Communitas, the State of Exception, and the Structure of Fiction

1Analyzing two stories, Sherwood Anderson’s “Godliness” (1919) and Daniel Woodrell’s “Woe to Live On” (2011), this essay discusses the applicability of concepts of liminality and the state of exception to American regionalist short fiction or narratives of community (Zagarell). “Godliness” depicts an idiosyncratic reaction to the transition from an agrarian to an industrialized Mid-West at the turn of the twentieth century. “Woe to Live On” deals with the reminiscences of a Confederate militiaman in the Civil War, another watershed in American history. Victor Turner’s, Carl Schmitt’s, Giorgio Agamben’s, and Richard Rorty’s theoretical conceptualizations help explain these fictional treatments of historical change.

2In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) Victor Turner distinguishes between two models of social coherence:

• 1 Turner’s distinction between communitas and structure harks back to German sociologist Ferdinand T (...)

The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions. . . . The second . . . is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals. (96)1

3In ways similar to Turner’s distinction of communitas and structure, Giorgio Agamben unfolds the dialectic of states of exception, which define and constitute both legal and political systems. In Agamben’s view states of exception lay the groundwork of modern societies, as they allow for sovereign decisions about the inclusion in, and exclusion from, juridical and political ensembles (Homo Sacer 9). They function as “a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas” (86, see 19; italics in original). Agamben’s theory of the state of exception relies on both Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921) and Carl Schmitt’s studies Dictatorship (1921) and Political Theology (1922). In Dictatorship Schmitt elaborates on the distinction between commissary dictatorship in the service of the political status quo and sovereign dictatorship in the service of governmental reform or overthrow (1-31 and 112-31). In their either conservative or progressive directedness Turner’s structure and communitas resemble Schmitt’s commissary and sovereign dictatorship, respectively. Like structure, commissary dictatorship protects the existing order and, like communitas, sovereign dictatorship ushers in revolution and transformation. These options are negotiated in states of exception (Schmitt, Political Theology 13).

5In his essay “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” (1992) Jacques Derrida considers judges (re-)inventors rather than executors of the law (23-24). The permanent state of exception such judges find themselves in resembles that of creative writers as the lawgivers of their fictional worlds. These parallels between the organization of cultural ensembles and fictional texts are borne out by literary theory. Jan Mukařovský, for example, defines aesthetic value as the rearrangement of social, moral, or ideological values within the work of art (88). Extra-aesthetic values can “experimentally crystallize into a new configuration and dissolve an old one” (90). Jurij Lotman links fictional plot development with divergent structures of separate semantic fields and semiospheres, governed by different value systems (Lotman, Universe 131; see Lotmann, Structure 233). Wolfgang Iser’s anthropological model of the triadic interrelations of the real, the fictive, and the imaginary also describes literature as a system that maps out trajectories of change and transition by “acts of boundary-crossing” (19).

6As Turner’s liminal processes and Schmitt’s as well as Agamben’s states of exception mediate between social conventions and transgressive behavior, signaling new legal, political, or cultural orientations, Mukařovský’s aesthetic value, Lotman’s semiospheres, and Iser’s concept of the fictive mediate between normative arrangements in life and divergent normative re-arrangements in works of art. Based on its very brevity and episodic structure, the short story in particular privileges the depiction of processes of transition, threshold situations, and moments of crisis, which suspend ethical, political, and cultural norms (Achilles and Bergmann). Short stories may therefore be considered states of exception themselves.

Sherwood Anderson, “Godliness” (1919) and the Craving for Divine Sovereignty

7“Godliness” is an anomaly as a short story and as a part of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It is a four-part story that developed from an abortive novel to be called Immaturity (Small 84) and has no apparent relation to George Willard, the protagonist of the cycle. The story may, however, be said to fit into the context of the other tales, as it reinforces their theme of isolation and provides the historical background which the other narratives presuppose. It may even be said to represent “the pattern of the larger cycle in which it is contained” (Small 84-85, 87-89, 91).

9A part of Jesse harks back to the past and tries to stay the transition from pioneer simplicity to modern technical developments, which he on the other hand also stimulates by modernizing his farm. He tries to merge the materialist quest for the efficiency of his farm, which “he want[s] to . . . produce as no farm in his state had ever produced before” (Anderson 33), with a spiritual yearning he cannot define. In this calamity Jesse begins to see himself as agent in a state of exception, “an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows” (33), as God’s special envoy and disciple: “Jesse’s mind went back to the men of Old Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out of the skies and talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and to talk to him also” (33). He reinvents himself in biblical terms as “another Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the father of sons who shall be rulers!’” (33-34). As Schmitt envisages the sovereign as a savior figure in states of exception (see Mehring 82-85), Jesse wants to be part of a divine plan centering on his leadership—an exceptional individual with divine license to rule and expand his reign: “It seemed to him that in his day as in those other and older days, kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of men by the power of God speaking through a chosen servant” (34). Jesse thinks typologically like the first Puritan settlers (Dunne 69). As it did for the biblical Israelites and the American Puritans, the promised land in the shape of his own farms plays an all-important role for Jesse. He considers himself anointed, sanctified by “a halo of Godly approval” (34). Not unlike modern dictators, whose ruthlessness and self-centeredness he shares, he seeks ancient models for his plans of territorial expansion in order to vindicate his greed for land. Jesse’s godliness is a form of imperialism.

10Jesse’s aspirations ring with reminiscences of John Winthrop’s exceptionalist “city upon a hill” in “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) and with the promotional rhetoric of the third of J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Jesse’s self-description as “‘a new kind of man’” (Anderson 33) and his desire for “a new race of men sprung from himself” (34) are a megalomaniac version of Crèvecoeur’s famous statement that in America “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (643). Yet Jesse’s private vision of divine election and privilege clashes with the spirit of the age, the indications of civilizational modernism surrounding him, the development of an industrial society marked by unprecedented technological advances, such as the railroad and the automobile as well as the growing power of mass media in the shape of newspapers and magazines (Anderson 34; Humphries 63-64).

11Jesse epitomizes the tensions and asynchronism of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Midwestern communities like Winesburg, which hover between traditional ties to the churches as “the center of the social and intellectual life of the times” (Anderson 34) and the secular belief in material gain based on technological progress. Turning the Old Testament into “a living metaphor” (O’Neill 73-74), Jesse reframes for his own purposes the biblical story of Jesse, his youngest son David, a shepherd made leader of the Israelite forces, and King Saul in their joint struggle against the Philistines (1 Samuel: 9-29). Jesse adopts the role of his biblical namesake, considering “all of the Ohio farmers who owned land in the valley of Wine Creek . . . Philistines and enemies of God” (Anderson 35). To fend off a rival or opponent of the stature of “Goliath the Philistine of Gath” (35), he feels in dire need of a son like the biblical David, who can help him realize his imperialist plans (35-36).

12The landscape around Bentley farm thus turns into an anachronistic projection screen for the re-enactment of biblical myth in the pursuit of current progressivism. When Jesse’s grandson David Hardy comes to live on the farm, it “was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man” (39). Although he has already acquired most of the farms in the valley without David’s help, Jesse remains a dual personality, his mind a liminal “battleground” (39), torn between his biblical fantasies of exceptionality and participation in “the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God . . . in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions” (40). Jesse uses industrial machinery on his farms to reduce the cost of labor, plays with the idea of producing such machinery in his own factory, and, indeed, invents “a machine for the making of fence out of wire” (40). In any case, he wants “to make money faster than it could be made by tilling the land” (40). At the same time he wants “to be a man of God and a leader among men of God” (39).

13Cultural change manifests itself in concentrated, chronologically condensed form in Jesse’s personality. As in judicial and political states of exception addressed by Schmitt and Agamben, Jesse tries to reconcile and terminate the liminalities of conflicting normative orientations, his belief in both divine election by sovereign decision and the fast buck. The model Jesse finds for this divisiveness, the David-Goliath episode from the first Book Samuel, is set “during a period of transition (from a tribal to a national society)” (Small 86) in Israel, which is not unlike the advent of modernity in America. Jesse thus becomes a near-allegorical vessel for the development of American exceptionalism from its religious roots to its modern secular manifestations, whose inner contradictoriness needs a performative outlet.

14Richard Rorty defines conflicting ultimate convictions, such as Jesse’s, as final vocabularies. Final vocabularies are beliefs which the people who hold them cannot justify. They provide explanations for attitudes, vital decisions, important matters, but they are considered by their users as not needing explanation themselves. And these users could not provide such explanation, if challenged (Contingency 73, 80). As “nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary” and as “there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription,” nothing “can serve as a criticism of a person save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture—for persons and cultures are . . . incarnated vocabularies” (80). On this view Jesse’s biblical orientation is the attempt to gain validation of his sovereignty by the redescription of his present situation in authoritative biblical terms. As God is not responsive and refuses to play the role assigned to Him in this scenario, Jesse provokes him performatively by the generation of heterotopic states of exception, in which his grandson David is assigned the role of catalyst.

15In two related forest scenes Jesse stages Old Testament-style sacrificial rituals, which are geared to finding final solutions for the liminal indeterminacy of his conflicting world views or final vocabularies (Anderson 42-43, 52-53). Generating yet another heterotopic state of exception, Jesse returns with David to the sacrificial space in the forest where his first attempt to involve his grandson in a biblical scenario failed. He wants David to witness his sacrifice of a lamb as a burnt offering (51). An apparition of God or an angel will make “‘a true man of God’” (52) like himself out of David. David is frightened when he recognizes the location where he had previously been traumatized. He feels solidarity with the even more frightened lamb in his arms, frees its legs from the rope with which they are tied, and promises to flee together with it (52). Ironically Jesse’s plans generate fear and a spirit of rebellion in his grandson rather than compliance. Undeterred, Jesse erects a burning pile on which to sacrifice the lamb. When Jesse approaches with his knife, David is terrified. Jesse intends to kill the lamb to put its blood on David’s head in a gesture of anointment. For the panicking David, Jesse’s intention, knife in hand, is less clear. His face turns “as white as the fleece of the lamb” (52) and he obviously feels like the sacrificial lamb himself. To apply Richard Rorty’s terminology again, David ironically redescribes the situation. He misunderstands Jesse’s intention in terms of the biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, which God prevented at the last moment by substituting a ram for Isaac (Genesis 22).

18If one follows Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation in Fear and Trembling (1843), a deconstructive element is already built into the original biblical Abraham-Isaac-episode on Mount Moriah, when the ultimate sovereign decides on Abraham’s state of exception. In Kierkegaard’s view, the absurdity of Abraham’s situation consists in the fact that God seems to want to go against one of his own most fundamental commandments by asking a father to kill his son. God generates a state of exception, seemingly to overthrow his own commandments and to subvert his own ethical code. Abraham follows his God by a leap of faith, even when this God seems to revoke his own principles:

All along he had faith, he believed that God would not demand Isaac of him, while still he was willing to offer him if that was indeed what was demanded. He believed on the strength of the absurd, for there could be no question of human calculation, and it was indeed absurd that God who demanded this of him should in the next instant withdraw the demand. (Kierkegaard 38)

19By its epiphanies of disillusionment “Godliness” provides individual manifestations of the collective despair and anguish which go along with major social and cultural transformations. If liminality is an undecidedness between alternatives, “Godliness” powerfully demonstrates the individual painfulness and communal divisiveness of liminal states between the lingering hope for an agrarian lifestyle in a comprehensibly structured communal ensemble and the inevitable adaptation to incipient mechanization and mobility, mass communication and alienation. Instead of metaphysically sanctioned moral orientation Jesse experiences God’s silence and David’s emancipatory reactions, which subvert and ridicule his intentions. In terms of Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of cultural mobility, which reproduces the two-facedness of Turner’s structure and communitas as well as Schmitt’s commissary and sovereign dictatorship, David’s translatio imperii, his transgression and future-orientation, supersede Jesse’s figura, his reliance on patterns of the past (“Cultural Mobility” 7-13). David’s Huck Finn-like flight into the great wide open makes clear that the story does not end on the solution of a normative crisis but rather on the serialization of liminal experimentation.

20The final vocabularies negotiated in Jesse Bentley’s idiosyncratic reconstructions of biblical states of exception prove irreconcilable on account of a dramatically growing lack of communal faith, a dwindling of what David Hollinger has called “the circle of the ‘we’” (68; see also Rorty, “Solidarity or objectivity?”). In the generalizing extradiegetic passages of the story, Anderson enumerates the factors which are responsible for such diversification leading to disorientation: immigration, urbanization, the railroad, and the automobile. He adds the disconcerting cacophony of newspapers and magazines, which level the distinctions between city and country and erode the religious spirit of the country people (34).

21Jesse’s test-setups for divine intervention only manifest the disorientation and disjointedness of the modern consciousness, the permanent liminalities betwixt and between fragmented religious traditions and ruthless materialism, which characterize Jesse’s shifting moods and states of mind and which he reproduces by his vain invocations of a higher authority. In the modern era, nobody rearranges states of exception and revokes decisions with the sovereignty of Abraham’s God. When they are not based on broad consent, decisions in states of exception may discredit the sovereignty they claim for themselves.

22Like “Godliness,” Schmitt’s “Political Theology” falls into four parts. The third of these sections develops political theology as a history of the idea of sovereignty in terms of its theological origins and increasing secularization—the development of which Anderson’s story can be considered a burning lens. Schmitt famously maintains that all “significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” and “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Political Theology 36). “Godliness” both confirms this diagnosis and satirizes it at the same time. By the attempt to revoke it, Jesse demonstrates its irrevocability. By the obviously arbitrary interplay of conflicting biblical scenarios Anderson’s story exposes an irremediable and permanent modern liminality, which can only be managed by negotiation and compromise rather than by autocratic intervention in states of exception.

Daniel Woodrell, “Woe to Live On” (2011) and the Return of Violent Anarchy

25Jake Roedel’s own excessive brutality is fueled by his fear of being marginalized on account of his German background. His hatred of everything German is motivated by his yearning for unreserved acceptance as an American. Whereas Jesse Bentley tries to revive the past and its theocratic mindset in order to be accepted as a leader of the people, Jake wants to suppress his German roots to be fully respected as an American. Some of his comrades among Quantrill’s Raiders discriminate against Jake and do not give him credit for his own fanatical Americanness and detestation of everything teutonic (Woodrell 110). To ingratiate himself with his Germanophobic comrades, whose aversion could threaten his own life at any moment, he is particularly cruel to members of his own ethnic group. When his contingent of Bushwhackers meets a Dutch immigrant family by chance, who imprudently betray their Union sympathies, Jake hangs the father and shoots his thirteen-year-old son, when he tries to free his father from the rope (114-19).

26This unspeakable cruelty wins in particular the respect of Jake Coleman Younger, who shares whiskey with him and accepts him as “‘a southern man’” (120). Jake’s vicarious destruction of an otherness that is also his own, seems to be able to overcome his estrangement from the southerners whose acceptance he craves: “It was for this that I searched, communion and levelness with people who were not mine by birth, but mine by the taking” (120). When the Bushwhackers make prisoners of a group of Union soldiers, Coleman Younger randomly shoots some of them. Jake suspects that Younger, who is not known for unmotivated cruelty, tries to best him, to demonstrate that he can shoot Union prisoners as abruptly as Jake shot the Dutchman’s son (127). In the state of exception of the Civil War an inverse moral code establishes itself that privileges senseless cruelty as the gold standard of solidarity and communal spirit among self-appointed southerners. Jake Roedel’s denial of his roots and destruction of anybody who betrays them is his version of acculturation.

His very name herded furies into my heart. In my father’s household he had been a saint, or near enough to it to have his picture above the mantel. He drummed up Dutchmen from among those foreigners who had come to America wanting to remain so. He oppressed me and I longed to sight in on him. I had seen him lure them on, making himself a patriarch for those who would not mix, leading them to Fit Mit Sigel. Oh, the battles my father and I had on Sigel’s account. We raged in his language, my face puffing, and his blue stubborn eyes glowing beneath his thick Prussian brows. He will keep you foreign, I said, and make you snobs about it. Is this wrong? was his reply. We never agreed; I chose to side with Americans and lost entry to the house that raised me. (126)

Killing his own kind, Jake tries to turn the struggle about the abolition of slavery into his personal struggle for acceptance in the United States.

28When Coleman Younger, recently released from prison, unexpectedly comes to visit Jake in 1904, Roedel’s son Jefferson becomes a “young man meeting history” (131). It is nonetheless a history and a claim to heroism he cannot and will not accept. Jefferson accuses Jake of having indirectly killed his own father. Alf Bowden, in retaliation for having been made a Confederate tool, instrumental in the murder of his Union comrades, shot Jake’s father in front of his wife, “‘he not even having English enough to know why he was killed’” (130). Jefferson cannot forgive his father, because Jake fails “‘to realize that an American would seek satisfaction from your kin. . . . What a mess you have made’” (130). Jefferson promises that his own sons “‘will not find that I killed my own people in the service of traitors, or that I scalped possible cousins for sport’” (132), as their grandfather did. That Jake might have lost his own life, had he not participated in scalping and thereby violated the Bushwhackers’ esprit de corps, does not count for Jefferson. Nor does Jake’s laconic statement that he did not like what he did (132). Jake realizes that he lost his son in addition to his father (131).

29Jake holds up the standards of the former Bushwhackers, a troop of marauders in a state of exception, who fought for their racialized Confederate ideal of America with a brutality that oversteps all moral boundaries, and takes heed of neither old friendships nor civil bonds. By contrast, Jefferson belongs to a sensitive young generation, wary of their origin and pampered by all sorts of amenities and a peaceful existence within the bounds of the law. The normative orientations of, on the one hand, the parental and, on the other, the child generation have become irreconcilable. Jake ridicules his offspring’s interest in their roots:

my son was of the generation that cared less for America than they did for the land that earlier generations had fled. There was now pride about the awkward consonants of foreign names, and narcissism in noodles called spaetzle, and in porkpie hats called homburgs. (131)

Jake’s memories of the communitas of his comrades in the Civil War, in which the most elementary decencies are invalidated and killing people can be a pastime, clash with the structure of the civilized standards of his son’s family and their adherence to their roots. Jefferson, named after the third president of the United States by Jake, addresses his father as Jacob (129) and, to Jake’s chagrin, gives his sons Kurt and Karl quintessentially German names (110). At the beginning of “Woe to Live On” Jefferson reads a newspaper article about the Great War and anti-German sentiment, which, contrary to his father, does not diminish his being “German-proud” (114). When Jake describes his grandsons’ adolescence as their having reached “‘the killing age’” (113), Jefferson tries to shield his sons from their grandfather’s “melancholy past” (113) in the Civil War.

30Herta, Jefferson’s wife, reads to their sons, Karl and Kurt, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–69), a book which provides the domestic counter-perspective of the four March sisters on the Civil War and makes clear that carnage does not reign everywhere. Robert March, the father of the adolescent March sisters, serves as a chaplain on the Union side and is wounded. The women of the family have to cope with his absence. Jo March even integrates a German perspective by her later marriage to Professor Friedrich Bhaer from Berlin. Predictably, Jake, who is a witness to Herta’s educational efforts, feels insulted by “the boys’ rapt attention to such childishness” (113).

31Jake’s memories of a divisive and extremely violent past seem encapsulated in a more pacifist and tolerant present, which sets hope in the next generation. This hope is symbolized by the promise of civilizational progress of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (131), the turn-of-the-century-period, when Coleman Younger comes to visit. At the time of his death in 1916, the writing on the wall of the First World War Jefferson reads about in a newspaper, indicates that the legacy of the state of exception of anarchic violence again supersedes the structure of civilization—not in Missouri where the story is set, but in the Germany where the Roedels hail from and in the Europe of Verdun, the Somme, and other battle sites.

32When he hears of Coleman Younger’s death in 1916, Jake, who is a wood carver, finds himself a piece of river-planed oak from the Missouri river—“now an occasional ally, sharing with me both muddy history and uncertain age” (110)—to sculpt something in honor of Younger. Jake is not religious but still feels the need to honor Younger and, in even less defined ways, their wartime achievements: “I have no need for preachers, or faith in their selected destinations, but there must be a place, and I will not be misdirected” (128). He thinks that he can reach this aim by his semi-conscious carving, which accompanies his memories of the war and whereby the piece of wood seems to shape itself: “many times the river’s hand carved more truly, and I bring no improvement” (110).

33In consequence of the liminal tension between, on the one hand, the state of exception of his war memories and, on the other, the self-confident as well as self-righteous moral certainties of his descendants, Jake’s wood sculpture in memory of Coleman Younger and the Bushwhackers develops into an amorphous pile of wood chips, adequately symbolizing the normative confusion of the Civil War:

My hand had carved I knew not what. I had not restrained it, and what it wrought was bark chips and wood curls, sawdust and splinters. Could this be? Could my passport be such? The chips and curls would not mend. No other design would grow from them. I gathered a handful of the fragrant flakes and raised them to my face. My nostrils rested on the little pile, my tongue touched their salt. Nothing but wood chips—the large rendered small, and confusing. I blew on them and they began to spray about, then I tossed them to the corners. Oh, that voice in my blade had divined me well. I would seek no other monument. (132-33)

Normative Disorientation in American Regionalist Short Fiction

34Neither Jesse Bentley’s reliance on value systems of the past nor Jake Roedel’s attempt to adopt an identity independently of his family’s past yield tangible results beyond their obsolescence. Both men’s states of exception cannot either transform or transcend the indeterminacies and liminalities of the present. They lead straight into the isolation they want to overcome. Nevertheless, while a return to the theocratic order Jesse desires remains either a distant or illusory option, the state of exception of the Civil War, its anarchic tyranny of violence, is only a repetition of earlier warfare and will return in future military and guerilla conflicts.

35If narratives of community represent “the contrast between community life and the modern world directly” (Zagarell 503), the stories discussed here portray this contrast in stark and dramatic contours. Both the Ohio farmers of “Godliness” and the Bushwhackers of “Woe to Live On” represent conglomerates of divisive interests rather than safe havens of solidarity. They are not an antidote to disintegration but its illustration. Both stories confirm rather than contradict Schmitt’s prediction that sovereignty in states of exception rests with individuals and not a group, let alone a population channeling majority decisions. They do not undermine Schmitt’s prediction that the “ideal of an unfolding self-conscious mankind” will end in anarchy (Political Theology 51). Both Jesse Bentley and Jake Roedel represent and experience a sovereignty that is “legally independent, underived. . . . not the adequate expression of a reality, but a formula, a sign, a signal. It is infinitely pliable” (Schmitt, Political Theology 17). Still, just like Jake Roedel’s wood sculpture, the formula, sign, or signal tends to become unintelligible.

36These stories demonstrate that, for lack of communal solidarity, the personal sovereignty Schmitt favors has degenerated into arbitrariness, eccentricity and lawlessness. Communities have become precarious or inoperable, as recent publications diagnose (Claviez, Nancy). Both Anderson’s “Godliness” and Woodrell’s “Woe to Live On” are cautionary tales with regard to Turner’s notion of communitas, Schmitt’s decisionism, and Rorty’s ironism—conceptualizations which may be unhinged by the repetitiveness of states of exception as unfounded as Jesse Bentley’s or as anarchic as Jake Roedel’s. The pivotal performative states of exception of these stories—Jesse Bentley’s attempt to bring God back into a godless world and Jake Roedel’s adoration of the god of war—highlight the function of short fiction for the negotiation of divergent normative regimes. In “Godliness” this negotiation leads to the deconstruction of biblical redescriptions. In “Woe to Live On” the anarchy of the Civil War erects an insurmountable wall between those who experience it and those who do not. By the marginalization of their protagonists these stories highlight the historicity of the states of exception they depict. This does not mean that states of exception are things of the past.