SOURCE: "Problematizing History: David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident," in CLA Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4, June, 1995, pp. 441-60.

[In the following essay; Hogue demonstrates how Bradley's narrative techniques in The Chaneysville Incident undermine traditional concepts of history.]

The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley, takes a novel approach to history and takes fictional liberties in resolving the modern and postmodern dilemmas of its protagonist. It resolves the modern and postmodern dilemmas of its protagonist by transforming, or imagining, aspects of the historical and cultural past into a contemporary constellation in order to validate, make coherent, and give history to certain modern and postmodern experiences. In the process of these transformations, these imaginings, The Chaneysville Incident problematizes, or undermines seriously, our modern traditional conception of history, which assumes that history seeks to explain what happened in the past by providing a precise and accurate reconstruction of the events reported in the documents. It also liberates its protagonist from any external moral or transcendental authority. This liberation allows him to act purely on desire or want.

The Chaneysville Incident, in problematizing our sense of modern history and in issuing in a postmodern worldview, releases its protagonist from a metaphysical, absolute racial or cultural narrative, from an internally cohesive set of perceptions or formal conventions, and from a sanctioned notion of an ordered universe and of man's place in it. It revolts against the prevalent, representational style that views history and culture in universal, essential terms, that subordinates the individual's subjective experience to the consolidated values and the sociopolitical mechanisms of a metanarrative.

The kind of literature that The Chaneysville Incident represents is what Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism calls "historiographic metafiction" or "postmodern historicism," which is "unwillingly unencumbered by nostalgia in its critical dialogical review of the forms, contexts, and values of the past." The Chaneysville Incident as historiographic metafiction is intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lays claim to historical events. It rewrites history yet calls history as a referent into question. It is aware of its own fictionalizing processes. It has a theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs. This kind of fiction is not "realistic" in the nineteenth-century sense of asking the reader to assume that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the textual real and the social real. Neither is it radically nonreferential in the sense of experimental fiction, which attempts to escape realism. As historiographic metafiction, The Chaneysville Incident blurs the distinction between history and fiction. In the blurring of the two categories, the text aesthetically crosses the boundaries between modern and postmodern fiction.

Unlike a modernist text such as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. The Chaneysville Incident does not want to exhume, or even preserve, a revered past. Nor does it want to deny the existence of the past as some critics of postmodern fiction have claimed. Rather, it wants, to use the words of Linda Hutcheon, "to revisit the past critically"; it wants to problematize the past's values, contents, conventions, and aesthetic forms. It wants a reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past that is informed by the present. Finally, it wants to arrive at a conscious, functional, and intentional truth about the past that is socially and ideologically conditioned.

John Washington, the protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident, is in a modern dilemma. He cannot overcome his alienation and fragmentation from, his lack of social identification with, and his lack of historical continuity with his father's, Moses Washington's, essentialist narrative, his values, conventions and definitions—values and definitions that are relevant to Moses Washington's existence but are incongruent with John's existence in the present. John Washington learns eventually that if he is going to find truth in history, he has to think of history critically and contextually. To achieve the freedom to live his life in the present, he has to accept the presupposition that history, like fiction, constitutes a system of signification by which we make sense of the past, that our readings and interpretations of the historical past are vitally dependent on our experience of the present.

At its opening, The Chaneysville Incident presents immediately John Washington's modern dilemma. His present living situation alienates him from the values and views of his father. John, who is a professor of history at a university in Philadelphia, has been living with Judith, a white psychiatrist, for the past five years. It appears to be a genuine relationship. They have developed the sort of esoteric codes of communication usually reserved for lovers. Judith has concern in her voice when she speaks to John, and the relationship is filled with human warmth, humor, and love.

Yet the five-year relationship has reached an impasse; it has not been finalized. John and Judith are not "legally espoused," and marriage does not appear imminent. Despite the fact that Judith's biological clock is running down, they have no children and there is no talk of children. John has not taken Judith home to meet his mother, and he refuses to discuss with her his childhood or his inability to reconcile his father's values—which he has adopted and internalized—with his present living situation. Why the failure at finalizing this relationship?

The five-year relationship has not been finalized because Judith is white, and interracial marriages and interracial babies are excluded from, or are repressed in, John Washington's conception of the social realm given to him by his father. What Judith's white skin represents for John is growing up with a father who had an essentialized narrative, a conception of time and space, that believes that a black man should be "natural," that he should not only be distrusting of white people, but also that he should be antithetical to a Judeo-Christian society. Basically, Moses Washington believed that man must be able to live in the wilderness. He "has to be able to make a fire, has to know how to make it in the wind an' the rain an' the dark." Moses Washington believed that a man must know how to hunt, fish, curse, and drink whiskey. He must be independent—that is, not dependent on mother, Jesus, or the government.

After forty years of living naturally, or in nature, in the mountains and making and selling illegal whiskey, Moses Washington comes down into the small southwestern Pennsylvania town to live. But he does not become a conventional man; he continues to live by his own rules. He marries Yvette Stanton, the daughter of a prominent black historian in town. There is no love or companionship in this marriage. It is not a conventional marriage; it is a marriage between allies. She wants children and he wants two sons to carry on his legacy. But Moses Washington's marriage is not the only thing unconventional about his stay in society, where he remains a "natural" man. He continues to live by his own rules—totally disregarding the laws and mores of society. He pays bribes to the sheriff to sell his whiskey and keeps a "folio" of illegal doings by prominent white citizens for blackmail purposes. He has "far-reaching theological discussions" with preachers about "certain Christian assumptions concerning the afterlife." He continues to mistrust white people. Jack Crawley narrates to John: "Moses didn't have no love for whitefolks. He'd sell to 'em, an' he'd buy from 'em when he had to, an' he'd talk to 'em if there wasn't no way around it, but he sure as hell wasn't goin' to think too much of John fallin' in love with one of 'em."

This is the narrative or way of life that John Washington inherits from his father. On his death bed Moses solicits a promise from Jack Crawley that he would teach his son John "to be a man." Fulfilling his promise, Crawley teaches John how to be a "natural," independent man. He teaches him how to survive in the woods, how to aim a rifle, how to hunt and fish, how to "bring [his] breathing under control; to still [his] own fear, to be methodical; to accept [his] limitations and compensate." Like the men in his family who have come before him, John Washington is taught to be both rational and instinctive.

In asking Jack Crawley to teach his son how to be a "natural" man, Moses Washington is taking the necessary action to continue the universalization, or transcendence, of his particular definition of manhood—a definition which he receives from his grandfather C. K. and which he accepts uncritically and imposes upon his subjective, lived experiences. In Crawley's action, we see the process by which one notion of manhood gains power and authority over another. But we also see the limitations of this definition when we witness how it becomes ineffectual for John. It arrests John Washington emotionally, not allowing him to live his life in the present. It fails to explain John's contemporary, lived experiences and therefore represses his desires and wants.

For a while, Moses Washington's way of life, or vision of man, becomes what his son John Washington wants out of life: "to get up in the morning, build a fire and go the spring and pay a visit to the privy, and then cook my breakfast." In short, John accepts Moses Washington's definition of manhood or view of man as a part of an absolute racial or cultural narrative. At this moment in his life, John does not realize that Moses and C. K. have taken the raw material of history and made it relevant to them, or have imposed an external narrative upon their subjective, lived experiences.

But somewhere along the way John Washington abandons the natural, independent lifestyle of his father for the American success story. He accepts and internalizes some of the cognitive styles of the mainstream society. A "neat, cleancut" appearance, the image of a "nice, gentle, shy Negro," and his passion for reading indicate that he has internalized the values of a secular American education and the behavior and appearance of middle-class America. John's competitive American spirit and his Protestant work ethic show as he reads the summer before college "the things that [his] soon-to-be classmates would have cut their intellectual teeth on." He becomes the local success story with his name and picture in the paper and his scholarship to college.

In addition to a father who held views and practiced values that are contradictory to his present living arrangement, John Washington's attitudes, especially about race, have also been shaped by his own experiences. He grows up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town that was basically defacto segregated. He learns early "many of the little assumptions and presumptions that go with dormant racism or well-meaning liberalism." Although never understanding why, John and other black males had to travel forty miles to another town to get haircuts. They could not swim in the city's public swimming pool and they were not welcomed in the town's coffee shop. John is also aware that in this small southwestern Pennsylvania town blacks are buried in a segregated cemetery and black males are always drafted into the armed services before their white counterparts. More overt and more conscious are those incidents where John is "pursued by white boys from the town, shouting names and curses; [he] would make the climb imagining that all the house windows were eyes staring at [him]; that they knew, somehow, that that day someone had called [him] a name or threatened [him], and [he] had done nothing besides close [his] eyes and ears, trying to pretend it was not happening." Finally, there is the experience that John has with the white friend Robert from high school whose mother does not want John to visit the house anymore because he is black. These experiences of racism explain John's mistrust, or even hatred, at times, of whites. They also generate or affirm his father's racial views.

Lastly, John Washington's racial attitudes are further hardened by the circumstances surrounding his brother Bill's induction into the Army and his eventual death. Because of his athletic abilities in football and wrestling, Bill is passed academically through high school. When he has played out his four-year option and is of no more use to the school, he is flunked. Without school, Bill is eligible for the draft. Against John's advice and knowledge and through his mother's coercion, Bill is drafted into the Army and is sent to Vietnam, where he is killed. John never forgives his mother for Bill's death. In fact, after Bill's death, he cuts off all communication with her.

The racial incidents which he experiences in his hometown, along with the circumstances surrounding his brother's death and his obvious desire for a mainstream American type of lifestyle, make John want to escape from his family's past, particularly his father's definition of manhood. He comes to hate his mother, perhaps for her choice of Bill as her favorite; he hates his father and was never close to his brother. He "promised [himself] that someday [he] would go where [the trucks] were going." John does go away and does not return until he receives the call from his mother announcing Jack Crawley's sickness and impending death. In going away, he had hoped both to abandon his life on the hill and to repress his father's definition of manhood. Reflecting on this promise as he returns for Jack's death and funeral, John thinks: "I knew nothing about the Hill any longer, I had made it my business not to know."

Physically, John Washington is successful in escaping his family's past, but ideologically and psychologically he is still very much his father's son. He continues to accept uncritically Moses Washington's view of manhood as a part of an absolute racial or cultural narrative. His entrapment in many of the values and conventions of his father's essentialized narrative is amplified clearly in two poignant moments. The first moment comes after he has learned of Jack Crawley's illness. On the bus ride home, John grapples with the difficulty of abandoning his father's narrative: "And so I settled myself in my seat and took another pull on my flask and looked out the window at the mountainsides black with pine, and thought about how strange home is: a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you don't particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run." The second moment comes in a conversation in which Judith asks him why he is with her if he hates white people: "You're the man with the logic," she said. "Here's some for you. You hate white people. I am a white person. Therefore you hate me. Only you say you don't; you say you love me. Which seems like a contradiction. So I guess you must be lying about something. Either you can't hate so much or you can't love—." John's response is that "it's not that simple." John still views the world through his father's lens and by the experiences of his personal past.

Judith, who takes a practical approach to the situation, does not understand the complexity of John's contradictory predicament. (Of course, she should, for she is a trained psychiatrist. This is one of four technical flaws in The Chaneysville Incident. The other three are the scaling of the catfish, the lack of an explanation for John's absence from his job, and Jack's talking, despite his sickness, without interruption or pause.) She does not understand how, on the one hand, John is in love with her, and how, on the other hand, he is tied or is entrapped, historically and ideologically, to a version of history or a racial narrative that mistrusts white people. For Judith, the situation is rather simple: either John loves her or he hates her. But because he is unable to articulate his complex, contradictory feelings to Judith, John becomes silent.

The event which forces John to confront and to eventually undermine his father's essentialized narrative and which forces him to confront his tenuous and unsettled relationship with Judith, who is growing impatient with him, comes with the illness and eventual death of Jack Crawley. After burying Jack, John becomes obsessed again with finding the truth about his father's life and death, which he has been pursuing since he was thirteen. Obviously, as a modern subject who needs a temporal unification between the past and future in the present, he needs answers from his family's past to function as a whole person in the present. He needs a historical line from the past to the present, and he hopes to find it in his father's past. John first pursues the truth of his father's life and death three years after Moses Washington's death. He enters his father's attic and finds "the chair, the table, the book, the lamp, the empty fireplace … the keys to a man's mind, laid bare to [him], clues to a mystery, the answer to every question there. All [he] had to do was interpret them. It was the greatest thrill [he] had ever known."

But this approach to history, as Hayden White argues in The Content of the Form, works from the assumption that history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative. John, the traditional novice historian, believes that history seeks to explain what happened in the past by providing a precise and accurate reconstruction of the events reported in the documents. In taking this approach to finding truth in history, John falls prey to one of the "greatest fallacies" that surrounds the study of the past: "the notion that there is such a thing as a detached researcher, that it is possible to discover and analyze and interpret, without getting caught up and swept away." In short, he refuses to accept the fact that our readings and interpretations of the historical past are vitally dependent on our experience of the present, or that history constitutes a system of signification by which we make sense of the past.

After John buries Jack, he returns again to his father's attic. This time his interest is sparked because he is bewildered by certain facts found in his father's portfolio. Again, he is seeking the objective truth of his father's life and death. Now, he is a professor of history who has been trained to order facts, to control data. John organizes his facts on color-coded index cards. The organization of Moses Washington's books, John surmises, indicates that Moses had been researching something, that what had happened was not, as everybody thought, that Moses Washington had given up hunting but rather that he had transferred his energies and efforts to a different pursuit.

The question that plagues John is: Why did Moses Washington then leave his books and take up his gun after ten years? For clues to his father's action, John traces his father's biblical research, examining all the facts and documents. But in acting still as a traditional historian who refuses to imagine, or to think of history critically and contextually, he is still unable to unravel "the whys and wherefores" of Moses Washington:

I had put the facts together, all of them, everything I could cull from those books and his notebooks and my notebooks: everything. I had put it together and I had studied it until I could command every fact, and then I had stepped back and looked at the whole and seen … nothing. Not a thing. Oh, I had seen the facts, there was no shortage of facts; but I could not discern the shape that they fitted in.

Still, in his endless search to find the truth about his father's life and death, John seeks information and knowledge from other sources. He has a rare conversation with his mother and he talks with Judge Scott, his father's friend. His mother reaffirms his knowledge that his father's marriage was one of convenience and that he lived an unconventional life. From Judge Scott, John learns about his father's business, his payment of bribes, and the portfolio he used for blackmail purposes. John also learns from Judge Scott that Moses Washington was both methodical and instinctive. But neither John's mother nor Judge Scott is able to shed any additional insight into why Moses Washington killed himself.

John moves into Jack Crawley's cabin, which is innocent of modern appliances and of an indoor bathroom and which is literally very close to nature and the wilderness. He cleans the cabin of the "[stink] of dying," moves his belongings in from his mother's house, and adjusts to the meager comforts that Jack's cabin provides. Obviously, he has clear intentions of staying for a while in the cabin. The letter to Judith and the hunting trip in the woods indicate, argues Klaus Enssler, John's rejection of his present condition—his relationship with Judith and his job as a historian—and his return to, or reenactment of, Jack's and Moses Washington's natural way of life. But in absorbing the full implication of John's letter, Judith comes to the Hill and disrupts John's reenactment. Her arrival brings John back to the present, which includes his dealing with his own existential existence, his relationship with her, and the mystery of his father's suicide.

With Judith, John visits Chaneysville—the place where the twelve slaves are buried and where C. K. and Moses Washington committed suicide. But because he still refuses to be intuitive or imaginative—which is an integral part of interpreting history and which is a prerequisite for his giving "shape" and "pattern" to the facts in his possession—John still cannot find the truth about Moses Washington's suicide: "Bit by bit the thoughts came slipping in, the facts and the calculations, the dates and the suspicions. There was no pattern to them, nothing I could grab on to: it was just random cerebration; a mind checking itself." The provisionally and uncertainty of John Washington the historian do not cast doubt upon his seriousness. All of his actions indicate his complete devotion to finding the truth about his father. Rather, they define the new postmodern seriousness that acknowledges the limits and powers of writing about the past. He is forced to grapple with the possibility that we can only know the past through discursive systems.

Simultaneous with John Washington's search for the truth of his father's suicide are repeated flashbacks to his unrealized relationship with Judith. Obviously, resolving the historical dilemma concerning his father's and great-grandfather's past also means resolving his personal one. But Moses Washington's truth in history does not satisfy or explain adequately John's present wants and desires. In addition, John continues to view history as something that is objective, as something that is external to his subjective reality. Again in Judith's company, John recognizes her love and warmth. He also acknowledges his attraction to her:

[S]he stepped closer to me and thrust my hands into her armpits and held them there with her own. Slowly I felt the sensation come back, felt the warmth and the pressure from her, the swell of her breasts against my wrists … seeing her cheek and belly and the faint hint of thigh beneath the material of her slacks, and I remembered how it felt to have the cheek against my chest, the belly and things solid and warm against mine.

Yet, despite the acknowledged love and warmth, John still refuses to tell Judith about himself or his family's past. He still refuses to give himself completely to the relationship.

But later, when Judith asks John how he got here, John, for the first time in their five-year relationship, begins to tell Judith about his family's past. He tells her about the history of the Hill where he grew up, about the role that the Methodist Church played in the slave trade. He tells Judith about the Underground Railroad. Then, in a radical turn of events, John, pulling his father's portfolio from the shelf, reconstructs for Judith the history of the Stantons, his mother's side of the family. Then he proceeds to reconstruct the history of the Washingtons, his father's side of the family.

In all of these stories about, and reconstructions of, the family's past, John is working only with facts. From the facts of his family's history, John sees a parallel in the lives of his father, Moses Washington, and his great-grandfather, C. K. Washington. Both C. K. and Moses were methodical and instinctive. For example, although C. K. is a "natural" man, he hunts the man down who killed his father and murders him. Likewise, Moses is a natural man but he also calculates how to manipulate the whites in town. Moses Washington had loved a woman because C. K. had loved a woman. Moses wanted sons because his grandfather had a son, Lamen Washington, who became "a fairly prominent black mortician." (Although The Chaneysville Incident does not consciously critique it, it shows unconsciously that John, like C. K. and Moses, sees women as objects. C. K. indifferently fathers a son. He "never ever mentions the fact that sometime during the winter she [Bijou, who is the mother of Lamen Washington] became his mistress." Moses also uses Yvette to bear him two sons; then he abandons her. John, even in his transformation in the end, still treats Judith as an object.) Both C. K. and Moses Washington had moved to the mountains of western Pennsylvania and had become bootleggers. By viewing Moses Washington's action outside the context of Christianity, John reasons that Moses's search was "to be sure that Christians were wrong." He also reasons that knowledge of death had a significance for Moses that it did not have for most men.

But the facts in John's possession do not lead to a complete satisfactory history for him. The facts, and the system of signification that presents them, do not give him a history that will allow him to explain his present living situation. John does not know why death is so significant for Moses and why Moses commits suicide; he does not know what happened to C. K., and that means he does not know anything. John does know that C. K.'s death and his father's death happened in Chaneysville, where twelve slaves are buried. He knows that C. K. was in love with Harriette Brewer, who was "educated and intelligent" and who helped to "take escapees [from slavery] who had made it as far as Philadelphia on north." But he does not know the "details of the affair." He also knows that F. H. Pettis, who might have known C. K., "had seen the lucrative possibilities represented by fugitive slaves, and he had begun to advertise in Southern newspapers, offering to track down and return fugitive property." But he does not know whether Pettis is the one who is responsible for C. K.'s murder.

In his visit to Chaneysville with Judith, John learns other things. He learns that Moses had killed himself in "close proximity" to Richard Iiames's remains and in a family graveyard belonging to a family named Iiames. He also discovers an unmarked thirteenth grave. "It was like the others, the same size and shape, and it had nothing written on it, but it was not in the pattern at all, it was above it, closer to the southeast corner of the Iiames family plot, almost exactly where [Moses] would have been when he killed himself." John knows the facts of the history he is trying to know. He knows names and places and people. In short, he knows "what Moses Washington [and C. K.] knew when [they] got this far." But what John does not know are the connections between these facts, between these names and places and people, and so he does not know their meaning. He does not know how to make these names and places and people relevant to his own subjective reality. He does not know how to establish a historical line from the past to the present—that is, until he takes a nonrational leap of faith.

As Judith gets the toddies, John begins to reconstruct imaginatively a historical past and a truth of his father's life and death that will be relevant to his own present living situation. He stops "wondering and worrying and start[s] doing what he should have been doing all along: thinking. Really thinking. Not just gathering facts and ordering them; not just trying to follow them along; really thinking, looking at the overall patterns of things and figuring out what the facts had to be." Unlike Moses Washington and C. K., when John Washington reaches the limit of his knowledge of his father's and great-grandfather's lives and deaths, he goes on beyond reconstruction into pure speculation. The signs of the narrative act fall away and with them all questions of authority and reliability: "Facts, I said. Don't you understand? There aren't any facts. All that about the runaway slaves and Moses Washington, that's extrapolation. It's not facts. I've used the facts."

In addition, John begins to trust Judith, who has stopped asking questions and is now just listening, and it is within this trust that he can "imagine" a truth of his father's and great-grandfather's life and death and resolve his unrealized relationship with Judith:

[Judith] brought the cup to me and pressed it into my hands, letting her hands linger there for a moment, holding the warmth of the cup against mine. I knew then that I had underestimated her, and had done it in a way that cheated us both…. And then I realized that something strange was happening. Because I was no longer cold…. I saw that she was leaning forward, her eyes shining in the light, fixed on the candle. And I looked at it too, at the steady flame, hardly a flame at all now, but a round, warm, even glow that seemed to grow as I looked at it, expanding until it filled my sight.

The shift from reconstructed history based on facts to speculation is manifested in the sounds and a voice that John, and not Judith, hears through the wind. These sounds put John squarely in the nonrational, non-Western, African tradition of C. K. and Moses. And just as C. K. and Moses, in committing suicide, had taken nonrational leaps, John takes a nonrational leap. With a drink and Judith's acceptance, John "imagines" and imposes a meaning on the historical past, on what happened to C. K. Washington and the slaves on the fateful night that they went running through the woods of South County. He has finally realized that the meaning and shape of history are not in the events or facts, but in the ideological or discursive systems that make these past events into present historical facts.

Therefore, he imagines that C. K.'s life had included a lost love, a woman named Harriette Brewer. C. K. had fallen in love with Harriette some years after his first wife was killed in a race riot. Before they could consummate the relationship, C. K. had gone back to the mountains to run his whiskey business, and Harriette, who believed not only in financing slave escapees but also in leading them out, had gone South. The discovery of her action led C. K. to his many daring rescues of slaves. Pursued by Pettis—whose business is catching runaway slaves—and half the men of South County, C. K. and Harriette, John imagines, are reunited a few hours before they face death together. C. K. arrives at their hiding place to bring them supplies and realizes that the slaves are "watching him" and "waiting for him to lead them." Cornered by Pettis and his men, C. K., Harriette, and the twelve slaves sing the song: "And before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my God, and be free." Then they kill themselves.

In John's "imagined" history, the warmth that C. K. experiences with Harriette and the warmth that John is simultaneously experiencing in his life with Judith are more than physical warmth. It is a human warmth of two people in love:

But [John] had not known about the other cold, the cold inside, the glacier in his guts that had been growing and moving, inch by inch, year by year, grinding at him, freezing him. He had not known that. But he knew it now. Because he could feel it melting. The heat that melted it did not come from the fire, it came from her, from the warmth of her body that pressed against his back, the warmth of her arms around him, the warmth of her hands that cupped the base of his belly. He lay there, feeling the warmth filling him, feeling the fatigue draining from him, feeling the aching in his ribs easing, becoming almost pleasant, and wishing that he would never have to move.

As John nears the completion of C. K.'s imagined history, Judith's warmth begins the melting of his "other cold"—the cold that has prevented him from sharing his past, his present, and his future with her because she is white.

Completing his imagined history, John imagines other things. After the slaves kill themselves they are buried next to a family graveyard. Richard Iiames, a white man who had come to Chaneysville, the "oldest continuous settlement in the County," in 1728 had taken "the time to bury them like that, to Figure out who loved who." This reconstructed event allows John to believe that there are some good white people, thereby undermining his father's essentialized narrative that black men cannot trust white people. John also concludes that Moses did not commit suicide, as C. K. had not committed suicide. Since he was sixteen, Moses had been on the search to prove the Christians wrong. John spends endless hours doing biblical research. He even goes to war because "he want[s] to understand dying," and he becomes a hero in the war because "he want[s] to take chances, [to] get closer to death." Finally, John reasons, Moses understands C. K.'s life and death. Going to Chaneysville, Moses was on a hunting trip—looking for his "Ancestors." Unlike Christians, C. K. and Moses saw death, John reasons, not as the end of life but as an extension of life. In "imagining" the historical past, John Washington recognizes that history depends as much upon intuition as upon analytical methods. He accepts the presupposition that the "shape" and "pattern" of history are informed by his experience of the present. Expressing his attitude toward history in an interview, David Bradley states: "History to me is raw material, the past is raw material. We can't be governed by it."

In "imagining," in rewriting and re-presenting the contents and events of C. K.'s and Moses's lives and deaths, John Washington produces a version of the past that validates and makes coherent his present existence. In producing his own narrative, John rejects the essentialist narrative and tradition of his father and great-grandfather and becomes postmodern. His narrative becomes what Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition calls a language game which has its own rules and has no recourse to a larger metanarrative or external principle of justice or authority. In this situation, the function of John's postmodern attitude, which is self-legitimating, is no longer truth but "performativity." He does what he does, not because there is an external truth or metanarrative to legitimate it but because that is what he wants to do; that is what he desires. In this instance, John's subjective experience is no longer subordinated to the consolidated values of his father's and great-grandfather's metanarrative. This postmodern attitude gives John the option of marrying Judith, which he hopes she understands:

As I struck the match it came to me how strange it would all look to someone else, someone from far away. And as I dropped the match to the wood and watched the flames go twisting, I wondered if that someone would understand. Not just someone; Judith. I wondered if she would understand when she saw the smoke go rising from the far side of the Hill.

In the conscious manipulation and interpretation of events from the past, John arrives at a truth that is socially and ideologically conditioned. It is a truth that is vitally dependent on his own subjective reality. In this truth, The Chaneysville Incident admits that the past is real and does exist, but it also suggests that there is no direct access to that past unmediated by the structures of our various discourses about it. John Washington has to use a discourse of his personal experience to make sense out of the past.

Therefore, as he and Judith prepare to leave Jack Crawley's cabin and return to Philadelphia, John seals the "folio up with candle wax, as [his] father had done for [him]" and puts it under his arm. Then he puts "the books and pamphlets and diaries and maps back where they belonged, ready for the next man who would need them." Finally, he burns all the "pads and cards" which he has accumulated. With the portfolio and the books and pamphlets and diaries and maps, his son (and hopefully his daughter), in years to come will have to rethink and rework the contents and facts of the past. He, like John, will have to make the raw material of history relevant to himself. It is this constant rewriting and rethinking of history that prevent it from being conclusive and teleological.

In moving beyond reconstruction of facts into "imagining" or pure speculation, The Chaneysville Incident passes from mimesis of facts, rumors, documents, information gathered from a graveyard visit, Moses Washington's "personal memoirs," and the various characters'—Jack Crawley's, Judge Scott's, and Yvette Washington's—accounts to what Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction calls "unmediated diegesis, from characters 'telling' to the author directly 'showing' us what happened" between the various characters. John Washington's mystery about his father's death and his great-grandfather's disappearance is solved not through epistemological processes of weighing evidence and making deductions—as traditional modern history is conceived and written, but through the imaginative projection of what could—and what The Chaneysville Incident insists, must—have happened. Abandoning the untraceable problems of attaining a reliable knowledge of the historical past, John Washington improvises a possible historical past. At this point, The Chaneysville Incident crosses the boundary between modernist and postmodernist writing.

In problematizing the entire notion of historical knowledge … The Chaneysville Incident puts into question the authority of any act of writing, by, to use the terms of Linda Hutcheon, "locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of singularity." It also exposes the process by which C. K.'s and Moses Washington's notion of truth gained power and authority over others. Finally, the text makes us aware that historical truth is socially and ideologically conditioned. It shows that history itself depends on the conventions of narrative, language, discourse, and ideology in order to present what happened.