The Temporal Realities of Imagined Pasts in Home and Yellow Earth Anonymous College

In "The Historical Novel Today: Or, is it still Possible?", Frederic Jameson considers the various difficulties which face the historical novel today. Especially relevant to the essay, are his ideas on imagined time in the historical novel. Jameson reminds us that "every present of time in which we move includes its own dimension of futurity, of fears and expectations, which (realized or not) at once accompany that present into the past along with it, as what Sartre called "dead futures" (297). While the historical novel re-imagines the pasts, it also extends into an imagined, fictional future, that exists in contemporaneity with our present moment. Therefore, to fulfil realism, the historical past must be represented along with "its own dimension of futurity, of fears and expectations", that is, its own subjective dimension of time. Jameson thus presents his qualification for realism in the historical novel: "[a]rt has no function but to reawaken all these differences at once in an ephemeral instant; and the historical novel no function save to resurrect for one more brief moment their multitudinous coexistence in History itself" (312-3). This essay would argue that the late works Home and Yellow Earth exemplify Jameson's...