Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

4. Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK

The debate over Oliver Stone’s JFK has been framed to date largely within the discourse of historiography, with greatest attention being paid to issues concerning the limits of fact and fiction and the erosion of the presumed boundary between documentary and imaginative reconstruction .1 Defenders of the film have usually argued from a deeply theoretical position, pointing out the permeable nature of the border between factual discourse and imaginative reconstruction, as well as the protean quality of even the most substantial documentary record of the past.2 In this chapter, I wish to shift the angle of approach to the film in order to consider another set of questions, revolving chiefly around the tension between the film’s formal innovations and its explicit aim to articulate a narrative of national cohesion. The film’s fragmentary form can be revealingly seen as an expression of a national narrative in disorder and disarray, its collagelike narrative structure reflecting the disruption of the evolutionary or historical narrative that gives continuity to national identity. From this perspective, the film’s notorious mixing of idioms conveys meanings that depart from issues of fact and fiction: rather, it expresses the fracturing of historical identity, the breaking apart of a once unified national text. The film thus recuperates its radically discontinuous style by linking it to the loss of what Benedict Anderson called social “unisonance,” to the absence of a unified national narrative, which it nostalgically evokes as the foundation of community and the ground for all other narratives of human connection.3 88 4 Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK The concept of nationalism has increasingly been tied to the development of particular narrative forms.4 In writing of the nation as an “imagined community,” for example, Anderson has linked the ideology of the modern nation to a specific sense of space and time expressed most clearly in the narrative forms of the realist novel. The temporal parallelism of the realist novel—the sense of temporal coincidence and simultaneity, of a multitude of unrelated actions occurring in a single community in what Walter Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time”—is directly related, in Anderson’s view, to the image of the modern nation: “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) in history.”5 Emerging as a strong form in tandem with the rise of nations, the realist novel, with its composite structure, its depiction of the one yet many of national life, and its temporal parallelism, “allowed people to imagine the special community that is the nation.”6 As Anderson says, the structure of the realist novel as well as the newspaper, both of which are crucial to the development of the imagined community, can be seen as forming a “complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile.’”7 By contrast, Hayden White argues in a recent essay that modernist antinarrative techniques, characterized by fragmentation, the exploding of the conventions of the traditional tale, and the dissociation or splitting of narrative functions, may be the most appropriate techniques for representing the historical reality of the contemporary period , with its unprecedented catastrophes and its compound global contexts.8 His hypothesis—that there is a deep connection between the cultural genres of modernist aesthetic practice and the social dramas of the twentieth century—provides a suggestive contrast with Anderson’s ideas about the cultural models of the nation-building past. White argues that the stylistic techniques of modernism, far from being ahistorical or removed from history, as so many critics have contended, provide better instruments for representing the recent events of the past than do the storytelling conventions of traditional historians or, for that matter, the storytelling conventions of realism. Traditional forms of historical explanation, relying on concepts of human agency and causality, assume a kind of narrative omniscience over events that, by their scale and magnitude, elude a totalizing explanation. Modernist forms, in contrast, offer the possibility of representing, for the Western Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK  89 world, the traumatic events of the twentieth century, such as the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the use of genocide as a state policy, in a manner that does not pretend to contain or define them. In these pages, I address the film JFK...