In Essaka Once: Time and History in Olaudah Equiano's Autobiography

IAN FREDERICK FINSETH In Essaka Once: Time and History in Olaudah Equiano's Autobiography 'emory and providence, grace and metamorphosis, anticipation and loss—these are paints our narrator applies to his selfportrait of emancipation physical and spiritual, and of an individual odyssey that bodies forth the promise of a race. It is their common pigment of transformation that I am interested in here: the felt temporality and the stance toward history of a turbulent life rendered in narrative form. Progressivist in mood and ideology, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Ohudah Equiano charts a network of movements across time, culture, and space: from childhood to adulthood, slavery to freedom , heathenism to Christianity, Guinea to England. All are figured as forward motion, and such momentum carries racial as well as personal significance, for Equiano seeks to embody and represent (in the sense of both sign and spokesman) the capacity of Africans to participate in the onward march of civilization. Reading the interesting Narrative for its articulations of time and history, I argue, clarifies our understanding of Equiano's cultural and intellectual allegiances on one level, and his emotional and experiential responses to upheaval and separation on another. In his recent work Time, Narrative, and History, David Carr speculates on the function of narrative in human experience, not only as a matter of individual perception of events or of individual self-representation , but in its capacity to organize social groups through a common relation to historical time. Building on the phenomenology of Husserl Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number i, Spring 2002 Copyright © 2002 hy Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1 6 10 Ian Frederick Finseth and Heidegger, and taking issue with those literary theorists such as Paul Ricoeur who see narrative as an artificial imposition upon life, Carr posits a "prethematic" sense of the past which is independent of the "cognitive historical interest," and which underlies the narrative fabric of existence. Narrative, in his view, is a conceptual structure that "pervades our very experience of time and social existence" (9) so that historical and fictional narratives are "extensions and configurations" of reality rather than distortions of it (16). It is, furthermore, practical, in enabling the subject to understand and to create experience according to a number of common relationships: means and ends, causes and effects, departures and returns, and so forth. On a larger scale, involving more, and more complex, configurations of experience, narrative provides a sense of the coherence of the life, of the overarching story and subsidiary stories that people continually tell themselves and others about who they are, what they are doing, where they have been. Such routine autobiographical reflection, or what Heidegger termed Besinnung, a making sense of things, is for Heidegger the essence and prerequisite of self-authorship and underlies the "authenticity," or radical uniqueness, of a life. Carr makes two particularly relevant points. First, he describes the heightened importance of autobiographical stock-taking during or after periods of crisis: The larger biographical past figures as a sediment or horizon ... in everything we do. But a multiplicity of activities and projects, spread out over time and even existing simultaneously in the present, calls for an active reflection that attempts to put the whole together. The most striking occasions for such reflections are those radical conversions, usually religious or political, in which a new view of life, of oneself, and of one's future projects and prospects requires a break with and reinterpretation of one's past. (75-76) Although not central to Carr's overall argument, this passage has clear pertinence to the sort of cultural and geographic transplantation that Equiano experiences. The second point Carr makes is that everything he has said about the narrative character of individual and social experience might not in fact describe a universal human reality, but only that of Western culture, particularly beginning in the eighteenth cen- Ohudah Equiano's Autobiography tury. The supposed unity of historical existence and historical narrative awareness, that is, might only characterize our thinking, while other societies likely have other means of confronting the "specter of temporal chaos, the meaninglessness of mere unstructured sequence" (183). Taken together, these two points alert us to a...