The relationship between lost or subjugated peoples and those who
attempt to retrieve or recover them is fraught with complexity. Historians, working
in a culture built upon exclusionary practices, can never be "proper"
to the subaltern "consciousness" they are attempting to resurrect
(Spivak 16). The most they can hope to achieve or recover is a “subject-effect”
-- an elusive echo of a network of “politics, ideology, economics, history,
sexuality, language and so on” (Spivak 12-13). The relationship between the historian
and his/her object of study is ultimately a “complicity between subject and object
of investigations" (28). This complicity is also apparent in The
Country of the Pointed Firs and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We can
align narrators with historians as both frame our experiences of the stories
they transmit, although the comparison between the two is complicated by our
cultural stereotypes that historians speak truth and narrators speak fiction. Spivak’s
essay, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” reminds us of the
imbalance of power between narrators and their subjects, while encouraging
readers to be aware of the interpretative aspects of a narrative voice.
The protagonists of both The Country of the Pointed Firs
and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde use their object of study to access or
express a repressed aspect of themselves. In The Country of the Pointed
Firs, the narrator occupies the position of the privileged writer who
ventures into working class rural Maine as an escape from a place, most
certainly urban, in which she finds herself “a foreigner” (Jewett 99). Through
her narration, we learn more about her powers of interpretation than of the
reality of the place she describes. She appropriates and idealizes the daily
lives of Dunnet Landing locals to tell a story of the place, but instead of
creating a realistic representation of their suffering, she flattens characters
and brings her own loneliness to the fore. Similarly, Jekyll uses Hyde (the
embodiment of bourgeois stereotypes of the lower classes) to strengthen his
elite position. Hyde functions as a mask to protect Jekyll’s pristine
reputation. Torn between both needing and simultaneously hating him, Jekyll
constantly denigrates and dehumanizes Hyde, describing him as "not only
hellish but inorganic,” in order to maintain the boundary between himself, the
civilized intellectual, and his animalistic, “primitive” other (91). Moreover,
Hyde is pushed even further away from the elite position of his creator by
being allowed no interiority in the novel's structure; he is never the
narrator, never do we see the world through his eyes. He remains a
"subject-effect," a thought or terror within the other characters’
minds or experiences but with no clear subjectivity himself.
In content, both novels reveal the imbalance of power between the
tellers of stories and their subjects. However, in their form, the novels also affect
the reader’s relationship with the power dynamics being presented; the novels
are structured as narratives traversing through time and then end with a
reflective or revealing chapter that reshapes our understanding of the
narrative that we have just passed through. The historians that Spivak
discusses see themselves as writing the last revisionary chapter of the
subjects they wish to uncover. But they, like the final chapters in our primary
texts, serve to solidify their own position of power as creators of public
opinion. Though we would never argue that Edward Hyde or the Dunnet Landing
locals are subaltern in Spivak’s sense of the term, both of these novels and
Spivak’s historians rely on the fact that their subordinate subjects will not
speak back to them and reveal the fragility of narrative, both historical and
fictional.
Word Count: 600. The power of collaboration...right there.
Haertig and Emrich
6 comments:
Fascinating post, Sarah and Lee!
Ashley and I were thinking along similar lines--that although the goal is recovery of voices, the construction of the subaltern as silent subject works to determine a static role for the oppressed. However, our humanitarian instincts work against this silence, and there's a very real possibility that slowly, the subaltern will find her voice, and as you've said, reveal the fragility (or in many cases, reductivity) of the narrative we construct for them.
Dear Lee and Sarah,
I really appreciate your attempt to explore the complicated theories of Spivak's work, tracing a parallel (although oftentimes a seeming divergence) between narrativity and historicity. It seems that historical representations that are interpretative can never be purely "truthful," as there are subjectivities and biases that spontaneously and uninhibitedly seep into works, undoubtedly. Just as traits of individual writers fall through their porous written representations, so too do colonial appropriations and idealizations of subalternity.
I wonder: to what extent could one inverse the relationship between Hyde and Jekyll that you trace? It seems that Hyde's degeneracy would be a negative influence on Jekyll, which perhaps explains his appropriation of Hyde's baseness to ensure his elitist position. Jekyll's subsumption of Hyde perhaps, then, signals Jekyll's own debasement.
I also would have appreciated a certain clarification. Do you argue that representations of subjugation in Stevenson and Jewett are parallel to colonialist historians' depictions of subalternity? Do you see the inadequate representations of Dunnet Landing's citizenry by the narrator as similar to the production of subaltern characters in historical narratives? You claim that Hyde is not a subaltern figure (I agree that Spivak would find this equation extremely problematic, as it potentially undermines the horrors of colonialists' suppression and subduing of those without voices), but I'm not sure if there is a qualification lacking in this comparison of narrative and history.
Best,
Zach
Hi Zack,
Thanks for engaging with our post. As we were hoping to make clear, we were not attempting to align the subaltern with any of the characters in our texts. We were not thinking of book characters as subaltern. That as you said, would be extremely problematic. What we were trying to do was to see if we could think with Spivak, to see if she might teach us something about our texts (then maybe we got carried away with trying to find parallels). I think Lee and I would both would agree that this paring was quite a stretch and it may have been unwise for us to try and pair our works of fiction with Spivak's arguments. Anyway, thanks again for the comments. I think you articulated questions we really should have have addressed in this post.
Hi Lee and Sarah,
Your argument about positionality between narrator and subject (or subject as object) was very clear and convincing because while the novel as a form can revel in its fictiveness, the historian in the western tradition unwittingly believes his fictions to be as true as possible. I think there is much more to say beyond drawing similarities between the two disciplines; as you allude to in your final paragraph, the novel as a form "are structured as narratives traversing through time and then end with a reflective or revealing chapter that reshapes our understanding of the narrative that we have just passed through." In that both your narratives are housed in novels, that are at once prose (versus poetry), fiction (versus "non fiction"), and literature (versus orature, non-literary texts, cartoons), there is a specific set of expectations, powers and violence that novel narratives have that are different from histories. As Zach notes, the subaltern and historians/historiographers of the subaltern are handed an always-already mediated history of a colonial class named by colonists and only "represented" in historical documents through these same colonists. And yet while this is a true and awful specter, I think noting the similarity between your two novels and the onus of the subaltern historian posits a new way of thinking about subaltern studies as always mired in a fiction. To what extent, truly, can a narrator "do justice" and represent an already manufactured subject? And in what ways do different forms (disciplines or genres or discourses) optimize these fictions for their own ends? Are fictional characters always safe because we know they live in novels? Are different kinds of historical documents more or less fictional and more or less violent than others? I guess I am asking is to what extent does form/genre shape and contour the position and power dynamic between narrator and subject/object that you helpfully point out in all three texts?
Thanks every one for responding!
Dear Ashley, you raise great questions and they are eerily close to the questions Sarah and I thought about when thinking through our post. I think you're absolutely right to ask, "To what extent, truly, can a narrator "do justice" and represent an already manufactured subject?" They can't. Nor, I would say, can historians do justice to the subaltern. I think that as soon as we realize that our efforts to recover voices will always be inadequate in some way, we can get over the inadequacy and take it as a given that something will always be left out our research. We just hope someone else comes behind us and takes up the piece we had to leave behind, while also realizing that they will leave pieces behind them. This seems like the process of academia currently. Moreover, I really question the extent that any voice can be unmediated, which is not the same as saying all voices are fictional, but it is the same as saying there's no such thing a "true" or "pure" voice.
And Zach, as to your questions, "Do you argue that representations of subjugation in Stevenson and Jewett are parallel to colonialist historians' depictions of subalternity? Do you see the inadequate representations of Dunnet Landing's citizenry by the narrator as similar to the production of subaltern characters in historical narratives?" I would say, No to the first, and Yes to the second. The subjugation is obviously not the same because it's not similar to the racialized, colonialized silence imposed upon the subaltern. But, I do see the representations of both the Dunnet Landing locals and Hyde as working in at least one way similar to the representations of the subaltern by historians because both representations, inadvertently or not, reveal something about the narrators of the last chapters on each book(the narrator in TCOTPF and Jekyll in J&H) rather than actually getting close to any sort of truthful subjectivity in Hyde or the Dunnet Landing Locals. These two "subjects' will always be unknown in some way or the other because their voices are only heard through the interpretive lens of the narrator.
That idea of the subject-effect is one of the most resonant bits (for me) of all the Spivak I've read. It suggests something about the actual scholarly work of history/historiography/subaltern studies in which we and others engage from time to time. This work, at root, is selective in the most literal sense of that word: we work on what we decide is worthy of our academic attention (for whatever reason), and the subjects of our scholarly work then become "subjects" merely by virtue of our critical gaze. If we think of this process textually, we might think of our selection of "primary" texts for critical analysis in terms of literature-effects. And, maybe, the narrative work you're tracing here can function by producing coherence-effects? Is part of your argument that narratives suppose or impose coherence and connectedness and "form/genre" (borrowing from Ashley) when it's impossible to determine whether any exist?
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