Stephen Best and affecting historiography

“Ghosts, Cowboys” is not a story about race, but notions of historicity and historiography are central to its structure and trajectory.  The story takes the form of a narrative of origins—or possible origins—delivered by a narrator who is in many ways indistinguishable from the author herself.  Claire Vaye Watkins, the author, admits that much of the project of Battleborn is motivated by her own need or wish to negotiate the her father’s legacy (O’Grady).  He was formerly a member of Charles Manson’s infamous Family.  Watkins

found a home in the … ambiguous truth of fiction.  “All the stories about my father, they’re very mythic, but flimsy,” Watkins says.  “I just wanted to know who he was.  And sometimes, the story is that you’re not going to know.”  (O’Grady)

Historiography is a similarly crucial concern in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, according to Stephen Best, though these texts attempt to negotiate the historicity of slavery and blackness.  For me, Best’s readings of the texts are most interesting in their theorization of affectively-motivated forms of historiography—Best is, in a broad sense, analyzing and critiquing critical discourse itself.  Though it is difficult to argue, if I accept Best’s analysis, that blackness is exceptional, I will not attempt here to make an argument in which “Ghosts, Cowboys” bears directly on racialization and relationships of blackness to legacies of slavery.  Rather, I think this story—given the professed motivations of the narrator-author herself—can allow me to poke at and problematize the affective dimensions of Best’s theorizations of historiography.

For Best’s conceptions of historiography are, at heart, affective:  they focus a critical lens on the “ethics” of a relationship of present to past (455).  Best draws on Benjamin’s Angel of History and the theories of affect and loss formulated by queer theorists like Heather Love to emphasize the role of the historiographer, since particular histories allow particular historiographers to engineer their own relation—ethical or unethical—to the past that they present.  As he argues,

[t]o be historical in our work, we might thus have to resist the impulse to redeem the past and instead rest content with the fact that our orientation toward it remains forever perverse, queer, askew.  (456)

The tendency to redeem characterizes, for Best, a great deal of the “literary” model of historiography in his field (461).  He traces two forms of literary historiography, motivated by two corresponding and divergent forms of affect:  one melancholic, another mournful.  The first is characterized by returns to the site and locale of historical trauma (slavery), while the second is characterized by a turning away, what Best calls abandonment (473).  The tendency to redeem or resuscitate emerges from melancholic historiography, which constantly returns to, or attempts to reanimate as the present, certain pasts that for Best can be characterized only by their “radical alterity” to the present (455).  If the historiographer redeems, the historiographer is a hero.

Claire—the narrator of “Ghosts, Cowboys”—also turns and returns to multiple pasts, but these are always conditional pasts, and the weight of affect on her tendency to return is difficult to overlook in a reading of the text.  The tendency to return evidences melancholic historiography, according to Best.  But Claire does not position herself as someone seeking to redeem; in fact, she explicitly acknowledges the alterity of the past—her pasts, her father’s pasts, the pasts she can only fabricate from incomplete records:

He asked about my father.  I wanted to tell him what I told you, but that’s nothing that can’t be found in a book, a diary, a newspaper, a coroner’s report.  And there is still so much I’ll never know, no matter how much history I weight upon myself.  …  Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.  (20)

A question arises here, then:  if we “already know” that the past is other, is there a way in which melancholic returnings are not always symptomatic of the tendency to redeem history?

Works Cited

Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” MLQ 73.3 (2012): 453–474. PDF file.

O’Grady, Megan. “The Way Out West: Claire Vaye Watkins’s Stunning Debut, Battleborn.” Vogue. Condé Nast Digital. 24 July 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2013.

Watkins, Claire Vaye. “Ghosts, Cowboys.” Battleborn. New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 2012. 1–23. Print.