography that was congenial to apostcolonial perspective. The metahistorical view is, I suppose, in this

sense ironic rather than tragic. It yearns for the unattainable, it seeks theunrepresentable, it goes on.

At the heart of my argument was the idea that the metahistoricalromance confronts the historical sublime as repetition and deferral. What I

meant by that was something different, I think, from what Keith Jenkinsmeans by deferral in a Derridean sense, though clearly there are affinities

between these ideas. For Jenkins, postmodernism rids itself of metaphysicsand ontology. I disagree, based on my analysis of presentations of history ina large number of post-1960s historical novels. By ‘deferral’, I was referring

to the movement towards the historical sublime by this metahistoricalromance: if colonial history and empirical thought construct ‘linear’ history

dependent upon a figure-fulfilment paradigm (White 1999), metahistoricalromance constructs history as ‘a weirdly healthy repetition compulsion, a

loss of the self and a journey from the center to the margins that is repeatedendlessly because the borders of knowable history it seeks are themselves

constantly receding. The crisis of postmodern history is the endlesslyrepeated movement toward the historical sublime/History’ (Elias 2001, p.

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202). This is not a rejection of the possibility of certainty; it is a frustratedattempt to find it.

Which brings me to the point of this article. I am struck now by how mytheory of the historical sublime in metahistorical romance mimics ethical

dialogism defined, 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 first to thesecond concept? And is a dialogue with history even possible?

I must admit that the last person I would have expected to align with myviews would have been Martin Heidegger, whose writing I find extremely

frustrating most of the time. Yet Heidegger was fascinated by the idea ofdialogue in ways that do map on to some of the claims I am making forsublime history, and givenHeidegger’s ineffable hermeneutics, I suppose that

this should not be surprising. The dialogue that Heidegger imagined waspossible between human subjects was one that literally never arrived, and it

could not be coerced to produce a ‘meaning’.His dialoguewith ‘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 thedialogue; it also goes beyond the control of the speakers, precisely because it

comprises language and is embodied in language. In this view, dialogueincorporates the play of language: ‘The veiled relation of message andmessenger’s course plays everywhere’ (Heidegger 1971, p. 53).

But for Heidegger this is not infinite 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 thespeakers of what the dialogue is actually about. The ‘hint’ is akin to

Lyotard’s sublime: it is an unspoken, unrepresentable figure that is and isnot ‘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 aparaphrasable meaning, a topic summary.

The hint is akin to intuition, laying at the borders of consciousperception, yet it does not stem from consciousness but from languageitself. The hint guides the dialogue and forms its conversational trajectory.

In ‘A Dialogue on Language’, an Inquirer (Heidegger’s persona) and ‘aJapanese’ 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 theyunexpectedly bear themselves toward us.

J: You are thinking of hints as belonging together with what you haveexplained by the word ‘gesture’ or ‘bearing.’

166 A. Elias

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 inmetaphysics.

I: Hints and gestures belong to an entirely different realm of reality, ifyou will allow this term which seems treacherous even to myself.

(Heidegger 1971, p. 26)

Hints form a vital part of Heidegger’s ‘ineffable dialogue where thatwhich cannot be said is brought close’ (Rockwell 2003, p. 25). Dialogue is

the interaction of human consciousness with language to form a meaning, adiscourse, that is more than the sum of its parts and to some extent beyondthe control of its interlocutors but emerging from their speech and

interaction. What the hint allows Heidegger to explore is a middle groundbetween determinism and open-ended play in dialogue itself. The

dialogue’s 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 nonunitarycharacter of the self as dialogue. As Michael Holquist (1990, p. 18) notes,

for Bakhtin,

the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness. Thisotherness is not merely a dialectical alienation on its way to a sublationthat will endow it with unifying identity in higher consciousness. On thecontrary . . . it is the differential relation between a center and all that isnot that center. . . . ‘Center’ in Bakhtin’s thought [must] be understoodfor what it is: a relative rather than an absolute term, and as such, onewith no claim to absolute privilege, least of all one with transcendentambitions.

In this view, the self becomes a dialogic process rather than a singularity,

and it is always defined 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 cannothave a philosophy: it is, in its very principle, fortuitous and incapable of

being rooted’ (1993, p. 56).As his commentators note, Bakhtin’s unique contribution to poetics is

that he correlates self/other dialogics to a kind of authorship. The dialogicengagement between self and other demands narration; as Eskin notes, ‘It is

through the other’s aesthetic productivity that I receive a body localizableand discernible in . . . a social, communal world’ (2000, p. 82). Moreover,

Rethinking History 167

the other’s narrativization of me demands that my consciousness answer,and this sets in motion an unceasing ‘oscillation between the other’s

‘‘aesthetic completion’’ of me and my own assertion of incompleteness andinfinite potential’ (Eskin). For Bakhtin, this process of self-development

through interaction with the other is parallel to other dialogical relations inthe world dependent upon narration. Most importantly, it is parallel to

novelness, an unceasingly dialogic and never-ending interpretation of theworld 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 particularhistorical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush

up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideologicalconsciousness 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 ‘unfinalizable’ and that reality is

creative and open (Morson and Emerson 1990), Bakhtin formulated atheory of dialogism that encompassed the creative formation of the self, the

text and the world. The perspective of the other, as Thomas Pynchon mightsay, ‘keeps it bouncing’.

The question is, then: Can theories of dialogism such as Bakhtin’s be

applied to history or historical understanding? Can we have a dialogue withhistory? We might fudge this answer by talking about our interactions with

individual historical texts—manuscripts, records, etc.—and how we enterinto 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 interactionin 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 aperson; 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 withhistory.

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 rathera 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 wepursue 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 realdialogue with them for us. What I perceive to be a yearning for the sublime

space of History in metahistorical romance is, however, this movementtowards the voices of the past, this desire to engage in a living dialogue with

168 A. Elias

these once-living voices and thus to form ourselves and our reality anew.Stanley Aronowitz has written that Bakhtin’s categories (dialogue,

chronotope, polyphony) ‘may be seen as a critique of historicism fromthe 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, aglimmer 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

find the buried logocentric treasure there, the key to the kingdom of ‘Why?’We return to the past again and again, seeking perhaps not closure butcreative 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 prevalentat the end of the twentieth century. Dialectic does not offer us this

possibility of interaction with the living voice. It presents a view of historynot 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 Bakhtindetermined that dialectic was essentially monological, and turned instead toa model (of self-formation, of poetics) that reinscribed the human voice,

and thus the possibility for growth and ethical revelation, into our art andhistory. In Hayden White’s terms, it is only by understanding history as

meaningless, inexplicable and sublime—and liberating oneself from thedisciplined linear model of history of which dialectic is one example—that

there is a possibility of human ‘dignity and freedom’ (White 1987, p. 81).In his discussion of the chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin

specifically 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 thechronotopes of the lived reality of the reader. ‘Out of the actualchronotopes of our world,’ he writes, ‘emerge the reflected and created

chronotopes of the world represented in the work’ (1981, p. 253). If in factthe metahistorical romance is a postmodern form of the historical romance,

and if the central characteristic of this postmodern genre is a desire forinteraction with the voices of the past that it perceives as necessary to a self-

formation and understanding of the world, then the constant, recursivemovement towards history and back again in this postmodern narrative

form understandably mimes the give-and-take of dialogism as both ethicaland generic process. I think that this is what Ernst van Alphen means when

Rethinking History 169

he writes that to be comfortable and at home in his new house, which wasonce 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 pastin order to construct (not reconstruct, not understand) a new relation to

the world around him and to his own self-understanding (Van Alphen1997, pp. 204 – 5). I think this is what the metahistorical romance does by

returning again and again to the historical past without resolution, withoutclosure: 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 contemporaryconsciousnesses cut off from older periods’ methods for creating order, self-definition and meaning in the world. If this is so, then sublime desire derives

from a fundamentally different impulse than does radical postmodernismaligned with deconstruction and poststructuralism. Deconstructive, post-

structuralist, anti-epistemological postmodernism glories in its refusals, itsbad-boy promiscuity, its militant anarchism, its radical chic, its heroic

Nietzschean insight about the blinders of convention that blinker the eyes ofthe 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 the1960s street work of the Situationist International, in Lyotard’s 1979 clarion

call to wage war on totality, in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizopoetics, in IhabHassan’s paratactic postmodernism, in Judith Butler’s performative gender,

in Donna Haraway’s cyborg interfaces, in Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatistirony, in Derrida’s attack on logocentrism, in cyberculture rhapsodies about

connectivity. It is an enticing position that is also a necessary corrective tofundamentalisms of all types. But it almost always fails to take into account

the current, nuanced account of the relation between ‘belief’ andfoundational 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 infact has shown us, negation and affirmation 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 historyand the hermeneutics of suspicion that guided literary theory in the mid-

and late twentieth century (and that is now apparently entering historio-graphy with a vengeance) and conduct a more nuanced investigation of

170 A. Elias

what an effective history can be. Perhaps provisional foundationalism is notthe 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 alternativeto the affirmation/refusal coupling integral to assertion (of science, of

theory, of logic, of value). The Bakhtinian impulse towards dialogue is infact perfectly in keeping with a postmodernist valuation of open-endedness,

newness, freedom, indeterminacy. When self and radical other establishrelationship and dialogue, history will be on the table and up for grabs.

However, in order to talk, we will have to recognize some foundationalstarting 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. AsMichael Holquist has noted, biology shows us that all living systems are

indeterminate, unconsummated, unfinished, 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 arepervaded by history, and we have this in common as well (Holquist 1997,

p. 233). A pluralist world culture may now be due for a post-postmodernism which has the courage to acknowledge that we have fortoo long constructed an either/or fallacy that forces us to choose

unnaturally between the singular and the universal, the heterodox andthe orthodox, the spoken and the unspoken, universalism and utter

difference, History and history, meaning and play. The fact that thesebinary oppositions are false was in fact Derrida’s greatest insight. To say

that history is tropological is not to say that it has no value or that it isnothing 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 unfinalized,deferred, filled 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. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist,translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Rethinking History 171

Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, translated by V. Liapunov, editedby V. Liapunov and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Elias, A. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, Baltimore and London.

Eskin, M. (2000) Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam andCelan, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Holquist, M. (1997) ‘Bakhtin and beautiful science: the paradox of cultural relativityrevisited’, 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’, RethinkingHistory, 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) Defining 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 HistoricalUnderstanding, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.

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172 A. Elias