When stories are told in my tradition, which is the Western tradition of history and narrative, there is, for the most part, a beginning, a middle, and an end; events have causes and consequences, civilizations rise and fall in orderly progression. Ancient History gives way to the Middle Ages; the Renaissance, Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, the Atomic Age and the Cold War come and go as expected. History is a neat line, which conveniently organises events into sequences that create order, intelligence, and sense. But what if I were to think about the history of the world as a set of concentric rings: stories appearing to stand within stories; a narrative of containment and exclusion. Some stories, when history is conceptualized like this, will appear larger than others; appear to contain the smaller narratives, surround them, dominate them.
This is a traditional way of making history into narrative (that is, of doing historiography), which privileges some narratives over others, designating them objective, truthful, and universally valuable. The larger narratives take up more space, are studied, disseminated, known, believed, and eventually become part of the tissue of information that makes up our social and intellectual life.
These dominant accounts are problematic, though: they inevitably leave out or cover up parts of themselves. Their claims to 'completeness' are at the expense of what they have to forget in order to sustain themselves.
But the trick of this idea of concentric rings of meaning or narrative is one of dimension: rather than being a flat plane onto which figures can be drawn, history and the world have multi-dimensional space. If I change my perspective, I can see that in fact the rings seem to be linked or contiguous, not simply contained/containing. Concentrism is one facet of what can actually be represented like this:
The same rings, in this perspective, are involved with one another, touch one another (well, almost, so imagine it; the Paint program on this computer is foul), participate in one another. They contaminate one another, complicate one another, but are not contained by one another--or not simply, since after all we can conceptualize them as concentric rings. But, seen like this, it's easier to understand 'separate' histories as mutually integral.
What seeing the history (or histories) of the world as concentric rings and then as a set of rings extended and linked does is to offer us a pattern of supplementarity that challenges the dominant form of historiography. That form relies on the assumed objectivity of its narrative, on the seamless narrativization of history so that there are stories we don't even recognise as stories, but as complete facts: in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That's one such. Think of all the particulars that that little verse, or any account of that event, must neglect, or smooth over, or misread, just to continue jauntily along the path of Progress and Expansion and the Glory of Exploration!
Expanding the rings (like a telescope) allows us to see that no one story could be complete without the others. Each is integral to the rest--which means that self-representation by certain narratives as 'complete' is a fallacy. Either the stories are all linked and participatory, or there are some which are 'outside' the accepted canon of stories, proving the canon's value and reality, as it were. And if there are stories 'outside' that canon, then their existence is what the canon requires in order to
be canon. And so what is '
supplemental,' (that is to say, extraneous, extra-canonical) is in fact necessarily
part.
I'm writing a paper to give at a conference in Liverpool this weekend, about the novel
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by
Julian Barnes. To be more specific, I'm writing about the so-called 'half chapter,' an essay (or story? Genre's unclear here, and, I think, purposefully so) called "Parenthesis," and how the novel and the story model this idea of concentric supplementarity. Here's my (very professional) diagram:
That's the 'real' world there--the immeasurable, innumerable, unnameable total of all human experience, of all time. And to its right are the authoritative histories that are written of it, the textbooks and the underlying social myths, which supplement the 'real' world. And then there are the contesting histories, which is what Barnes' novel is--it retells or revisits many familiar narratives and themes--and these narratives are the supplement to that collection of histories we designate (or have designated for us) as 'official.'
And then there is, in my case specifically, "Parenthesis," (that'd be the 'book' witht he loveheart on it) which is a fragmented, personally voiced lyric essay about love--about the narrator's love, and about love in general (as much as it is possible to speak generally). Parenthesis--even the word implies exclusion from the main text; afterthought. But the utterance of Barnes' history needs "Parenthesis"--it is the supplement to the 'alternate' history.
"Parenthesis" pretends to be exterior to Barnes' history, just as A History of the World (note the use of the indefinite article) claims to stand apart from the histories it deconstructs. Actually, these stories are interior. But there is the problem of completeness--are we to consider "Parenthesis," which is resistant to the larger scale of the novel and of canonical history, somehow more complete than these other narratives?
In the end, we can't. "Parenthesis," in the end, is still representative--in both senses of the word. I mean, here, that Barnes is both showing us something (rather than giving us the 'complete' thing itself) and is limited in his showing to something that still is standing for something else--in this case, the particularity of the experience of love. "Parenthesis" privileges the fragment, the particular, and the local, but it can never get beyond its own generality. This is no endpoint.
Endpoints, however, aren't the question.
Instead, "Parenthesis" does the work that literature and art have to do, which is to point us towards the particular experience as an 'antidote' to totalising or generalising narratives. So the next step in the diagram (the next concentric ring) is the private experience and narrative of each person. And this brings us to the final/first figure in the diagram, the whole world, the ‘real’ world, world of experience, the place where are these stories are constructed (and which is constructed by the stories).
