Degree zero of history

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Barlow, Tani E

The matter of where history in the larger sense belongs, however, is a chronic concern throughout Spivak's book-particularly in chapter three, titled "History." There Spivak begins by disavowing a desire to write "real" history, and instead situates her project as one that tells "two stories about the informant in history" (198).13 Each of these informants was actually once alive, however. And this is a key distinction for her. Indeed, some descendants of these informants are not only still living but even remember them, however incompletely or erroneously (in a disciplinary sense). These historical personages were once, to put it plainly, material and worldly human beings and consequently were never imaginatively figured fictional characters. In the case of the Rani, Spivak goes about compiling evidence just as Scott's "good historian" would. Her archival researches are sufficient to establish that wherever the Rani appears, the text's actual objective is to install a colonial social grid. This grid puts the colonizer into the position of the sovereign subject and the Rani-like Indians in the position of natives in their own land. It brings the historical Rani into representation only in a context of property law involving a political strategy for expanding British claims. But Spivak's research nonetheless establishes the historicity of a person who went by this oddly colonialist name, Rani of Sirmur, and whose house the storyteller visits, just as Spivak's own family memory can establish the second figure of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri to have been a distant relative who hanged herself.

Spivak gives two central reasons why she, putatively a literary critic, is willing to trail historical figures through a colonial archive or a family memory. Both justifications involve the work of displacement. The first is a strategy for historically displacing avant-garde, Eurocentered literary theory that persistently misreads what is actually a valuable, often mislaid documentary record of popular, female, native expression. The second is to displace the hold of colonial historicity itself. Here her argument recognizes the mapping or discursive work of colonizing agents and suggests ways of reading (a historian would say "historiographically") the very grids that the archive holds in place, in order to locate evidence that might enable other readings and in the end displace the grid. Interestingly, one implication is that no matter how the historical figures (of the Rani of Sirmur and Bhubaneswari Bhaduri) fare in conventional historical accounts they still offer a potential material resource to critical theory as no literary figuring or literary text can. The Rani of Sirmur and Bhubaneswari Bhaduri are not symptoms. They do not signify a historical or political unconscious (the presumption in much cultural criticism now). Indeed, they cannot be read exclusively as literature at all.14

Spivak's intent, then, is to displace the complicit relation of literature and historical archive (a metonym of history for Spivak) prevailing in contemporary cultural studies. To my mind she has achieved that. Certainly no argument from "literature" to the world could stand after her discussion. Her accomplishment is to have resituated the evidence of "worlding" in a framework of historical writing that is in fact largely not literary at all. But Spivak is insistent that what she is doing is not history, either. History, it would seem, lies somewhere else. She takes this up to some degree in her own plaintive question: "Of what is history made as it happens?" (238). And what she wants, she says, is a history "that can attend to the details of the putting together of a continuous seeming self for everyday life" (238).15 In a sense, then, Spivak has addressed and displaced both Sartre's claim to be able to read his way into the history of the colonial other and Barthes's predicament of not being able to see an end to literature.