Dis-re-membering master narratives and the imagination of space

The fourth chapter of Stewart’s book, “Chronotopes” caught my attention as a place where her overarching argument is made in a particularly interesting way. The relationship between progress or History and individual places becomes purposefully muddled in her explanation of the everyday life of the people she’s living with. On page 97 she writes that “master narratives speak of a war of positions. In this case, in this doubly occupied place, there is first the perspective of industry and the status quo that would write the history of this place as an inevitable progress of events. In response, a critical voice claims events as evidence of the forceful exploitation of a people and the tragic death and destruction of a culture.” Her critique of master narratives that follows draws upon DeCerteu, among others, to argue that both models of History, “would close the very gap that gives rise to local chronotopes of haunting places and the need to constantly re-member things” (97). This gap that she identifies, the space on the side of the road of her title, is what is left out as master narratives of progress or exploitation cut through places like interstates and locate them only in terms of temporal relationships, rather than seeing the local cultural geography that arises from a network of signs and interpersonal relationships. This is why, as she argues elsewhere, the camps and hollers can be simultaneously characterized as a place of “both authenticity and a degraded state of nature. ‘American’ encounters with ‘Appalachia,’ then, come always already encased in a totalizing transcendant order that scans the surface of things for its own ‘highs’ and ‘lows” (119). As I attempted to argue in my presentation on Ray Young Bear’s poetry a week ago, often times, our interpretations of other cultures and places will tell us more about our own desires and anxieties than about the truths of people’s lives that are (supposedly) the object of study or reflection.
The experience of reading the chapter on chronotopes confirms this need or desire for an ordered, even teleological progression to follow. The first section was somewhat difficult on a first read through, but as soon as she shifts and begins giving what appeared to be her versions of the master narratives, the fog lifted. I could follow an already established narrative structure (either progress or exploitation) rather than having to piece (re-member) it on my own. Interestingly, Stewart highlights this shift by distancing herself from the narrative that she’s giving by inserting the line “I could tell you” into the beginning of several paragraphs. The effect is to make the reader sit up and realize that though they’re more comfortable, perhaps, with this version of things (or thangs), that she’s going to complicate it some a ways down the road. As she writes near the end of the chapter, “the shock of history, then, is not the end of the story, but its ground and motivation. Things do not simply fall into ruin or dissipate in the winds of progress but fashion themselves into powerful effects that remember things in such a way that ‘history’ digs itself into the present and people cain’t help but recall it” (111). Stewart’s narrative and the local stories that make it up refuse to look past the material space of the present, and the fact that it’s made up of the effects of the past, but it is not a mere giving over of the self or culture to the master narrative.
The story that she tells of Hollie and the job counselor in Chapter 5 seems a particularly good instance of this kind of refusal. As the counselor tries to “help Hollie in his Real Circumstances,” his “direct, instrumental questions” miss the significance or truth of experience that Hollie is attempting to communicate, and vice versa. Rather than accept the offers of help (residential programs), and the accompanying expectations for living situation, that the counselor offers, Hollie finally responds “well, maybe someday I might get to come back and see if you have anything for me” (137, font formatting original). Stewart’s understanding of the encounter is that the two men find themselves baffled by “two interpretive spaces” that do not intersect, leaving each to retreat into his initial understanding of the other, Hollie becomes backward “white trash” and the counselor becomes “instrumentalized” and “removed from the logic of the encounter itself” (137). If anything, this characterization of the counselor is one potential weakness of Stewart’s account, as she is unable to enter into a similar sympathetic interpretation of the counselor’s motivations and expectations as Hollie’s (or chooses not to). However, this is a minor point, and the book seems to attempt a mimetic re-presentation of the events and people that she encountered during her work, something that comes through more clearly in the story that she tells here. Her emphasis upon the space-time relationship draws attention to that which is usually missed, particularly in her frequent exhortations for the reader to “picture” or “imagine” a scene, conversation, or other space that she then goes on to describe. The somewhat destabilizing style that I noted above slows us down, I think, so that we can co-create the imaginative work of the remembering that she undertakes throughout the book.

- Andy DuMont