Quote a sentence or two from "The Dead Book" where you see Hartman making the case one way or the other about her method of extrapolating from a line or two in an archive or ledger in order to more fully represent the life of an otherwise anonymous person. 2. Take a few more sentences to explain the quotation and how it encapsulates one side of Hartman's ambivalence.
3. Then, quote a sentence or two from "Venus in Two Acts" where Hartman makes the opposite case. Again. take a few more sentences to explain the quotation and how it encapsulates the other side of Hartman's ambivalence.
4. Finally, offer your own view. Where do you stand on the value or dangers of "critical fabulation"?
“I could find a salutary lesson in the girl's suffering and pretend a story was enough to save her from oblivion. I could sigh with relief and say, "It all happened so long ago. " Then I could wade into the Atlantic and not think of the dead book.” (153)
1. In these sentences, Hartman encapsulates the equivocation of one’s experience when reading “The Dead Book” into using it as a way to deal with preferring to forget about the horrors of slave trade. She explains in this quotation the contradictions of choosing and not choosing to remember a story and the difficulties and tough skin it takes to accept the occurrences of what happened to the girl. Through this quotation, Hartman emphasizes the harms in telling stories of the terrors of the slave trade in that most readers will choose, like she said, to dismiss the story’s explicit content instead of accepting it happened. Therefore, the mal-treatment of slaves constantly becomes immune to the people on board since it happens regularly.
“If the story ended there, I could feel a small measure of comfort. I could hold on to this instant of possibility” (153).
2. In The Dead Book, while her name remains unwritten, this nameless girl was given her life and is recognized in her death, therefore she is not forgotten or erased from history, literally. Therefore, Hartman immortalizes her with the utilization of the surgeon’s journals as well as other court records. As a result, this questions the extent to which her work is able to animate and bring back alive with complete truths what is true and untrue from lost sources at are still circulating or in the hands of people who wish not to revive stories of the forgotten.
“My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history.” (14)
3. This quote explains the importance of taking this story of the girl into account to learn from it for a future filled with hope. Hartman thinks of this of the good of telling the story, in order to not sugarcoat the horrors that happened during the slave trade. She reveals the rawness of it and helps to make people aware or more aware than they already are about the power of learning from the trials and tribulations of slavery while also respecting the hopes and aspirations of the story tellers/ writers through their history.
4. I'm indecisive about “critical fabulation” in the sense that although it emphasizes the importance of incomplete narratives throughout the course of history and gives a chance for the quieter voices and marginalized groups to have a say and get to share their stories. In a more academic setting, it could be potentially dangerous to just include “critical fabulation” in one's findings, especially if the blanks that are trying to be filled have no factual evidence it happened. At the same time, though, it's important to not shut down the narratives that may or may not fill in the blanks of historical records. I think it could be a useful tool that develops and adds validity to historical narratives. Nevertheless, critical fabulation that does not employ necessary conclusions to stories is essential to reminding us of the incompleteness and unknowns of history.
