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An Attempt to process Saidya Hartman's method of critical fabulation:
In her article "Venus in Two Acts" Saidya Hartman delivers in a very dense passage the method of critical fabulation. The following lists all stem from Hartman p 11f. I was trying to use Hartman's wordings to compile them. The Sorting of the bullet points into strategies and goals follows the grammar of the text but should not be read as absolute or even clear.
Critical Fabulation is
- Advancing a series of speculative arguments
- exploiting the possibilities of the subjunctive (grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities)
- fashioning a narrative that is based on (…) a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history
- playing with and rearranging the elements of the fabula
- re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view
in order to
- tell an impossible story
- amplify the impossibility of its telling
- create a space of productive attention to the scene of loss (by using the subjunctive, “what could have been”-form)
- encompassing the positive objects and methods of history and social science
- AND the matters absent, entangled and unavaillable by its methods
- to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible, to write their cultural history
- while enacting the impossibility of representing their lives.
it tries to:
- jeopardize the status of the event
- to displace the received or authorized account
- to immagine what might have happened
- throwing into crisis the “what happened when” of history
- exploiting the “transparancy of ressources” as fictions of history
in order to
- make visible the production of disposable lives
- in the Atlantic slave trade
- and in the discipline of history
it attempts to
- describe the “resistance of the object” if only by first imagining it
- to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity
and to
- Flattening the levels of narrative discourse
- confuse narrator and speakers
in order to
- illuminate the contested character
- of history
- of narrative
- of fact
- to topple the hierarchy of discourse
- to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices
Hartman summarizes this strategy as follows:
The outcome of this method is a “recombinant narrative,” which “loops the strands” of incommensurate accounts and which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the time of slavery as our present.
(Hartman, p. 12)