Focalizations and Fragmentations: Comparing the Aesthetics of Critical Fabulation in Saidiya Hartman’s “The Dead Book” and “Venus in Two Acts”

Abstract

This thesis explores the emergence of critical fabulation, the speculative archival methodology of Saidiya Hartman, through the lens of Mieke Bal’s concept of focalization. Critical fabulation offers a method of deconstructing and renarrating the colonial archive of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to reckon with the absence of the autobiographical perspective of any enslaved women. Although coined in Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” critical fabulation’s aesthetic strategies of unsettling perspective, voice, rhetoric, affect, and figurations are present in Hartman’s earlier work “The Dead Book,” from her 2007 book Lose Your Mother. This thesis traces the emergence and development of this practice in the contexts of each text to explore where, when, and how Hartman employs aesthetic fusions and fragmentations, different degrees of imagery immersion, and focal reconstructions and deconstructions. I use Bal’s concept of focalization to defamiliarize the notion of perspective and analyze the ways in which Hartman recaptures the affective tendencies, grammatical moods, syntactic proclivities, and metaphorical patterns across a range of different European colonial roles—from the numerizations of ledger bookkeepers, to the romanticizations of white abolitionists, to the euphemizations of legal apparatuses—in order to illuminate and critique the different discursive figurations which have circulated and hardened into the Western aesthetic regime and discipline of History. I also use focalization to track the ways in which Hartman starts to tease the bounds of perceiving/knowing/writing/reading dictated by a “History” which attempts to graduate itself to the declarative status of epistemological objectivity, while obfuscating white violence and its own incoherent and fantastical figurations. Hartman does this by employing grammatical moods unconventional to History, such as the subjunctive and imperative, and by invoking the less overdetermined sense of the aural. Lastly, focalization provides a hermeneutic key by which to understand what I am calling the supratextual tendencies of “Venus in Two Acts,” meaning the ways Hartman diagnoses and stages “our” material and symbolic relationality with the past, present and future, and hails us to become critical fabulators “ourselves.”