Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History

University of California Press

A: What is the great world-historical event of 1875?
B: Vladimir Ilych Lenin turned five!
A characteristic Russian joke
during the Brezhnev era

Early in The Brothers Karamazov, we are offered a series of speculations about the paternity of Smerdyakov, born after the rape of an impoverished and feeble-minded orphan, "Stinking Lizaveta." Since Smerdyakov ends up murdering Fyodor Karamazov, the whole narrative and intellectual thrust of the novel depends on Smerdyakov being Fyodor's bastard son. But astonishingly, for a writer so dependent in his political journalism on a cosmos of pre-ordained plots and historical destinies, Dostoevsky, for a brief moment, deliberately allows Smerdyakov's parentage to remain unclear. Suspicion falls on a certain Karp, an escaped convict, and on various other drunken "gentlemen" of the town, until it finally dissolves into the forever undecidable past. Here, in the heavily forestructured universe of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky points to the radical freedom of human beings from any kind of determinism, and his technical, literary way of showing this is to throw into doubt the time-honored device of foreshadowing. Smerdyakov may grow up to be his father's killer—indeed, without that resolution there would be no story to tell—but he is not predestined for that deed, and the man he does murder may, in fact, not even have been his biological father. Such a strategy can be defined as a kind of sideshadowing: a gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple, and mutually exclusive, possibilities for what is to come.1 In narrative terms, sideshadowing is best understood

in opposition to the familiar technique of foreshadowing, a technique whose enactment can vary tremendously in its degree of intricacy, but whose logic must always value the present, not for itself, but as the harbinger of an already determined future. The Russian joke quoted above is a fine jibe at the remarkably crude foreshadowing that habitually characterizes any global and monolithic way of thinking, and it is probably salutary to insist that all foreshadowing is vulnerable to the kind of irony that the Russians learned over the decades to direct at their own institutionalized version of the topos .

Although we usually think of them as discrete categories, there are intimate and mutually elucidating similarities in how we make sense of literary fictions, historical events, and individual biographies. These similarities are both formal (a book's language and structure) and ethical (its significance in human terms). Hence, applying the same analytic scrutiny to historical accounts and literary texts provides a powerful way to understand the underlying principles governing both kinds of writing. And because the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and one another are a central portion, perhaps even the core, of who we are and, more technically, because the ways we narrate and order those stories are as significant in their effect as is their thematic content, the implications of foreshadowing go far beyond what strictly formalist literary considerations suggest.

At its extreme, foreshadowing implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made, in which human free will can exist only in the paradoxical sense of choosing to accept or willfully—and vainly—rebelling against what is inevitable. This is the case whether the foreshadowing takes place at the theological, historical, or psychological level. Christian apologetics, Marxist teleology, and psychological determinism are striking instances of how powerful our impulse toward foreshadowing can be, and make clear how it is bound to seem arbitrarily colonizing of, and condescending to, any moments that threaten to exceed its interpretive grasp. Thus, the Christian Church Fathers' reduction of the Hebrew Bible to a cycle of prefigurations of and preparations for the Gospel story is, for all its intellectual dexterity and inventiveness (especially the elaboration of figural allegory), rightly viewed by Jews as a brutal impoverishment

of the original texts. "Supersessionist" theology necessarily reduces the predecessor text to an "Old Testament," whose independent significance is fundamentally annulled once it is construed as only the first stage of a process culminating in the annunciation of a "new" and more complete truth. Think for a moment of the Pauline Epistle in which the wandering of the Jews in the desert is read as a figura of the challenges facing the first Christian communities, or the ways in which the Christian exegetical tradition interpreted the story of Jonah as a prefiguration of the Savior's Passion, with the three days in the belly of the whale foreshadowing the three days when Christ harrowed Hell between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. In its encounters with the Hebrew Bible, Christian hermeneutics read the central events of Jewish tradition as "witnessing," in the sense of foreshadowing, the authority of its own stories. Hence, for example, the pressure in the Christian tradition to rename a narrative like the Hebrew Bible's Akedah, or "Binding," of Isaac as the "Sacrifice" of Isaac, a self-conscious refiguring designed to make the Jewish story interpretable as an anticipation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.2 Indeed, there is a strong sense in which the very idea of history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward light, and from ignorance toward truth, is rooted neither in Jewish nor in Classical thinking but, as Jonathan Boyarin has argued, entirely in "the early church fathers' idea of the progression from Judaism to Christianity."3 And much as the Jewish and pagan world found the claims of the first Christian missionaries incomprehensible, to someone not already persuaded of the truth of their secular revelations, the conventional Marxist explanations of why the working classes stayed so loyal to their national governments at the outbreak of the First World War, or of why large sections of the German proletariat adhered to Nazism, often against their own economic interest, can seem astonishingly dismissive of the peculiarities of each specific circumstance.

Sideshadowing's attention to the unfulfilled or unrealized possibilities of the past is a way of disrupting the affirmations of a triumphalist, unidirectional view of history in which whatever has perished is condemned because it has been found wanting by some irresistible historico-logical dynamic. Against foreshadowing, sideshadowing

champions the incommensurability of the concrete moment and refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master-schemes; it rejects the conviction that a particular code, law, or pattern exists, waiting to be uncovered beneath the heterogeneity of human existence. Instead of the global regularities that so many intellectual and spiritual movements claim to reveal, sideshadowing stresses the significance of random, haphazard, and unassimilable contingencies, and instead of the power of a system to uncover an otherwise unfathomable truth, it expresses the ever-changing nature of that truth and the absence of any predictive certainties in human affairs. Or in Robert Musil's more subtly ironic formulation, what we need to recognize is the reality of underdetermination, the fact...