Hauntologies of Fiction: Reading Roth at the End of History

Abstract

Hauntologies of FictionReading Roth at the End of History Andy Connolly (bio) It has been over thirty years since francis fukuyama proclaimed that the Cold War victory of western democratic capitalism over communism culminated in an end to class-based ideological conflict as the motor of "History." Drawing upon an interpretation of Hegel's belief "that the evolution of human societies […] would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings" (xii), Fukuyama looked to the imminent spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism into heretofore closed-off reaches of the globe as a sign that the long Enlightenment project toward human progress had begun to adopt its peak, finalized form. As a major governing assumption of our neoliberal age, the Fukuyamist belief that we have reached the "end of history" looks to free market capitalism's limitless capacity to enhance individual potential and promote human freedom, while at the same time short-circuiting any serious discussions about the limiting structural conditions of class and poverty, not to mention the influences that other powerful factors such as gender and race have in the uneven shaping of capitalist social relations. Over the past number of decades, what has given particular impetus to this myth of a post-historical, classless society has been the capitulation of effective forms of social, political, and cultural dissent to the neoliberal assertion that "there is no alternative" (assigned the acronym TINA by political commentators) to market-based definitions of democracy and the social good. As such, the radical liberalization of the post-Cold War period has been shaped by a monocular stridency, which forecloses not only on the major social struggles of the past but also on the lessons that such history may present for understanding the present and potentially altering the future. In terms of our historical horizons, then, the end of history has locked us into a kind of endless, monotonous present, from which there appears no relief or interruption. It has taken some time to understand the lasting impact of my early life experience as one of Fukuyama's children. Then again, coming of age at the end of history proves deceptive in such ways, diminishing one's sense of historicity since there's apparently no more epic battles of "History" to live by or suffer from. The significance of history [End Page 50] in such an age is subject to all kinds of denial and delay. Like the repressed, history at the end of history often comes in the shape of uncanny and monstrous returns. No longer the meaty source of experience and identity that it once was, or at least appeared to be, it can take a spectral quality, like a haunting trauma whose presence is yet to be made properly known, but which lurks in wait for us, eager to disrupt our naïve sense of having broken from the past. Over the years, Philip Roth's fiction has helped shape my understanding of the peculiar "hauntological" functioning of history at the end of history. This sense of how the seemingly dead past haunts both the present and the future is not only revelatory in terms of events that have shaped my own "dwarf drama" (Anatomy 106), but also in relation to my understanding of what Roth has to tell us about history and memory. Roth's historical imagination, with its various presentiments of the "unforeseen" (Plot 113), proves highly informative when it comes to thinking about the complex issues of memory and futurity that shape our present times. Such considerations of how history functions as a spectral presence in Roth's work continues to shape my scholarship. I My early adulthood in the mid-90s was colored by a number of local phenomena that reflected the larger post-Cold War experience of a liberalized and rapidly integrating world, disencumbered of the previous two centuries of modernity, made replete with class antagonism, revolution, nationalism, colonialism, and international conflicts. During this period, many young Irish people like myself, particularly within the southern Republic of Ireland, began to experience, in ways that seemed quite sudden, a welcome breach from the drab...