Historicizing Shame, Shaming History: Origination and Negativity in the Eneas

Historicizing Shame, Shaming History: Origination and Negativity in the Eneas Noah D. Guynn What we call time is precisely truth's inability to coincide with itself. —Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading WHAT IS INVOLVED IN "HISTORICIZING" STATES OF SHAME in French literature? Does it mean turning to the evidence of literary history in order to demonstrate how shame has been differently configured in past eras? Or could we invert the question and ask whether history itself—meaning the classic notion of a realistic, objective, or truthful representation of temporal operations'—is shamed by its failure adequately to grasp the fleetingness of time or to locate or reproduce the whole truth of a past moment or lapsed state of consciousness? More to the point, do proud historical fictions—those that attempt to exclude shame by placing it at a temporal or ontological remove, that invent an honorable selfpresence or a bounded collective subject—enact through the very gesture of repression an inexorable return of shame? I will suggest in this essay that shame, the most obviously self-reflexive of human emotions, indeed produces a mirror effect: a history of negative affectivity exposes the negative grounding of historical knowledge generally. By negative grounding I mean two things: first, that the taking-place of temporal operations cannot be stabilized in language or narrative; second, that no sufficient representation of the whole exists, be it the whole of historical time, the whole truth, or the entirety of individual or collective consciousness. Shame troubles a totalizing, truth-telling historiography by exposing fissures within subjectivity (whether individual or collective) and within those retrospective narratives by which the subject represents itself to itself, by which consciousness understands itself as having continuity and coherence over time. For, as a factitious, figurai, and—most importantly—a temporal entity, the subject can never be wholly self-identical, essential, or absolute. Rather, it is more aptly understood as a contingent performativity in which presence is always fleeting into the past or rushing forward as an unanticipatable futurity. As a result, even the proudest foundational histories—myths of identity or state formation; legitimating, authorizing genealogies—cannot escape a 112 Winter 1999 Guynn resurgence of negativity in the form of the evasiveness or nonexistence of the present. Moreover, if historical narratives fail to possess, know, or master their object in any positive way, then historiography could itself be understood as a nexus of subjectiv crisis. Retrospective narration does not confirm the unity of the individual or collective subject or the coherence of the subject's past, even if it appears to do so. Instead narrative exposes its failure to grasp or signify presence or to make good on its truth claims,2 and therefore precipitates a negative affective response that I will call shame. Let me therefore propose as a provisional definition of shame that negative affective response which arises from the traumatic recognition of negativity within origins and strategies of origination. Shame is, in my view, the conscious or unconscious awareness of the impossibility of subjective or narrative mastery. It can therefore be linked to the historian's failure to control the future meaningfulness of his/her narrative or to reclaim past time or consciousness through narrative. As a number of scholars have suggested in recent years, historiography is incapable of retrieving the whole truth of historical origins, and, thus, like all mimetic or rhetorical forms, historical narratives inevitably fail to provide "purely" evidentiary answers to factual or causal questions.3 Instead, they expose the absences, silences, and aporias that constitute the paradoxical "ground" of historical knowledge; the negativity that occupies and fractures both origins and narratives in which origins are postulated; and the recurring necessity of writing and rewriting, inventing and reinventing the past. If indeed shame arises from the recognition of temporal and subjective negativity, then shame should be understood not as a primal, superseded affect, but as a pervasive, recurring response to diachronic change and a powerful reminder of the groundlessness of totalizing conceptions of historical truth. To illustrate my argument, I will retum to an origin of sorts: the Roman d'Eneas, an Anglo-Norman "translation" of Virgil's Aeneid, one of the earliest examples of vernacular...