―Space takes for us the form of relations among sites.‖ Michel Foucault ―Of Other Spaces‖ Whereas archetypal concepts of space were founded upon physical and social relations among peoples, the enlightenment discourse on space interrogated the interplay of scientific empiricism and subjective perception. While mathematical theories triggered the growing acceptance of absolute models of space, other thinkers, such as Leibniz, insisted on the purely subjective, relational qualities of space by stressing the importance of perception and rational meditation and the productive interplay of the intellect and the imagination.
Similar to Leibniz, Hegel, in the nineteenth century, denied the existence of void space and defined space and time as conditions rather than preexisting matter; ―since they are the exterior forms without which things would not be‖ (Taylor 356). Hegel‘s theory of space, most
completely formulated in his Philosophy of Nature (1830), also continues Descartes‘ legacy of
extension as it perceives space as the specific manifestation of an abstract idea. But for Hegel, unlike his predecessor, time takes supremacy over space as time represents the ultimate negation of space, which relegates space to a second category defined by temporally unstable movement. Ultimately, however, Hegel resolved the time-space dichotomy in what is arguably his greatest contribution to the discourse of space, namely the principle of place: ―a spatial point enduring through time‖ (Hegel 254). Although Hegel‘s theory of space introduced the principle of place, his focus on temporality is somewhat indicative for the changing focus of the philosophical debate in the nineteenth century. Mathematicians such as Gauss and Poincaré now experimented with geometrical models that transcended the Euclidean formulas in an attempt to interrogate the question of curvature of space. As a result, the relational, perceptual models of Leibniz and Kant were replaced by a purely mathematical system of thought.
In the early twentieth century, Einstein‘s relativity theory completed the total
mathematization of space and proclaimed the end of the relational model of transcendental idealism proposed by Leibniz. Ever since, post-Einsteinian models of space define space as emptiness, as a frame of reference, a ―co-ordinate system (along with time) within which all reality exists‖ (Smith 68). By asserting and promoting a universal space (such as the systems of global commodity and information exchange), we ignore, as Rob Shields rightfully notes, the complexities of spatial practice and our vision of space becomes restricted to ―perceived space,‖ thereby overlooking the qualitative meaning of places, regions and their myths (162). This theoretical dilemma, I believe, is most adequately addressed by Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and it is their responses to the growing abstraction of space that are most helpful for this project.
For Lefebvre, spatialization is a model with three essential components: spatial practice, the representation of space (discourse of space), and the spaces of representation (discourse on
space). In conjunction with Leibniz‘s concept of sensed space, it is the last notion of Lefebvre‘s theory, the spaces of representation, the idea of a space as it might be, and a fully lived space, that is most valuable for my interrogation of historiographic space in Parkman‘s texts; for Lefebvre and Leibniz present relational models that allow for an analysis of space and history through the individualized, experienced, even fictionalized, lens of the author and his
protagonists. In contrast to mathematical models of space, these relational approaches will allow for a careful analysis of the interaction of space and history. Ultimately, applying a relational model of space to the works of Francis Parkman will uncover the interdisciplinary process of writing America‘s past in the nineteenth century and his unique approach to American
such as Thomas King and William T. Vollmann will exemplify how these authors strive to produce a literary discourse of history and space that is both contradictory and differential. Indeed, works such as Truth and Bright Water and Fathers and Crows challenge the quantitative
spaces of postmodernity by depicting the importance of human practice and the unbroken relevance of what Joy Porter termed ―sacred geographies‖ (27) for cultural identity formation.
In this relational analysis of space, I will employ Foucault‘s theories of spatial history to extrapolate the construction of lived space in Francis Parkman‘s writing, as well as to analyze how spatial writers such as King and Vollmann reclaim the mental spaces of history and restore them as places of lived, or sensed, experience. For Foucault, external spaces must be understood as a set of ―relations among sites‖ (230). In contrast to psychological or phenomenological spaces, external spaces, as Foucault understands them, do not exist in a void, or mathematical totality. Instead, external spaces form a network of relationships in which human life takes place. These spatial relations can be sites of transportation, relaxation, trade, and warfare and grouped into two major categories: utopias and heterotopias. Utopias, ―sites with no real place‖ (Foucault 230), are imagined places in which individual and communal desires are negotiated and
envisioned in a perfected state. Heterotopias, on the other hand, are physically existing places of ―effectively enacted utopia‖ (Foucault 230). In other words, heterotopias (or counter-sites as Foucault sometimes calls them) are real sites that allow access to the purely imagined idealization of the utopia. Consequently, heterotopias connect the unreal to the real, the imaginary to the physically existing.
For Foucault, heterotopias are phenomena shared by all cultures in which each space fulfills a ―precise and determined function within a society‖ (232). In his essay ―Of Other Spaces,‖ the French philosopher explains that modern heterotopias include places such as prisons, retirement
homes, even cemeteries, but also cinemas, gardens, and museums. Since this study is concerned with historical spaces, the notion of the museum must be of special interest in Foucault‘s concept of heterotopias. The museum is, in fact, a special category of heterotopias, in the sense that it not only relates various places to each other (if we think about a museum of fine art, for example, it allows the visitor to experience paintings from French, Italian, German, or American artists), but also different time periods (as a museum like the Louvre features exhibitions from Renaissance masters, Classicists, Impressionists, Expressionists etc.). Besides establishing heterotopias, a museum thus also creates a space in which, as Foucault puts it, ―time never stops building up and topping its own summit‖ (234).
While Foucault limited his analysis of counter-spaces to physical structures such as museums and libraries, I would like to extend his definition of heterotopias to include written texts. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the Romantic historicism of the nineteenth century and the postmodern novels of aforementioned authors create literary heterotopias. A good example for illustrating this continuing employment of literary heterotopias is the work of Francis Parkman. Parkman‘s histories, I will argue, depict sites of exploration and commerce (as on the Oregon Trail), or sites of invasion and conflict (as in New France) and thereby establish a retrospective heterochrony, combining the utopia of an idealized past with the textual space of the author‘s and the reader‘s present. Thereby, these literary heterotopias create idealized textual spaces that invert, juxtapose, transgress, and combine historical spaces that are both mental and physical. Further, Parkman‘s heterochronies, i.e. his historical works, not only accumulate time but also establish relationships between formerly unconnected temporal planes. By recording history they establish, as Foucault puts it ―a place of all time that is itself outside of time‖ (233).
Parkman‘s historiographic spaces are, however, juxtapositions of competing spatial models. For in Parkman‘s representation of New France we witness the combination of eighteenth century locale and situation (geographical data, maps etc. that Parkman used to reconstruct his description of New France) and nineteenth century discourse on space. By doing so, Parkman‘s spaces juxtapose in a real place several mental spaces, linking them to other spaces while simultaneously contradicting them. Parkman‘s approach thus neatly mirrors a relational understanding of space, by enforcing Leibniz‘s doctrine of transcendental idealism. In his
accounts of the French and Indian War, for instance, he relates the experience of his characters to the imagination of his readers, thereby forming a new image of the historical event and the geography in which it took place, thus establishing literary heterotopias very similar to his postmodern successors. A great example of Parkman‘s technique is his description of Fort Duquesne:
Fort Duquesne stood on the point of land where the Alleghany and the Monongahela join to form the Ohio, and where now stands Pittsburg, with its swarming population, its restless industries, the clang of its forges, and its chimneys vomiting foul smoke into the face of heaven. (Montcalm and Wolfe 987)
Here Parkman‘s geographical identification of the French fortress is achieved by relating the location to a modern landmark familiar to his nineteenth-century readership, the city of Pittsburgh. Thereby, the historical description leaves the temporal horizon of the eighteenth century and is expanded into the present of Parkman‘s perceived audience.
Among the varying geographies that the concept of historiographic space evokes are not just colonial counter-spaces (French Canada vs. British New England, Native American vs. frontier settler) or sites of westward expansion, but also spaces of imperial domination. After all, Parkman‘s texts attempt to claim and indefinitely secure the physical space described. These spatialized imperial aims are achieved through a retrospective analysis of the spatial
transgressions (as in border warfare and Indian raids) and their protagonists within a period of epistemic rupture. To achieve his nineteenth century goal of American dominion over the continent, Parkman employs an eighteenth century strategy, ―the conviction that geographical knowledge reflected the domination of nature and natives and verified ability to control, extend, and rule the empire‖ (Arias127).
While chronicling the violations (from all parties involved) of loosely established
geographical and cultural borders played a crucial role in defining permanent borders between empires, and later nations, violence becomes a central theme of the national American narrative of domination. Describing the violence of the Native American tribes and the French and later British colonial powers served to undermine their claim for the American continent. The perpetrators of unjustified violence were thus effectively marginalized in the public
consciousness of the American settlers, in turn providing fertile ground for reciprocal efforts to rid the contested space from their threat. While the violence of the indigenous population, and even of the colonial powers to an extent, was labeled as uncivilized and even barbaric, the fight of the American settlers for independence became stylized as a necessary response to restore the Edenic equilibrium.7
The desire for a new American Eden thus always incorporated the element of transformation. Although the vision of a new Garden of Eden was distinctly pastoral in nature, it soon became tied to the gospel of progress and invited technological advancement such as the railroad, and later the automobile, as welcomed tools to achieve that vision. As the technological
developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth century began to radically transform the
7
Parkman, for instance, harshly criticizes the French practice of masquerading regular soldiers as Native Americans and sending them on border raids with their Indian allies, thereby
pastorally idealized American landscape, historians evoked the excessive violence of the frontier as the defining virtue of the American character and a transformative force serving the
accomplishment of the American destiny. It is therefore no surprise that especially heavily contested border spaces, such as the Mexican-American or Canadian-American border, are the preferred site of the actual and theoretical interplay of violence and space. The contested spaces of the border (in all its manifold forms), however, are by no means a phenomenon of the past, but continue to impact the American experience. In fact, as Giles argues, postmodern
representations of the border have taken the dialogue between violence and space to another level, thereby creating entirely new concepts of space. In The Spaces of Violence, Giles explain
that the extreme and excessive violence described by authors such as DeLillo, McCarthy, Ellis, or Banks ―contaminates implied thirdspace, severely limiting its potential for new freedom and liberation, and thus produces co-opted fourthspace‖ (15). Although I do not entirely share Giles entropic vision of an unredeemable border space characterized by senseless violence and moral apathy, the transnational contact zone of the border is, undoubtedly, continuing to challenge established models of space.
In contrast to scholars such as Giles who transfigure the postmodern fascination for entropic spaces and excessive violence into an equally bleak and abstract understanding of space, void of any possible return to communal spatial practice, I wish to identify an alternative understanding of space. I believe, following Foucault, that the postmodern literary representations of space, as for instance the heterotopias of New France and the Oregon Trail, also involve the
―détournement (the re-adaption or hijacking of sites) of space, as in the tradition of occupying key spatial sites or buildings as a means of protest‖ (Shields 165). Therefore, the second half of this dissertation will be concerned with tracing the re-negotiation of Parkman‘s heterotopias by
postmodern authors in an attempt to show that the ―production of space is [not only] a process that is configured or reconfigured in any historical period‖(Shields 167), but that authors like William T. Vollmann and Thomas King aim at returning the notion of lived, sensed space into the discourse of the American past, thus producing a postmodern concept of space diametrically opposed to the corrupted fourthspace of violent excess Giles describes.
While analyzing the use of space in the works of King and Vollmann, I am particularly interested in the continuation and deconstruction of nineteenth century spatial models in postmodern American historiographic literature. I will analyze how both authors challenge or continue established historiographic spaces, such as Parkman‘s New France or Oregon Trail, by enforcing or replacing existing spatial concepts. Additionally, I will argue that postmodern authors might not only refashion historiographic space, but also introduce a new set of historical subjects and events that challenge American national history at large. As a result, these
postmodern renditions of historiographic space necessitate not only new representations and understandings of space and undo the hegemonic concepts of spatial control, but, in turn, also produce new forms of narrating the past. These re-negotiations will uncover epistemic ruptures within the history of the American landscape that both supplement and dispute existing
narratives and contribute to the ontological portrait of American settlement history. The above outlined examination of historiographic space will enrich existing scholarship on Francis Parkman and his postmodern legacy while generating new insights into the ways American writers continue to shape the past and its memory.