{"id":2635,"date":"2022-08-01T11:22:08","date_gmt":"2022-08-01T09:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=2635"},"modified":"2025-02-28T17:13:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T15:13:33","slug":"david-anderson-the-end-of-history-revisited-christa-wolfs-kassandra-and-jeanette-wintersons-sexing-the-cherry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2022\/08\/01\/david-anderson-the-end-of-history-revisited-christa-wolfs-kassandra-and-jeanette-wintersons-sexing-the-cherry\/","title":{"rendered":"David Anderson: THE \u2018END OF HISTORY\u2019 REVISITED: Christa Wolf\u2019s \u2018Kassandra\u2019 and Jeanette Winterson\u2019s \u2018Sexing the Cherry\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his article \u2018The End of History?\u2019, originally published in the journal The National Interest<\/em> in Summer 1989, Frances Fukuyama argued that \u2018the triumph of the West, of the Western idea<\/em>, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism.\u2019[1]<\/a> It was in this respect that history had reached its \u2018end\u2019: the course of history in the sense of \u2018mankind\u2019s logical evolution\u2019 had arrived at \u2018the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government\u2019 (Fukuyama, p. 4). Despite all the suggestion of apocalypse in its title, Fukuyama\u2019s essay is actually quite upbeat. The answer to all our problems is already here<\/em>. And yet, in his final paragraph, he strikes a melancholy note:<\/span><\/p>\n

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one\u2019s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel it in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. (Fukuyama, p. 18)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In light of Russia\u2019s attack on Ukraine, Fukuyama\u2019s extraordinary anticipation of a bland technocratic future seems more premature than ever. His own confession of an emergent nostalgia for history as such, conceived in the face of \u2018centuries of boredom\u2019 \u2013 which sounds remarkably akin to the popular narrative of Vladimir Putin\u2019s toxic immersion in Russian history across just two years of boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic \u2013 might well have been replaced by a new nostalgia for a time when a prognosis like \u2018The End of History\u2019 seemed possible. If the period since 24th<\/sup> February 2022 has seen history get \u2018started once again\u2019, the effect on \u2018art and philosophy\u2019 remains to be seen. The rapid reassertion of Cold War narratives has hardly been invigorating for the historical imagination. The idea of the \u2018iron curtain\u2019 being lowered once again has appeared to mean that the story has already been written: we are just re-living it.<\/span><\/p>\n

A look at some of the historical fiction written in the 1980s might suggest ways out of this potential imaginative impasse, offering up alternative possibilities, or Gegenwelten<\/em>,[2]<\/a> in place of the dispiriting spectacle of history-on-repeat. Fukuyama himself does not mention literature \u2013 the \u2018ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture\u2019 he describes is confined to the presence of colour television sets in China, Beethoven in Japanese department stores and rock music \u2018enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon and Tehran\u2019 (Fukuyama, p. 3). In fact, the historical fiction of the 1980s reveals a space in which the meaning of \u2018history\u2019 is still very much contested and where the threat of the \u2018end of history\u2019 in its more obvious sense \u2013 in the form of nuclear war or climate apocalypse \u2013 emerges as a force that speaks powerfully to the anxiety of our present moment. Two evocative novels that have much to tell us in these respects are Christa Wolf\u2019s Kassandra<\/em> and Jeanette Winterson\u2019s Sexing the Cherry<\/em>. Published in 1984 and 1989, these two texts challenged the idea of rational progress and \u2018man<\/em>kind\u2019s logical evolution\u2019 (my emphasis) by raising the prospect of a distinctive feminist poetics \u2013 of \u00e9criture f\u00e9minine<\/em> and \u2018what it will do\u2019 as H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous had put it in her 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa<\/em>.[3]<\/a> The Gegenwelten<\/em> they propose suggest ways out of the macho strait jacket of violence, destruction and impending nuclear war.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1979, echoing the future-oriented slant of Cixous\u2019s essay, Wolf wrote of her search for a language capable of recording the trauma of her daily experience of surveillance by the Stasi. Was bleibt<\/em>, which was not published until 1991, opens with a meditation on the possibility of a language \u2018which, as of yet, is in my ear but not on my tongue\u2019: the language in which \u2018I would think back on this day, still new and not yet lived out, in ten or twenty years\u2019 time.\u2019[4]<\/a> In 1984\u2019s Kassandra<\/em>, Wolf retrospectively reconstructs the experience of a character on the cusp of history and myth, a figure both admired and persecuted within her own society. The result is an account of the Trojan War that reads like an allegory of the Cold War, where the false logics of power and heroism, and the fear of \u2018loss of face\u2019, offer a parallel to those of endless investment in weapons and the prospect of mutually assured destruction or \u2013 as the acronym appropriately has it \u2013 MAD.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her research for Kassandra<\/em>, Wolf drew on the English writer Robert Graves\u2019s 1955 compendium The Greek Myths<\/em>. She seems to have been inspired by Graves\u2019s description of a matriarchal ancient society. At first glance, her ambition to represent Cassandra as she was \u2018before anyone wrote about her\u2019 seems to mirror the sentiment of Graves\u2019s great-uncle, the historian Leopold von Ranke, that historical writing should strive to represent the past \u2018the way it really was\u2019.[5]<\/a> Yet her recognition of Cassandra as a human, humane<\/em> individual has far more in common with Walter Benjamin\u2019s sixth thesis on the concept of history, where \u2018articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it \u201cthe way it really was.\u201d It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger\u2019.[6]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

For Wolf, this \u2018moment of danger\u2019 was clear enough. As she put it in the third of her lectures on poetics which she delivered in 1982, \u2018the thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is unsayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist\u2019 (Wolf, Cassandra<\/em>, p. 226). In her novel, the narrative itself is figured as a kind of death sentence. As Cassandra puts it, \u2018keeping step with the story, I make my way into death\u2019 (Wolf, p. 3 \u2013 Jan van Heurck\u2019s translation of Wolf\u2019s more direct \u2018mit der Erz\u00e4hlung gehe ich in den Tod\u2019). Yet the note of optimism that resonates through the ebb and flow of Cassandra\u2019s \u2018Angst\u2019 is based on the possibility of a distinctive women\u2019s writing, so that Wolf\u2019s restitution of Kassandra, \u2018one of the first women figures handed down to us whose fate prefigures what was to be the fate of women for three thousand years: to be turned into an object\u2019 is grounded in the possibility of a new language, a new tradition, to be passed from mother to daughter, \u2018so that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come\u2019 (Wolf, p. 227, p. 81).<\/span><\/p>\n

Kassandra <\/em>was published in an English translation by Virago press in 1984. A year later Pandora, another of London\u2019s handful of feminist publishing houses, released British author Jeanette Winterson\u2019s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit<\/em>. The novel\u2019s stylised account of Winterson\u2019s childhood as the adopted daughter of an evangelical Christian mother in Lancashire is filled with reflections on time as \u2018a string full of knots\u2019 and the idea that the protagonist\u2019s multiple selves \u2018have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time\u2019.[7]<\/a> Although she does not explain the title within the novel, Winterson wrote in a 2014 introduction that it was \u2018attributed by me to Nell Gwynn, raunchy mistress of Charles 1st, possessor of fabulous breasts, and famously painted as an orange-seller\u2019 (Winterson, Oranges<\/em>, p. xi).<\/span><\/p>\n

Charles would resurface in 1989\u2019s Sexing the Cherry<\/em>, where Winterson depicts his trial and execution while also revisiting the idea of time as an illusory construct. The novel is set partly during the English Revolution and partly in a present threatened by nuclear weapons and environmental catastrophe, a time governed by the false logic that the only way \u2018to eliminate the nuclear threat is by ordering more weapons\u2019 and that there is no alternative to the \u2018endless stream of plastic\u2019 being thrown into \u2018gouged out craters in the countryside.\u2019[8]<\/a> It blurs the lines between past and present, and even the idea of a linear temporality as such. Its central characters, \u2018the Dog Woman\u2019 and \u2018Jordan\u2019, appear in both the seventeenth century and in the form of twentieth-century analogues, the former appearing to the latter in strange dreamlike visions. The pleasure-denying ascetism of the Puritans in the seventeenth century \u2013 all men, in the novel \u2013 holds up an unflattering mirror to the present, while the enormous, violent Dog Woman fulfils the role of a Gravesian mother goddess, operating as Cassandra\u2019s opposite number. Wolf\u2019s idea of narrative as a \u2018fabric\u2019 (Wolf, p. 141) or a \u2018narrative network\u2019 (Wolf, p. 262) is likewise analogous to Winterson\u2019s idea of reality and narrative as merely \u2018empty space and points of light\u2019, of positions in time as mere \u2018coordinates\u2019 and of lives running in parallel, erupting across temporal thresholds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Winterson\u2019s preoccupation with the ideas of a \u2018conspiracy of women\u2019 and a \u2018private language\u2019 (Winterson, Sexing the Cherry<\/em>, p. 29), which emerge in various ways across her text, match up with Cassandra\u2019s desire to be heard by \u2018a young slave\u2019 who might pass on her story, as well as with the symbols left by Cassandra and the other women in the \u2018Gegenwelt\u2019 constituted by the caves at Mount Ida: \u2018We called that immortalizing our memory, and laughed\u2019 (Wolf, p. 133). Winterson\u2019s own reference to \u2018the Greeks\u2019 early in Sexing the Cherry<\/em> establishes a similar idea, appearing to allude to Benjamin\u2019s sixth thesis as well as to Cixous\u2019s The Laugh of the Medusa<\/em>, with its idea of countering the \u2018phallocentric tradition\u2019 \u2013 according to which \u2018the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason\u2019 \u2013 with a \u2018white ink\u2019 (Cixous, p. 164, p. 166). \u2018They wrote an ordinary letter\u2019, Winterson asserts, \u2018and in between the lines set out another letter, written in milk. The document looked innocent enough until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered, what mattered was the life flaring up undetected \u2026 till now\u2019 (Winterson, Sexing the Cherry<\/em>, p. 2). The idea of the \u2018world turned upside down\u2019 \u2013 the title of a song from the revolutionary period, and of a 1972 history of it written by Christopher Hill \u2013 is reimagined in this text along gender lines, and thus becomes the key to the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

The self-styled \u2018Leseland\u2019 of the DDR and the condition of literature as \u2018Weltersatz\u2019 guaranteed Wolf\u2019s position as a public author.[9]<\/a> As she put it in an essay from 1968, the author was \u2018ein wichtiger Mensch\u2019, an important person whose role in the social fabric was acknowledged partly by virtue of the extreme level of oversight and censorship organised by the state. Kassandra<\/em> sold half a million copies in the Bundesrepublik within four years. 200,000 copies were sold in the DDR by the fall of the wall. In the UK, Winterson\u2019s position in the cultural marketplace was far from guaranteed. For her part, as outlined in the 1995 text entitled Art Objects<\/em>, she asserted that literature must hold its own in the cultural marketplace by offering the reader \u2018an invitation to believe\u2019, satisfying the voyeuristic curiosity of readers who \u2018like to be in on a secret\u2019 and \u2018can be taken in by someone who offers truth with a wink and says \u201cI\u2019m telling you stories. Trust me.\u201d\u2019 Winterson\u2019s faith in the power of art \u2013 and literature as <\/em>art \u2013 is that it will set the static into motion. \u2018Art objects<\/em>\u2019, she insists, shifting the word \u2018objects\u2019 from what seemed to be a noun into a verb.[10]<\/a> The movement is the same as that attempted by Wolf, whose interest in Cassandra as one of the first female figures \u2018handed down to us\u2019 to have suffered being \u2018turned into an object\u2019 extends, in her third lecture, to men as well. Women\u2019s situation is so lamentable partly because they \u2018are second-degree objects, frequently the objects of men who are objects themselves\u2019 (Wolf, p. 259).<\/span><\/p>\n

Deploying a similar rhetorical technique, Winterson argues for constant innovation in literature: if the novel is not \u2018novel <\/em>[\u2026] then we can only museum it<\/em>\u2019 (Winterson, Art Objects<\/em>, p. 176). The transformation of \u2018museum\u2019 from noun to verb marks an opposite movement to that of \u2018object\u2019, involving a freezing of history into a static image, and the negative sense of the \u2018museum\u2019 here has much in common with Fukuyama\u2019s despondent vision of \u2018the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history\u2019. Yet it is precisely by confronting the very real threat of an end to human life, in the sense of nuclear or climate apocalypse, that Wolf and Winterson suggest ways of reinvigorating the historical imagination. Invoking diverse contexts and reading \u2018between the lines\u2019 of the historical record, they illuminate the present \u2018moment of danger\u2019 and reinstate a positive sense of futurity \u2013 with a feminist perspective. \u2018Shouldn\u2019t an experiment be made\u2019, Wolf asks, \u2018to see what would happen if the great male heroes of world literature were replaced by women? Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Jesus, King Lear, Faust, Julien Sorel, Wilhelm Meister\u2019 (Wolf, p. 260). Cassandra<\/em> and its accompanying lectures are the working out of that experiment at full scale, and the same might be said of Winterson\u2019s ambition in Sexing the Cherry<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the context of Fukuyama\u2019s depiction of culture as mere elevator music, it is all the more striking that Cassandra <\/em>and Sexing the Cherry<\/em> aspire to be both art and <\/em>philosophy. At the same time, their connection to high cultural traditions does not preclude the possibility of intervention in the space of the popular. Reading them today \u2013 particularly Wolf\u2019s depiction of the accretive false logic of war in Kassandra<\/em> \u2013 is sometimes an uncanny experience. Three decades after Fukuyama\u2019s article, it seems that we find ourselves further than ever from the prospect of a \u2018nostalgia for the time when history existed\u2019 and the replacement of \u2018risking one\u2019s life for an abstract goal\u2019 with the \u2018endless solving of technical problems\u2019 \u2013 let alone \u2018centuries of boredom\u2019. And yet the renewed actuality of these texts not only makes them more understandable to us, forging connections through history in just the same way they themselves sought to do \u2013 it also shows us how re-imagining the past might help revive the prospect of a liveable future.<\/span><\/p>\n

The literary and cultural scholar <\/em>David Anderson<\/em><\/a> is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London currently working at the ZfL on his project \u201c<\/em>Representations of History in British and German Popular Culture Since the 1980s<\/em><\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Frances Fukuyama, \u2018The End of History?\u2019, The National Interest <\/em>16 (Summer 1989), p. 3.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> \u2018Gegenwelten\u2019 is the ZfL\u2019s annual theme 2022\/2023<\/a>. The term might be literally translated as \u2018counter-worlds\u2019. In its current usage it can refer to the confected parallel realities of those who deny the existence of COVID-19 or climate change, but it also encompasses a profounder history of utopian projects, dystopian nightmares and their cultural representation. \u2018Gegenwelten‘ may be completely fanciful or, as in the case of many historical utopian or dystopian imaginaries, they may exert an active shaping force on the reality from which they apparently depart.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, \u2018The Laugh of the Medusa\u2019 (1975), in Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin (eds.), The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader<\/em> (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 161.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Christa Wolf, \u2018What Remains\u2019, in What Remains and Other Stories<\/em>, trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993), p. 231.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Christa Wolf, Cassandra: a novel and four essays<\/em>, trans. Jan van Heurck (London: Virago, 1984), p. 273.<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Walter Benjamin, \u2018On the Concept of History\u2019, in Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938\u20131940<\/em>, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.\/London: Belknap, 2003), p. 391.<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit<\/em> (London: Vintage, 2014), p. 119, p. 218, p. 216.<\/span><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry<\/em> (London: Vintage, 2014), p. 141, p. 147.<\/span><\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> See Yvonne Delhey, \u2018Das Leseland DDR und die Autorin Christa Wolf\u2019, in Carola Ilmes and Ilse Nagelschmidt (eds.), Christa Wolf-Handbuch. Leben \u2013 Werk \u2013 Wirkung<\/em> (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), p. 322.<\/span><\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Winterson, Art Objects: essays on ecstasy and effrontery<\/em> (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 176.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: David Anderson: The \u2018End of History\u2019 revisited: <\/span>Christa Wolf\u2019s \u2018Kassandra\u2019 and Jeanette Winterson\u2019s \u2018Sexing the Cherry\u2019, <\/span>in: ZfL BLOG, 1.8.2022, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2022\/08\/01\/david-anderson-the-end-of-history-revisited-christa-wolfs-kassandra-and-jeanette-wintersons-sexing-the-cherry\/<\/a>].<\/span>
\nDOI: <\/span>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20220<\/span>801<\/span>-01<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n