1. Kahramanlar
1
Emre Kahramanlar
Professor Roberta Maierhofer
Cultural Studies Seminar (Change and Transformation in American Culture)
12 July 2015
Multiple Layers of Knowledge and the Fragmentation of History in Edward P. Jones’ The
Known World
How do we know about the past? How can the reader trust the author when he gives
an account about the past, a type of narration that tries to give you an account about how men
lived and what they said? In this verbal image of reality, how do we know that it is the
absolute reality that we have to rely on? In other words, how do we decide to trust this image
of reality when we know that there can also be multiple layers of realities outside this verbal
image? Where does the knowledge come from? If it comes from a writer of history, how are
we sure that he is not stitching the historical document, or a trace; the raw material of history,
into his discursive representation and present the reader with a narration which has been
rearranged, made relevant and reduced to a single reality or a totality? These are a couple of
rhetorical questions that are on agenda when it comes to question the very problematic nature
of the historical knowledge, which deals with the events of the past.
In order to understand how these questions came to light, one should look at the
archaeology of how historical knowledge is formed in the sense that it helps in differentiating
between the 19th
century’s historical knowledge, which is associated with causality and
objectivity of history and it’s change in second half of 20th
century, which underlines the idea
of fragmentation in the historical knowledge.

2. Kahramanlar
2
Historical knowledge especially in the 19th
century was believed to be an objective
one. During this time period, historians of the age believed that they should put a distance
between history writing and fiction writing in the sense that unlike fiction writers who had
the tendency to write about only the possible, or the imaginable, they objectively wrote about
facts and accurate statements about history. However, throughout the second part of the
twentieth century, the idea of history in the minds began to change greatly due to some new
definitions historians and theorists coined. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher puts
forward that history is best understood by discursive systems, in the sense that language, as a
discourse is a powerful device; hence it effects our knowledge about history. In other words,
it is the power to make history and the foundation through which we know anything.
Therefore, our knowledge is constructed through the subjective use of language. Similarly,
Foucault’s contemporary, historian, Hayden White argues that history has a certain pattern of
narration and it is aware of its own plotting. These important thinkers highlight the idea that
the production of knowledge and how we make sense of it is constructed; it has a certain plot,
and it is not the definitive source; it is questionable. In other words, it is fragmented.
These developments led by the important names aforementioned above, the ideas
about the fragmented knowledge and history find a body in literature in Edward P. Jones’ the
Known World; a historical novel about slavery. The fact that his characters vary greatly in
the way they narrate the past raises the questions about the source of knowledge: Who is the
knower? Known by whom? How do we know about the past? Where does the knowledge
come from? In this paper, Edward P. Jones’ approach to the question of knowledge and
history are going to be examined according to his characters’ different accounts, and their
way of making sense of the world within the light of the ideas of Michael Foucault and
Hayden White.

3. Kahramanlar
3
It is important to understand how Michel Foucault defines the archaeology of
historical knowledge, and how Hayden White puts forward his thoughts on the fictitious
nature of historical knowledge in order to get a grasp of Edward P. Jones’ idea of
fragmentation in making of knowledge in his work, The Known World.
Michel Foucault, in his work Archaeology of Knowledge, talks about how the
historical knowledge tries to reveal the stable and turns to linear successions in order to find a
stable ground in centuries of continuity. It tries to build a bridge between centuries and puts a
causal succession in historical knowledge, which is supposedly unshaken, total in its structure
and stable. However, there is one other aspect that the historians, or writers of history
disregard, which is discontinuity:
Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogenous
manifestations of a single mind or of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn
development of a science striving to exist and to reach completion at the very
outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or
theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions,
interruptions, whose status and nature may vary considerably. (4)
Historians whose ultimate aim is to form a single body of discourse, he states, usually
disregard these interruptions. Within the light of this information, Foucault talks about the
fact that if one wants to see how these interruptions are disregarded in the making of
historical knowledge, he has to scrutinize how the historian approaches the document in the
discipline of history. He states:

4. Kahramanlar
4
To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to
‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and
lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or
which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our
time, history is that which transforms documents the monuments. In that
area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now
deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed
in relation to one another to form totalities. (7)
As can be seen from this quotation, for the sake of making a historical document a
monument, historian disregards the discontinuities and plays with the document until he fits it
into his own discourse. In this process of memorization, historical document is being
adjusted, fit to the discourse of the historian so that it fits into a totality and eventually
becomes a monument of the his argument.
Discontinuities in the historical knowledge making, he states, reached significance.
Especially during the second half of the 20th
century, when people started questioning their
self, their sex, their subconscious and when the new literary developments such as post-
structuralism and postmodernism rose, history and historical knowledge also came to be
questioned. The total historical discourse was torn to pieces to examine the fragments of the
historical knowledge. And the question was not to disregard discontinuities anymore but to
take them seriously and study what other windows they might open in the representation of
history, and how these windows might differ from the general history’s point of view. Thus,
the disregarded discontinuity came to light and what was formerly disregarded started to be
studied: and the new questions were asked: What is science, what is text, what is the history?
What might be the other causes of these discontinuities? If the historian does not speak for
these discontinuities, who is going to talk about them? Who are the other silent narrators who
did not speak in the past?

5. Kahramanlar
5
As can be seen from these questions, the focus on the knowledge, especially historical
knowledge shifts from the totality to fragmentation. And in time, historical document and the
way it is represented by a historian, or an author have become two separate things. While on
one hand the former is associated with the raw material in history; an unprocessed trace
which might have a different story when it is cut from the historians discourse, on the other
hand, the latter is highly possibly glued to historian’s or the author’s own work, which might
involve reduction, limitation and readjustment so that it looks a total, a part of a collective
mentality. Within the light of this transformation scheme, the total corpora of works which
try to put the traces into a single pattern have left their places to the questions that are asked
in their composition of discursive formations: How can we trust the author? How can we trust
the knowledge of the author? How does he represent history? Where does this historical
knowledge come from? Where does the knowledge come from? This group of questions has
become important in the formation of the knowledge and in the study of the new history.
Hayden White, an important historian who thinks that history is very well aware of
it’s plotting touches upon similar points in his work, The Tropics of Discourse, in the sense
that writing history is not so different from writing fiction. There is actually no boundaries
between the two because he thinks “history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a
form of historical representation” (White 76). Both kinds of writers try to provide the reader
with a verbal image of reality. However, he states that if one goes back to the roots of the
historical discourse and the archaeology of history writing, it will be seen that the writers of
fiction came to be associated with only the representation of the possible, or imaginable while
the history writing was favored for only representing the facts. Consequently, whatever
historians, in their verbal representations, were writing became a fact. In his Tropics of
Discourse, he digs into the roots of this general prejudice and finds out that, the main reason
behind the false facticity of history is back in 19th
century, right after the French Revolution.

6. Kahramanlar
6
He stipulates that historians changed their ideas about historical writing after the revolution
and they went on to “defictionalize” (White 124) the process due to their belief that the
former historians’ unrealistic expectations about the ways that historical societies could be
transformed, and their false readings of history failed the societies and filled the members of
these societies up with utopian hopes that based on this type of fictional beliefs, societies
might actually change history. So instead, he states, the historians came to believe they have
to put a distance between historical writing and fiction writing in order to be redeemed from
the fictitious effects of the French Revolution. Thus, the general idea of 19th
century’s
historical representation was that history could only show the facts:
History came to be set over against fiction and especially the novel, on the
representation of actual to the representation of possible or only imaginable. And
thus was born the dream of historical discourse that would consist of nothing but
factually accurate statements about a realm of events which were observable in
principle, the arrangement of which, in the order of their occurrence would permit
them to figure forth their true meaning, or significance. (123)
As can be seen from this quotation, historical representation of the historians is
associated with the idea of reflecting only the facts, as if history is a branch of science, which
can only deal with the facts in the past. Hayden White states that the historians, or the writers
who made the historical knowledge of 19th
century forgot one thing only, that is; “They
didn’t realize that the facts do not speak for themselves but the historian speak for them,
speak on their behalf and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole, whose integrity in
its representation of a purely discursive one” (White 125). Whatever is left to the reader are
actually not the facts themselves, but the representation of what historians believed to be the
facts. Their facts are actually their unities and totalities. What could be regarded as facts, on
the other hand, are the fragments of history that are not yet made a part of a discourse. A

7. Kahramanlar
7
historian feels himself responsible to collect these scattered fragments and employ them into
his own story; in other words, he reinvents the historical documents and pastes it into his
narration.
So far, what has been discussed is the discontinuity in the representation of historical
knowledge in Foucault’s terms and the representation of facticity in history making and its
very close relation to fiction making in Hayden White’s terms. These two bullet points in the
representation of history highlight these questions: Where does the knowledge come from?
How can we trust the author? How can we trust the document, if it is nothing but a trace,
which is embedded into the discourse of the author of the text? This is when Edward P.
Jones’ The Known World comes to light. It is a historical fiction about slavery back in 19th
century in an imaginary town called Manchester County. The reason why the Known World
is important in relation to Foucault’s and Hayden White’s works and their ideas about the
fragmented accounts in history making is that it is a novel which recreates the past and it
favors the fragmentation of knowledge in writing history as it consists of tiny little versions
of narratives which is made up by different characters. These characters highlight the
discontinuity in history in Foucault’s terms and the fictitious side of history making in
Hayden White’s terms. Additionally, There are some fictitious documents which are made up
by Edward P. Jones, deliberately to underline the impossibly of objective history writing.
Similarly, as each character gives his or her account in their narratives, we see that they are
forming their own kind of knowledge by adding up some background information, which
effects the way they narrate their history; in other words, the way they make their historical
knowledge. It somehow presents the reader with multiple layers of realities in the
representation of historical knowledge, and the instability of knowledge making and how this
process might be related to tiny bits and pieces of consciousness of the characters, even of the
author himself. So rather than defining total historical accounts which try to reveal the stable

8. Kahramanlar
8
and build a bridge between centuries, Edward P. Jones presents us with a postmodern text
which questions the totality of causal history making, on the grounds that he shows the reader
instability in the narration of his characters; instability in his own statements; he even
presents the reader with the instable nature of the text itself, which is shaky in its structure,
and it addresses to the dustiness of the writing process. As a result, the questions that are up
on the agenda, as they have been since the beginning of the paper, are: How do we know
anything? Where does the knowledge come from? How can we trust the author, if he himself
is fragmented? How can we trust his own characters, if the author is already fragmented?
How can we trust the text itself, if the text is fragmented?
The Known World is composed of tiny narrations of the characters that narrate the
time of Henry Townsend, a slave owner who lived in Manchester County. Almost all of these
tiny little accounts are related to fragmentation in knowledge making and in history. One
example about the fragmentation in the knowledge of characters’ accounts comes in Chapter
4 in which a pamphlet writer Anderson Frazier visits the town where Henry Townsend and
Caldonia Townsend live to collect the bits and pieces of stories from the locals to narrate the
story of Henry Townsend. The name of the pamphlet he is going to issue in the name of
Henry is called The Need for Story Telling. He is asking for help from Fern Elston, who used
to be Henry’s teacher. So at this part of the book, the reader is hearing Henry’s story from
one of the major characters, Fern Elston. In her account when she is narrating Henry’s story
to Anderson Frazier, also to the reader, we see that she does not expose Henry’s entire story
to the reader:

9. Kahramanlar
9
Fern looked down into the palm of her hand, had Anderson not been white and
a man, had the day not started out hot and gotten hotter, had she and her
husband not quarreled that morning about such a trifle it did not deserve the
name trifle, had the gambler not gone away to Baltimore a long time ago one
leg missing, had all of this not been so, Fern might have opened up to
Anderson. This is the truth, as I know it in my heart. (109)
The reader sees that Fern Elston’s narration, therefore the way she makes knowledge,
through which she is going to convey to Anderson Frazier who is going to publish a
pamphlet, a historical document about the slave owner Henry Townsend, depends on the skin
color of the interviewer, Anderson Frazier. Additionally, it has some relations with the
weather getting hot. We might assume her narration gets less willing as the weather gets
hotter. The whole fate of the narration “the truth as she knows in her heart”, even goes down
to her background and becomes more specific: It involves her quarrel with her husband that
morning before Anderson Frazier arrives to interview her. In former chapters, the reader is
informed by the fact that her relationship with her husband is problematic because of her
husband’s gambling habit. They have a weak relationship and she barely sees her husband as
he is pretty much occupied with gambling all the time. What is important here then, this kind
of loss of a husband figure in her life contributes to her willingness in her narration, in other
words, it effects her story telling; her making of knowledge in the pages of history.
Additionally, her husband, during that specific day in past when Frazier is taking down notes
for his new pamphlet, a historical document to be, has his role in making of history even
though he is barely aware.
Additionally, her willingness to narrate events as her heart tells her to narrate depends
on another gambler, Jebediah Dickinson whom Fern Elston’s husband, Ramsey Elston owed
500 dollars. Jebediah Dickinson’s mutual relationship with Fern Elston is exposed in the later
chapters when he comes to demand his money from his husband. However, Jebediah, a slave,

10. Kahramanlar
10
ends up getting locked up in Elston’s barn, where he got whipped several times because of
his wild nature, and willingness to obey Elstons. Fern Elston, as she is a wife whose husband
is away most of the time, finds a console in Jebediah’s words and becomes attached to him in
time. However, Dickinson loses his leg because he disobeys the orders and tells off the
Elstons. He gets sent off to Baltimore by Fern Elston to get a better life, with a lost leg, with
500 dollars unpaid. Fern Elston, now without the presence of Dickinson thinks about him all
the time, and his loss of presence effects her consciousness a great deal, which brings us to
another reason of her willingness to narrate history, the story of Henry Townsend: the loss of
narration equals to the loss of Jebediah Dickinson in her mind, which effects the narration of
the story.
As can be seen from the example of Fern Elston’s narration, which is related to the
bits and pieces of her background, the surrounding conditions which irrelevantly effects her
consciousness comes to light in her story telling and making of a history. Consequently,
Edward P. Jones employs this method of discontinuity, and the fragmentation of knowledge
in his character to highlight the fragmentation in the knowledge making process, which is not
linear, causal process and he highlights that in writing about the document, or an account is
not the same process as the account or the document itself: while the former needs
organization and rearrangement in the making of the knowledge, the latter is mostly related to
the trace, which is original in its nature but is exposed to fragmentation.
The second example comes with a different character, John Skiffington, the sheriff of
the town. He is responsible for enforcing the law in Manchester County. He also deals with
all types of a crime, slave escapees etc. In this specific scene, which takes place in
Skiffington’s office, he locks up a French slave seller, John Broussard for committing a
murder of his partner. John Broussard, formerly selling slaves, now locked up, has two
slaves: Moses and Bessie, who are also in Skiffington’s office, waiting for the Broussard’s to

11. Kahramanlar
11
be judged by the court. However, Skiffington has to sign a petition that will take Broussard to
the court. In other words, Skiffington is getting prepared to make a historical document in the
novel. However, in this specific scene, we see that due to a number of people coming into the
office, and because he starts to pay attention to some irrelevant details in the office, he gets
distracted and is having a hard time making the law and signing the petition and therefore,
making the knowledge. Overall, the reader is observing Skiffington struggling with his
consciousness while he is trying to sign the petition for Broussard. As he is writing down the
petition, he is also asking questions that can be associated with the whole historical
representation itself: “Nature of the alleged Crime. Are there witnesses to the alleged
Crime? Can such witnesses be believed?” (Jones 168). As can be seen, Edward P. Jones goes
down to every single detail, in this case, the how Skiffington writes the petition which is
concerned with Broussard killing his partner, and even scrutinizes the witnesses in this
document; whether to believe them or not. Accordingly, whether this crime occurred or not is
not at important here, what is more important is whether the witnesses can be believed or not.
Namely, Edward P. Jones is trying to establish a dichotomy between a historical event, a
murder, and how this historical event is represented through Skiffington who hesitates
whether he should trust the witnesses or not.
As Skiffington’s writing of this petition continues, the reader come to realize that his
distractions on his way to make knowledge get more intense. Robbins, and Henry Townsend
come to the office and start a negotiation on the two slaves who belong to Broussard: Bessie
and Moses. As they do not want to be sold separately, Bessie starts to cry and Moses starts to
beg Robbins not to separate them, which makes Skiffington uncomfortable, as it causes too
much noise and too much distraction:

12. Kahramanlar
12
“We together Massa,” Moses said to Skiffinton. “Me and Bessie
together. She all I have in this world. We is one as a family.” “I
know that,” Skiffington said, trying to write. “ Don’t you think I
know that? It occurred to him that a white woman might pass the
window and have her sensibilities offended by seeing a naked slave
man and he stood and went to the window, as a kind of distraction
for any woman passing. (173)
His lack of concentration, and his inability to write because of the interference of the
other characters are continuously affecting Skiffington because of his own consciousness
delay the knowledge making process. It even causes him to change his place from his table,
where he tries to write, to the window where he tries to distract the women to look inside his
office because he does not want them to see a naked slave inside his office. Edward P. Jones,
therefore, addresses to the Foucalian idea of discontinuity in the making of historical
knowledge with these kinds of delays in Skiffington’s making a historical document.
So far, what has been dealt with as far as the fragmentation of knowledge is
concerned is the way Edward P. Jones underlines the impossibility of the linearity in the
narration of history. He has shown it in two levels: the first one through the narration of Fern
Elston, and the second one through the inability of Skiffington in signing a petition. In every
one of them, characters’ consciousness plays a great role in making of knowledge and this
consciousness depends on multiple variables; in the former, these multiple variables become
effective in the narration of the character, in the latter, they are effective in the character
himself. Namely, while on the first example, the point is Fern Elston’s narration is
fragmented, in the latter, John Skiffington himself is fragmented and he fights with the up
and down curves of his brain while he makes the knowledge. In the Known World, however,
there are two other levels in the fragmentation of knowledge.

13. Kahramanlar
13
The next level of fragmentation in the book, therefore, is the fragmentation in the
account of the author. It addresses to the problem of how the author of the text could be
selective in writing a historical document. This quotation is about the details of Jean
Broussard’s trial right after John Skiffington finally signs his petition. What is important in
here is that, the details about the document regarding the death sentence of Broussard is full
of interesting and irrelevant details:
The records of the Jean Broussard trial, along with most of the judicial records
of nineteenth-century Manchester County, were destroyed in a 1912 fire that
killed ten people, including the Negro caretaker of the building where the
records were kept, and five dogs and two horses. The Broussard trial took one
day; actually, part of a day- the trial itself all that morning and the jury
deliberations a portion of the summer afternoon. One of the jurors was a man
who had studied the law at the College of William and Mary, where his father
and grandfather had gone. (176)
In this quotation the reader is faced with the author’s world of fragmentation. While
he gives the reader an account of Broussard’s trial he talks about the historical document that
got lost in a fire. What is striking is the fact that even though the reader cannot get an access
to the knowledge of Broussard’s trial details, he can easily reach the irrelevant information
concerning how many animals died in the fire. The author of the text goes even further and
narrates about the type of the animals that died in the fire. Furthermore, the reader has the
information about the day of the trial; he gets access to a kind of knowledge which gives
details about the conditions of the trial day; that it is a summer afternoon and that it took
place all the morning of that specific summer day; It even goes to the specific details about
one of the jurors who studied at the College of William and Mary. Furthermore, the reader

14. Kahramanlar
14
can get an access to this jury member’s father and grandfather who also had gone to the
College of William and Mary.
While on one hand, we have all this information about the dogs and horses that died
in the fire which destroyed the details of the Broussard trial, or we even know the details
about the day when the trial took place, or even when we know about the details of the
grandfather of a jury member who participated in the trial; we cannot even access to a single
letter of a document of Broussard’s trial. This kind of knowledge is the author’s selective
knowledge. Edward P. Jones presents us with a selective consciousness, this time, not Fern
Elston’s, not John Skiffington’s but his consciousness itself.
Within this aspect, the reader is presented to a problematic nature in the making of
historical knowledge. As a result, the questions about the problematic nature of the
knowledge making come to light one more time: How can we trust Fern Elston, if her
narration is not causal but depends on multiple layers of fragmentation such as the skin of
Anderson Frazier? How can we trust John Skiffington in the signing a petition for
Broussard’s trial if he cannot continue his making of knowledge and write it because of many
factors which affects him, such as his fear of people down the street who might see the slaves
naked, or the crowd in his office which continuously delay his act of writing a petition?
Above all, how can we trust Edward P. Jones when he deliberately refuses to provide the
reader with a historical document that is destroyed in the fire back in the past, but he still
talks about irrelevant details about the fire? How can we trust him when the reader can know
the types of animals that died in the fire, but cannot reach even a piece of a letter which might
survive from the actual document from Broussard’s trial? Therefore, if the author himself is
selective in the making of knowledge himself, how can we trust the author?
Especially, after this quotation we see that Edward P. Jones is deliberately employing
these kind of delays to address to the other side of historical writing; he wants to highlight the

15. Kahramanlar
15
idea that historical text should be aware of its fictitious nature in the sense that it doesn’t
work like a science, or the very nature of it does not always depend on causality or linearity;
instead, discontinuity is at play in this phase. In this sense, Edward P. Jones is on the same
page with Michel Foucault and Hayden White. In my opinion, the common point among
them is they all celebrate the idea that other doors should be open and other voices should be
heard when it comes to making of knowledge and that one should consider accepting
discontinuity in the making of the knowledge.
So far what has come to light are the fragmentation in character’s accounts, characters
themselves, and the fragmentation in the author himself. On this last level, I am going to
argue whether the reader can trust the text itself. In chapter four, there is a dialogue between
Henry Townsend and Caldonia Townsend, This specific dialogue takes place in Fern Elston’s
dinner table. This is the first time Henry meets Caldonia, whom he is going to get married
later. Henry and Caldonia are in the middle of a conversation about how to ride a horse.
Henry tries to show how to ride a horse to Caldonia. He takes the pepper shaker in his hands
and moves the pepper shaker in the table to show how she should be situated and how she
should ride the horse. However, the way Edward P. Jones narrates this specific scene calls to
the mind the writing process itself:
“Oh,” she said after he said he saw her riding ”You keep your head down
and that ain’t right,” Henry said. He took the pepper shaker in his right
hand, extended his arm before him and moved the arm from right to left.
Everyone at the table was now watching him. The hand with the shaker
moved smoothly, gracefully from the right to the left. “Thas how
everybody else rides,” Henry said. “Me and everybody else.” Henry put
the pepper shaker in his left hand, tipped it and moved his arm less
gracefully from the left to the right. And as it moved, pepper poured out of
the shaker onto Fern’s white tablecloth. He said, “I’m sorry to say this, but
thas how you ride.” Henry did this with the shaker several- going from
right to left, the pepper shaker was upright, but going from left to the right,
the pepper flowed down. Fern thought that there was something sad about
the pepper falling, and it was all the sadder because it really didn’t have to
be that way. She said to Anderson, “This was his clumsy way of telling
Caldonia she was losing something by not looking up.”(142)

16. Kahramanlar
16
In the close reading of this specific scene, important details about the self-reflexivity
of the text come to light. On a surface level, Henry tries to tell Caldonia how to ride a horse
by moving the pepper shaker first, from right to the left, second from left to the right. On a
deeper level, on the other hand, the reader is witnessing Edward P. Jones, through his main
character Henry, stressing upon the idea that the writing process itself is fragmented. It can be
understood from the way Henry moves the pepper shaker. First he moves it from the right to
the left, and it runs smoothly, which might be associated with causality and linearity in
making the knowledge, or creating a discourse. But when he moves the pepper shaker from
left to the right, that’s when the pepper spills onto the tablecloth. That’s when in the world of
Foucault and Hayden White and what they come to represent as far as the making of
knowledge is concerned, the world of discontinuity interrupts the author and he makes his
movement from left to right, that’s when the knowledge making process begins with the
discontinuity, which is, as can be read from the quotation, less graceful as the process itself
has a complication as it is composed of multiple layers. The pepper shaker might be
associated with Edward P. Jones’ pen because the dust pepper only spills down when he
starts his movement from the left and goes to the right. Judging by the fact that he spills it
over to a white tablecloth is another reference to writing on the white paper in the sense that
both the tablecloth and the paper have the same white color.
The most important side of this analogy comes when the very nature of spilling process is
associated with writing process. Because if the writing process itself is associated with
spilling pepper on the table, it is also possible to comment that, the pepper on the table is
dusty, therefore, it is not going to be there a long time. Accordingly, this analogy shows the
reader fragmentation in writing and knowledge making process. As pepper spills over on the

17. Kahramanlar
17
white table cloth, it does not stand there as a whole but as dusty pepper pieces each one of
which is scattered all over the table. Consequently, Edward P. Jones wants to put a stress on
the dustiness of the words in the writing process and how scattered the words are in the brain
of the author as he makes his knowledge process. Once again, Edward P. Jones shows the
dichotomy between the assumption that the knowledge making is linear and causal in its
structure, and that it is actually fragmented and it is discontinuous. As far as the writing
process and the fragility of it, as it is seen in this quotation, are concerned, we come to realize
that, we cannot trust the characters; we cannot trust the author; we even cannot trust the text
itself as it is shaky and dusty process.
How do we know anything? Where does the knowledge come from? Can we trust a
historian? Can we trust an author, when they are dealing with the events of the past? Can they
compensate for the loss of the voices; voices that haven’t spoken, which could not narrate
their own stories? In historian’s or an author’s verbal image of reality, can we hear about the
other people who are outside this picture? Can we trust the text itself when the text itself is as
dusty as a pepper shaker? How can we trust Fern Elston, when she is obsessed with Jebediah
Dickinson as he narrates her story? Can we trust Skiffington while he cannot sign a petition
because the people distract him easily in his office? Can we trust Edward P. Jones in his
narration of his story when he selects to give irrelevant details about Broussard’s case but
rejects to provide the reader with the actual document itself? Maybe the reader cannot trust
them, but the new history and the representatives of it; Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and
because of Edward P. Jones’ multiple voices in the narrating history, at least open the reader
a new window that there might be possible effects, actions, thoughts, narrations and the
discontinuities in these narrations which can effect the knowledge making process. These
type of characters, in Edward P. Jones’ the Known World, takes the reader to another
dimension, where there might still be some voices that might be unheard, some actions,

18. Kahramanlar
18
which might look irrelevant in writing history; but they are there. They are the fragmented
dimensions, fragmented voices, the discontinuities that now can find their voices thanks to
the narration of Edward P. Jones, and the studies of Michel Foucault and Hayden White.

19. Kahramanlar
19
Works Cited
Foucault, M. (1976) Archaeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: HarperCollins (paper)
Jones, E. P. (2003) The Known World. New York: HarperCollins
White, H.V. and White, P. H. (1978) Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press