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Article Excerpt
I don't, I don't, I don't, I just don't understand
my daughters. What happened? Tell me what happened? (Thereafter Johnnie 66) What happened? It was slavery. And white and black are so close. And dark and light are so close. And someone's white grandfather buried someone's black grandfather after those slaves sang that song and died. Truth. Freedom ... It was slavery that happened and I read the story in a book. Who buried whom? Is the story over? (Thereafter Johnnie 173).
In Carolivia Herron's 1991 novel Thereafter Johnnie, none of the five main characters comprising the protagonist's family are able to grasp the meaning of the past any more than they are able to relinquish their insistence on its hold upon them in the present. As the above epigraphs suggest, the central characters of the novel are haunted by an unfinished past--the generations distant past of African American slavery, certainly, but also the contemporary past in which an episode of father-daughter incest has destroyed the Snowdon family at the end of the twentieth century. Following an affair between daughter Patricia and father John Christopher Snowdon, the birth of a daughter, Johnnie, leads to the dissolution of the family and allows for the irruption of the past into the present. This late twentieth century episode of reproductive incest seems to call forth earlier episodes of incestuous reproduction during slavery, linking the two "pasts" of the Snowdon family through the repetition of incest. Figuring out the relationship between these two pasts becomes a kind of obsession for the novel's protagonists--particularly for John Christopher and Patricia, the father and daughter who find themselves drawn into an incestuous affair marked by its irresolvable roots in forgotten history.
But despite this obsession with finding out the "story" of "what happened," the novel is decidedly unclear about the relationship between the historical violence of slavery and the contemporary crisis caused by father-daughter incest. Even as each member of the Snowdon family insists that the past has produced their crisis in the present, the status of "the actual past" (123), as Stephen Knapp puts it in "Collective Memory and the Actual Past," remains highly indeterminate. Thus, despite that fact that everyone in the family insists that "what happened" necessitates historical excavation and explanation, no one is able to agree on precisely what history is or how it might impact the errant desires of present-day kin. As Johnnie exclaims in frustration, "History doesn't help. Slavery won't go away" (174). Characters cannot figure out how the irruption of incest in their present lives plays out the historical violence that haunts their family, and in the absence of knowledge John Christopher and Camille Snowdon, along with daughters Patricia, Cynthia Jane, Eva, and Johnnie, produce a series of stories about the violence of history. In stories spanning two hundred years of US history and combining biblical, epic, and romantic parables of incest, the Snowdon family comes to narrate its genealogy as the inheritance of incest, from the rape of Patricia's great-grandmother Laetitia by her father/master during enslavement, to the childhood "seduction" or molestation of Patricia by her father John Christopher, to Patricia's adolescent and adult sexual pursuit of her father under the guise of biblical re-enactment.
In keeping with the growing field of trauma studies, it might seem appealing to read this novel as testimony to the impact of historical trauma. Recent trauma studies have argued that trauma signals a breakdown in the historical conditions through which subjects know and narrate their experience. According to these accounts, trauma is precisely that which remains outside the domain of historical representation, a "gap" in knowable history that requires a more figurative testimonial agency to world it back into existence. As Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue in Testimony: Crises in Witnessing, trauma is a type of "extreme limit-experience" (xvi) that challenges conventional modes of historical representation, marking "a history which is essentially not over, a history whose repercussions are not simply omnipresent [...] but whose traumatic consequences are still actively evolving" (xiv). By remaining outside historical representation, trauma marks the ongoing or "evolving" movement of an unfinished history that still awaits its testimony. In these accounts, testimony provides a unique type of historical agency, one that enables subjects to bring trauma into historical representation through aesthetic and textual iteration that allows "truths that are unspoken--or unspeakable--[to be] inscribed in texts" (xiii-iv). In Thereafter Johnnie, the unfinished past of enslavement might be said to "evolve" in the testimonial project enabled by contemporary incest, allowing characters to begin the process of telling stories about the impact of history on their present lives. (1)
But this approach to testimonial agency has also come under sharp critique by scholars who claim that it "romanticizes" trauma and produces a mystical or quasi-religious aura for testimony that is inappropriate to historical representation. In the Winter 2000 edition of Representations, critics such Stephen Knapp and Kerwin Lee Klein argue that such a highly aestheticized account of testimony reduces properly rational historical agency to mystical claims about the resistant power of traumatic memory. As Klein puts it, memory has taken on an "elegiac tone" (127) that simultaneously "promises auratic returns" (129), providing a discursive mode of "re-enchantment" (136) that stands against rational historicism. According to such critics, the two "pasts" of Thereafter Johnnie would be far more different than they are similar. To understand the relation between the sexual exploitation condoned in US slavery and late twentieth century father-daughter incest, each episode must be considered historically distinct rather than collapsed into a single "evolving" historical trauma. What is at stake is the temporal immediacy attributed to testimony through trauma, its supposed reduction of real historical difference to subjective memory: Patricia might be traumatized by her sexual relationship with her father, but she cannot really be traumatized by her great-grandmother's sexual relationship with her father/master. According to these critics, to call this second instance trauma and seek its redress through the discourse of memory is to relinquish the rationality of historical agency.
The question posed by these debates about trauma is ultimately how we should conceptualize the relationship between historical representation and testimonial agency, or, more specifically, how we should conceptualize the relation between the past and the present. I would like to suggest in my reading of Thereafter Johnnie that what is at stake in these debates is the political temporality of agency, the "time" of testimonial and historical agency as they are organized in a national frame. In particular, I will explore the ways in which kinship and sexuality provide the terms through such a political temporality of agency marks the time of the nation. Returning to the specific problem posed by the two pasts of Thereafter Johnnie's incest narrative, I will ask, following Arlene Keizer: "What is the connection between the incestuous sexual abuse of black girls/women by their black fathers and the incestuous sexual abuse of enslaved black girls/women by their white father-masters?" (388). (2) While both are "eroticized incestuous relationships," Keizer explains, there is an important difference between the contexts of "incestuous sexual abuse" (388) in legal enslavement and in liberal freedom. But what precisely? Is one rape, and the other seduction? If, as Keizer suggests, both instances represent "eroticized incestuous relationships," how can we interpret them as "sexual abuse" without either negating women's agency or taking recourse to structural arguments about domination that collapse the difference between legal enslavement and liberal freedom? In this essay, I will argue that incestuous agency produces a political crisis in the historical relation between kinship and nation. Rather than seeking to rationalize the historical relation between sexual exploitation in slavery and in freedom, then, I will read Thereafter Johnnie's genealogy of incest to explore the limits of political agency articulated in national time.
Testimonial Possession
Literary critics exploring the relation between memory and history have attempted to address the questions raised above by focusing on the role of literary texts in securing or reproducing historical transmission. In these accounts, literature is not just a form of testimony about specific historical events, but also marks the historical breakdown of testimonial agency for subjects who have been disenfranchised from the legal right to testify. For the female descendents of slaves, two historical problems present themselves in the production of testimony: first, the loss of primary memories--those linked to one generation's experience--and second, the legal problems of inheritance, in which US legal institutions disenfranchise women and African Americans from the "right" to property in memory. The difference between slave rape and child molestation, in these critical accounts, becomes a problem of generational difference, what Elizabeth Yukins calls the problem of "bastard consciousness" (226). (3) Without the ability to "claim proprietary rights to traumatic memories" of historically distant trauma, Yukins suggests, "historical trauma creates an insurmountable barrier to familial cohesion and inheritance"--"kinship can neither authenticate nor secure memory" (222). Literature provides a vehicle to mark and remember such disenfranchisements by providing extra-legal narratives through which to reproduce familial coherence and memorial property.
In the following argument I wish to differentiate my reading of Thereafter Johnnie from Yukins' important clarification of the legal limits assigned to memory through the national regulation of proper kinship. Whereas Yukins ultimately seeks to describe this history as a form of memorial disenfranchisement, I wish to push this argument a bit further and ask how this legal coupling of kinship and property might perpetuate a troubling "familialism" in both the genealogy of trauma and the aims of political redress. In particular, I wish to argue that the narrative structure of Thereafter Johnnie resists precisely this liberal formulation of political agency. In Thereafter Johnnie, it is in fact the Snowdon family's efforts to "claim proprietary rights to traumatic memory" that bring about the novel's radical dissolution of characterological coherence and narrative telos. Instead of enabling familial cohesion through traumatic testimony, the characters' efforts to claim proprietary rights to memory leaves them "possessed" by a passion for memorial self-ownership. Rather than producing more coherent generational transmission, however, the characters' passion for historical reference--and utter impatience with one another's interpretations of referents--leads to a kind of testimonial possession that radically isolates each family member and ultimately dissolves any realist plot. In their search to understand the relationship between historically distant events and the sexually possessive desire that drives members of the Snowdon family in the present, the protagonists of Thereafter Johnnie seem to chase the past "down the rabbit hole," to quote Patricia Williams from The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Thus even as Patricia insists "I remember. I remember. It happened. Once upon a time it happened" (32), Johnnie bemoans, "I...
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