The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel

Abstract

Over last decade a number of novels have displayed a various and intriguing range of historical commitments. Although I will not attempt to take on whole range here, I do want to explore a subset of historical novel I think I can clearly delineate, or at least two exemplars of this subset. I call this particular category neo-Victorian novel, and I read it as at once characteristic of postmodernism and imbued with a historicity reminiscent of nineteenth-century novel.(1) In order to develop my own argument, I will make rather free use of Fredric Jameson's critique of postmodernism, particularly his critique of postmodern representations of history. In his attacks on postmodernism, Jameson has decried its supplanting of redemptive project of history with the random cannibalization of all styles of past,(2) an approach he finds problematic because if one's relation to past is a matter of randomly retrieving various styles, then one loses impetus to find out what actually happened in that past. As a Marxist critic for whom purpose of history is the resurrection of dead of anonymous and silenced generations, retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future (CL, p. 18), Jameson finds in postmodern historicity an ever-widening gap between actual lived past and its representation. According to Jameson, postmodern skepticism regarding how much we can really know about past has resulted in nostalgia for look of past without significant interest in its substance.(3) Consequently, past as historical referent is dissolved in self-reflexive textuality: the past as `referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts (CL, p. 18). Jameson acknowledges that history is an absent cause that is never completely representable, and yet he insists that History is not in any sense itself a text or master text or master narrative, but that it is inaccessible to us except in textual or form, or in other words, that we approach it only by way of some prior textualization or (re)construction.(4) Jameson is concerned that postmodern preoccupation with history-as-text has shifted attention away from actual events of past, toward interpretation of those events. What appears to disturb Jameson most about postmodern representations of past, be they fictional, filmic, or architectural, is that they strip away its specific political content to focus on its aesthetics. Instead of respecting radical difference of bygone eras, postmodernism projects onto them contemporary culture, fabricating a privatized, or subjective, history denuded of its specific cultural resonance.(5) Epitomizing this kind of historicism for Jameson is a film like Body Heat, which stylistically connotes 1940s film noir through language of nostalgia, but is actually set in 1980s Florida (CL, p. 19). The past, according to this cultural logic, becomes a treasure trove to be mined for pertinent connections and similarities to our postmodern world, an approach that for Jameson creates a false continuity between past and present. Jameson argues that using history responsibly means reading it for traces of uninterrupted narrative of class struggle, and bringing to surface of text this repressed and buried reality (PU, p. 20). In effect, he sees past and present as having continuity only insofar as they can be united in a Marxist interpretive framework, which he claims is uniquely qualified to evade double bind of antiquarianism and postmodern tendency to project contemporary relevance onto history (PU, p. 19). The former posits an artificial rupture between past and present; latter creates a false connection. In his well-known indictment of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Jameson claims that historical novel can no longer represent historical past, but can only represent our ideas and stereotypes about that past (CL, p. …