Garry Gillard > writing > lectures > 237 > 01
H237 Narrative Fiction 2 lecture 1 1995
Wednesday 19 July 0930 EH 2.22: Introduction
This is the first lecture for H237 Narrative Fiction 2. Welcome to the course unit: I hope you not only enjoy it but get what you want from it!
My room is EH 2.6 and my phone number at Murdoch is 360 2389.
A few announcements first. Tutorials are Wednesday 1430 and Thursday 1530: only the two, I'm afraid, for the 39 or so of you as at this morning (there are also 13 externals), so each will be quite crowded. If you are going to withdraw from this unit I'd be very grateful if you would do so by the end of this week, as I may have to offer an additional tutorial. If I do, it will be at 1030 on Friday in EH 2.27. There is no tutorial during the first week. Please write your name on one of the sheets. The Study Guide and Reader is available from the Bookshop window for about $8: good value. Please buy and read. I've handed out the internal Study Guide. There are some differences between the Study Guide in the printed book and these sheets, and where they differ it is the stapled sheets which are the official version. This unit is Vijay Mishra's design, and his choice of texts, and the Study Guide and Reader was prepared by Vijay Mishra. All the set texts are available and reasonably priced - the primary texts - at Murdoch Bookshop prices - add up to $129.15 - though the Waugh is another $30. It is, however, a good anthology, in the sense of its selection of postmodernist writing. I'll refer to it whenever I can, and will do in a moment during this lecture. These lectures are not being recorded: there are no facilities in this room.
Assessment is on the SG sheets. You might want to note particularly that although there is an exam, it will be during the lecture time in Week 13. I hope you will find this a bit more pleasant than a formally invigilated examination during the assessment period. What I'll be asking you do in that class test/exam is demonstrate that you have in fact read the set texts and you have some understanding of what the unit has been about, including the notions modernism and postmodernism. I've decided that tutorial papers are in fact a good idea, and I was very pleased with the papers given in Narrative Fiction 1. With only ten primary texts and perhaps twenty in one so-called 'tutorial' we'll have to have two papers in almost every tute, so I want you to sign up for a novel and a week as soon as you're ready, and don't exceed two per tute, please. I would prefer you to give me a copy of the paper, so I can give more careful consideration to the grading - rather than just getting an impression as you're giving it, when I'd rather be thinking about how to use it in the discussion. The idea of a tutorial paper - apart from showing off some of your vast knowledge of the subject - is to provide a stimulus for discussion: so your paper should not be too long, so as to leave time for that discussion; and it should be lively and provocative if possible. If you could actually manage to give me the copy of the paper before you read, so that I can follow better and note what points I'd like to direct attention to - that would be excellent - but I realise I'm asking a lot!
This lecture will attempt to be an introduction to the unit, and specifically to those concepts - modernism and postmodernism - in relation to a few of the set texts.
This unit continues the study of the novel which began in the first semester unit Narrative Fiction 1. That study saw the origins of the classical European novel as beginning with the Spanish picaresque novel of the sixteenth century, [1] and broke off just before the turn of this century, with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. [2] This unit begins just after the turn of this century - just as if we'd planned it that way - with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, first published by Dent in 1902, followed by Sigmund Freud's amazing tale about Dora, which he actually wrote in 1901, but did not publish until 1905. I find it amusing to think that Conrad was delving into the heart of the Dark Continent at the very same moment as Freud was plumbing what he thought was Dora's dark heart - but which was really his own.
This unit has a subtitle, 'Modernism/Postmodern' - whether unfortunately or not, I'm not sure - but it does have the effect of focusing the mind. The two units now called Narrative Fiction 1 and 2 were at one time differentiated as Theory of the Novel and Comparative Studies in the Novel. In 1978, John Frow taught H229 as Theory of the Novel, when it was described in much the same terms as in 1995. John's idea at one point was to teach a particular novel in relation to a particular theorist or book, and so, for example, to read Tom Jones in relation to one of Lukács's books: The Historical Novel, for example. Also in 1978, M. Didier Coste offered H237 as Comparative Studies in the Novel, for which the primary texts were written by Arenas, Banerji, Burroughs, Faulkner, Fowles, Gorki, Joyce, Kafka, Kawabata, Lezama Lima, Mann, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Sartre, Sillitoe, and Volponi. There was no unit in Postcolonial Writing then, as there is now, and so any interest in post-colonialist texts had to be taken up in the genre unit, as you can see from some of the authors' names. But the main interest in H237 has always been in a sort of diaspora of fairly recent twentieth century novel texts from all over the place, reflected in the name change, in 1983, to Contemporary Studies in the Novel. Thankfully, this year's field is somewhat more confined than has been the case in the past, and it should actually be possible for all of you to read all of the primary texts. And that is your primary objective!
The current course description has introduced a new idea or two since the days of Frow and Coste, and, as you know, currently goes like this: 'This unit deals with a range of significant modern and postmodern novels. The unit examines the major twentieth century English novelists, with a strong emphasis towards the end on postcolonial writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie who expand the cultural and generic limitations of the novel form.' So there are apparently two distinct approaches which we take up: one directed to the question of the postmodern, the other to the question of the postcolonial - both very difficult questions to deal with.
John Hartley, of blessed memory, and like so many of our best people, departed for a Chair elsewhere, used to say that his Program, Communication Studies, did Pomo, while the other one, English and Comparative Literature, did Poco. Well, it's not entirely true, John: we do both! - and especially in this unit.
What are modernism and postmodernism? That is a question - or two questions, I suppose - that I expect you will be able to answer with some authority by the end of this unit: I hope I shall be able to also. You see: I'm doing this unit too. The curriculum is laid down by my colleague Vijay Mishra, who is too valuable a scholar to be available for teaching at the moment, and who is therefore being replaced by me. For technical reasons there was no time for us to consult about the approach to this course, and so I have simply inherited it in this form, with this rubric and with the set text by Patricia Waugh. [3] And so I see these questions as being asked of me also, and I see us as approaching an answer - or some answers - together.
At this stage, therefore, I shall merely indicate to you some of the answers that other people have given to these questions. I suppose we could start with people at this University: Alec McHoul perhaps. He writes this, in the MS of his latest, as yet unpublished book: 'I am in broad agreement with [John] Frow's opening assumption: "that the word ['postmodernism'] can be taken as designating nothing more than a genre of theoretical writing."' [4] Alec is quoting John from his 1991 book What was Postmodernism? [5] where he writes: 'But rather than try to unravel the "meaning" of the concept of postmodernism, let me suggest [and I think the quotation is worth repeating] that the word can be taken as designating nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing.' [6] I draw your attention to the 'ism' on the end of the word: it is an indication that we are not dealing with anything in the real word, but only an idea, an ideology, a fiction.
I won't be able to go on for much longer in this lecture without referring to Brian McHale, who I have found to be the simplest, clearest writer on this subject. [7] (Even the blessed John Frow, after his clear beginning, gets bogged down in the technicalities of history.) A section of one of McHale's books has been excerpted by Patricia Waugh in the set text, Postmodernism: A Reader. It's the beginning of Chapter 8 - only the first third of the chapter, but it does give you a sample of the clarity of McHale's way of thinking and explaining things. That section made a number of things much clearer for me: Genette's diegesis and hypodiegetic structures, Douglas Hofstadter's "stack" of narrative levels - even mise en abyme, which I thought I was pretty clear about, becomes even more clear in McHale. So I strongly recommend him to you - although there are only two copies of Postmodernist Fiction in the Murdoch Library and one of his later book, Constructing Postmodernism.
At the beginning of the first book, Postmodernist Fiction, McHale characteristically sums up the whole book in one sentence: ''This [he writes] is essentially a one-idea book - an admission that probably ought to embarrass me more than it in fact does. The idea is simply stated: postmodernist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues.' [8] Let's unpack that! He seems to be saying that the essential difference, in his thesis, between modernist and postmodernist fiction is that one is dominated by questions about ontology and the other by questions about epistemology. Epistemological questions have to do with how we come to know things, from the Greek word for knowledge: 'episteme'. The dictionary definition of 'epistemology' is 'theory of the method or grounds of knowledge.' Ontological questions are more fundamental, and have to do with what is. This is also from the Greek: from the Greek word for 'being,' and ontology is defined in a dictionary as the 'branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.' So, postmodernist texts, it is claimed, are less interested in the means of knowing and inquire into the nature of the things that we know, whereas modernist texts don't take knowing for granted, but rather inquire into what knowing is and how we come to know and what it means to claim to know something. In that sense postmodernism is more fundamental, saying: before we get around to the superficies of how we come to know the nature of things, we'd better see first what kinds of things there are to know.
I think it's probably useful if I try to impress on you this one idea just as a starting-point, and not claiming any superioritiy for it, and to underline it, I quote from David Harvey, who writes that
The postmodern novel, McHale (1987) argues, is characterized by a shift from an 'epistemological' to an 'ontological' dominant. By this he means a shift from the kind of perspectivism that allowed the modernist to get a better bearing on the meaning of a complex but nevertheless singular reality, to the foregrounding of questions as to how radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate. [9]
By 'perspectivism' I take Harvey to mean: 'way of representing the world.' And according to this view the modernist sees this represented world as have a singular reality, but one that is complex and multi-faceted, having many aspects; whereas the postmodernist sees the world he or she represents as having not a singular reality but containing many different realities which are not capable of being read together, but will always compete.
One other thing that I want to stress about McHale's argument is the word 'poetics.' He states the thesis in the form of an analogy. He doesn't actually say what I've just seemed to say: that postmodernist fiction is dominated by ontological issues while modernist fiction is dominated by epistemological issues. He's saying that the difference is analogical with the difference between two poetics; and it's the two poetics which differ in that way.
What's a poetics when it's at home? Well, as I suggested last semester, it's what we more generally call 'theory' here at Murdoch: that is, the theory of literature. As Jonathan Culler writes, 'When poetics studies individual works, it seeks not to interpret them but to discover the structures and conventions of literary discourse which enable them to have the meanings they do.' [10] Rather than writing about the actual literary works of art themselves, poetics is writing about the nature of literary works of art.
I can now go back to John Frow and expand a bit on the main idea I was taking from him when he wrote that postmodernism is 'a genre of theoretical writing.' The point is that we are not primarily talking about postmodern writing, some kind of particular literary genre which exists in certain texts by certain writers, but about a poetics of postmodernist writing, writing about particular literary works - perhaps in certain texts by certain writers, or perhaps only in particular aspects of certain texts by certain writers.
Or, to put it more simply, as does Brian McHale, 'postmodernism, the thing, does not exist ...' It does not exist 'precisely in the way that "the Renaissance" or "romanticism" do not exist. There is no postmodernism "out there" in the world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or a romanticism "out there." These are all literary-historical fictions, discursive artefacts constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians. And since they are discursive constructs rather than real-world objects, it is possible to construct them in a variety of ways, making it necessary for us to discriminate among, say, the various constructions of romanticism ...' [11] So now it's clear why it seems to be so difficult to find one simple definition of postmodernism: it's because - by definition - there cannot be one!
Nevertheless, obviously, one has to start somehow, and McHale starts by trying to think of some single characteristic that can be seen as defining 'modernism' - since obviously it you're dealing with 'post' modernism it has to have something to do with the older term - and what he comes up with is Tynjanov's notion of the 'dominant.' We come to know about this through Roman Jakobson, who writes that 'The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure ...' When we perceive a different dominant, according to Jakobson/McHale, we are in the presence of a different genre, or mood, or what-you-will, and this is what McHale claims, by a backward process of definition, is the difference between postmodernist fiction and modernist fiction: they have a different dominant. And to return to what I was setting out a moment ago: the difference is the difference between ontological and epistemological issues.
Let's look at one or two of the classic modernist texts on our syllabus: take Heart of Darkness for example. Is it dominated by these kinds of questions: '"How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?" Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable?' [12] I suggest that it so dominated.
In another text, To the Lighthouse, the narrator at one point imagines this: 'the mystic, the visionary, walked the beach, stirred a puddle, looked at a stone, and asked themselves 'What am I?' 'What is this?' and suddenly an answer was vouchsafed them (what it was they could not say): so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert.' [13] And again, this time from one of the characters: 'What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behoved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. What does it mean? - a catchword that was, caught up from some book fitting her thought loosely ...' [14] Lily later in the book cannot 'achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces ...' and she smiles ironically (in an authorial kind of way): 'for had she not thought, when she began, that she had solved her problem?' [15] And indeed the book ends precisely with the solution of Lily's problem: 'With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.' [16]
'[C]haracters in many classic modernist texts' writes Brian McHale ' - Henry James's and Joseph Conrad's, for instance - sift through the evidence of witnesses of different degrees of reliability in order to reconstruct and solve a "crime"' [17] I think this applies perfectly to our text. Kurtz has certainly committed a crime of some sort, and probably crimes plural. And Marlow's personal quest is for knowledge: he wants to find out not only what Kurtz's crimes are but also why he carried them out. And in the process he interrogates various sources of information: almost everyone with whom he comes into contact in the course of the narrative gives him some information which seems to be part of a whole: Marlow's aunt, the Company official that hires him, the doctor who checks his state of health, the Swedish captain of the steamer, the Company's chief accountant, the Manager of the station, the aristocratic manager's 'spy,' even Towser or Towson, the author of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, as well as the 'harlequin' Russian, 'Kurtz's cousin,' and so on and so on, terminating perhaps with the Intended - even she has some detail to add to the composite picture.
Turning now to the other end of the pole on which the unit turns: I come to the question: what is postmodernism? I'll return to McHale's line on that in just a moment, but first it behoves me to refer to a couple/three of the classic texts which are usually thought of as originary, and they are represented of course in your Patricia Waugh set text: and I'm thinking specifically of Lyotard and Jameson.
I shall, however, have to begin by sketching some definitions of these terms, and I hope you'll bear with me if this is already familiar territory. I begin with Lyotard, who writes (in a passage unfortunately not reprinted in Waugh):
I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institutions which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements ... [18]
So: modernism is a mode of thought which employs what Lyotard calls 'grand narratives', or meta-narratives. An important example of such a narrative is the grand narrative of Freud, which tells the story of how each human being enters the great struggle for the satisfaction of their desires, a struggle fought out in the arena of the family. Another example is that of Karl Marx, whose story concerns the liberation of each worker in a future in which they have united and agreed to share the common property for the good of all. A third is found in the thought of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who believed that his own science, anthropology, the study of man [sic], was also 'entropology', the study of entropy, of the descent of humankind into meaninglessness, as our contract with our original selves and with nature is gradually dissipated. Each of these thinkers, according to George Steiner, is caught up in a 'nostalgia for the absolute', a quest either for a lost innocence in the past or for a future in which we will recover a lost paradise. [19] Other examples may be found in the work of Durkheim, Bergson, and so on.
Of course, not everyone simply takes Lyotard's hypothesis uncritically on board. 'Linda Hutcheon ... accuses Lyotard of having produced "an obviously meta-narrative theory of postmodernism's incredulity to meta-narrative."' [20] And 'John Mepham has written that Lyotard "tells a simple tale about the naivety of tale-telling, grandly narrativizes his incredulity towards grand narrative."' [21] In other words, he does himself precisely what he critiques others for doing. But we'll entertain Lyotard a little longer.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a mode of thought trying to come to terms with the loss of that sense of direction which is a characteristic of that unified sense of identity and purpose which is found in the modernist world. And this seems to me to have had direct application to the worlds of narrative fiction, as, among other things, they are precisely intended to represent these modes of thought in terms of character and action. So that a modernist novel will tend to have a definite sense of direction, perhaps even inevitability, destiny, in the lives of the characters who appear in it. (Though we should note that the direction does not necessarily have to be 'upwardly moral', to coin a phrase. All that matters is that there is direction, and a sense of identity and of place.) And a characteristic postmodern novel will contain 'dazed and distracted characters,' suggests Brian McHale, who 'wander through an "anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural" without a clear sense of location, wondering, "Which world am I in and which of my personalities do I deploy?"' [22] And I quote David Harvey again.
Spaces of very different worlds seem to collapse upon each other, much as the world's commodities are assembled in the supermarket and all manner of [302] sub-cultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city. Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen. [23]
So we are dealing with values expressed at a high level of abstraction, which we could apply to the narrative by Camus set for this unit to see if his hero 'works toward a good ethico-political end,' to return to the quotation from Lyotard, or if, on the other hand if its 'narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal,' if The Outsider is 'being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements.'
Is it useful to think of Camus's novel as being in some ways postmodern? One way to work on the answer to this question might be to look at the table set out by Ihab Hassan, of 'Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism.' [24] Hassan is also excerpted in the Patricia Waugh text.
Table 1.1 Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism [25]
modernism - postmodernism
romanticism/Symbolism - paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) - antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose - play
design - chance
hierarchy - anarchy
mastery/logos- exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work - process/performance/happening
distance - participation
creation/totalization/synthesis - decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
presence - absence
centring - dispersal
genre/boundary - text/intertext
semantics - rhetoric
paradigm - syntagm
hypotaxis - parataxis
metaphor - metonymy
selection - combination
root/depth - rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading - against interpretation/misreading
signified - signifier
lisible (readerly) - scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire - anti-narrative/petite histoire
master code - idiolect
symptom - desire
type - mutant
genital/phallic - polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia - schizophrenia
origin/cause - difference-differance/trace
God the Father - The Holy Ghost
metaphysics - irony
determinacy - indeterminacy
transcendence - immanence
monoglossia - heteroglossia
Some of the items in this table are clearly irrelevant in the present context, and I certainly won't try to deal with all of them. In fact I shall select only a few of the items, more or less at random, to simplify the presentation for this purpose, and I have also suggested an addition: monoglossia/heteroglossia. The last pair of terms, which I would add to Hassan's list, derive of course from Bakhtin. Monoglossia refers to the way in which 'an official culture and authority seeks to reduce meaning to a univocal, unproblematic, authorized, single signification;' [26] while heteroglossia, on the other hand 'allows the polyphonic articulation of ideas and sentiments different from or [22] contradictory of those preferred by the monoglossic discourse of official culture.' [27]
These items in these lists of Hassan's I'm going to suggest may be mapped onto the singular distinction made by McHale with respect to the principal difference between modernist and postmodernist texts, namely the difference, in McHale's terms, between an epistemological dominant and an ontological dominant, and therefore, moving to Hassan's terms, the difference between the foregrounding of the kinds of items found in Hassan's first columns and those found in his second.
Taking The Outsider as an example of how this might be applied in practice, and of course I'll be taking this up in more detail in the ninth week of the course, I want to suggest that one way of reading this text is to see in it a conflict or contestation between two ways of being in the world, which are capable of characterisation as modernist and postmodernist.
Take the first pair of opposites in the boxed section of the Hassan list: purpose/play. It seems to me that of these two the one that is dominant in the Meursault's life as represented in the novel is definitely play. Many of the other characters are represented as not only displaying purpose, and not only displaying it, but requiring it of the central character, who is consistently reluctant to consider such a question. In the trial scene (I'm beginning to think a trial scene is a sine qua non of a novel - we've found so many in the novels we've been considering) in the trial scene the point of the exercise for almost all of the participants is of course an epistemological one: they want to know why Meursault did it; I suggest that he does not. Similarly his employer, the caretaker at the asylum - all the minor characters know what they want to know. Even Raymond takes Meursault's advice about to deal with his girl, because he wants to know what is the best thing to do. Meursault, however, more than anything wants to be. I suggest that the most significant moments in his consciousness are the experiential moments, when he is involved with his body, with his environment, and with his emotions: when he is playing the sea with Marie, and then having sex with her, when he is running after the truck with his workmate, when he is overcome by the blinding sun in the scene with the Arabs, and finally, when he anticipates his execution scene, which he anticipates will be an emotional event for all concerned.
Similarly, the design/chance dichotomy is crucial to the central event in the novel: much of the dialogue in the second half of the novel turns on whether Meursault meant to do what he does at the turning point, and if so why. We, with our privileged view through what I call 'Meursault-cam[era],' know that there is a greater element of chance in what he does than design.
And again similarly for the hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy. And again Meursault is ranged against the other characters who want him to show a proper respect for social hierarchies rather than behave in the anarchic way in which he does. Or, to put it more precisely, the question of the precisely appropriate relationship between hierarchy and anarchy is foregrounded by this narrative.
I have no time to continue this demonstration at present - I hope to have an opportunity to continue in more detail in Week 8 - so let me rather try to sum up my reading of The Outsider in the context of this course unit. I see it as being very close to being one of McHale's 'limit-modernist' texts, novels which he sees as hesitating between two 'dominants,' or, to put in another way, as being capable of being read in two different ways, in a modernist or a postmodernist context.
This is, for example, what he has to say about Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies (1951), the second novel of the Beckett 'trilogy' - and I think this applies also to The Outsider (1942):
... there is here some hesitation between an epistemological dominant and an ontological dominant. Both epistemological and ontological questions seem to be raised by this text, but which focus of attention dominates depends upon how we look at the text. In this respect, Malone Dies recalls the figure/ground paradox of the Gestalt psychologists: looked at one way, the picture seems to represent (say) a goblet, looked at the other way, it represents two faces. Analogously, looked at the other way, Malone [13] Dies seems to be focused on epistemological issues, while looked at another way it seems to be focused on ontological issues. I would like to reserve for texts of this type - hesitant texts, goblet/face texts - the label of 'limit-modernist' ...
I don't believe McHale sees his key terms as being periodising concepts, and yet if you construct a schematic summary of his first chapter (which he calls 'From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant,' the conclusion that it is periodising is difficult to avoid. Here is the chart which sums up his identification of these 'limit-modernist' texts, and you'll see that it has a precise turning-point. McHale himself does not make this point, but, as I say, I find it very hard to resist.
For McHale, the moment of the transition from modernist to postmodernist poetics is:
1951 Beckett, Malone Dies
1959 Robbe-Grillet, Dans le labyrinthe
1962 Nabokov, Pale Fire, perhaps the paradigmatic limit-modernist novel
1967 Fuentes, Change of Skin
1968 Coover, The Universal Baseball Association Inc.
1973 Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
McHale works through the relevant texts of these six authors and in each case identifies at least one work which he sees in his terms as modernist and also at least one work which he sees as postmodernist - and also at least one work which he sees as being a 'limit-modernist' case. I took the trouble to note these, as I've shown you, and was delighted to find that of these six 'limit-modernist' texts there was one that was as close as it could be to the centre of the period accidentally identified by the dates of first publication of these texts, and that text he identifies as 'perhaps the paradigmatic limit-modernist novel' - and that novel, Pale Fire, was first published right in the middle of the twelve year period covered by these typical 'limit-modernist' texts. I therefore have great pleasure in announcing 1962 as the annus mirabilis: the year of the postmodernist text!
Now, in case you are not already aware that this is a dangerous hypothesis, let me say so explicitly - it is. However, it may be a useful idea for you to critique, at least some kind of starting-point, perhaps the kind of ladder that Wittgenstein imagines at the end of the Tractatus Philosophicus which you climb up and then kick away after you - or, in the words of that great sage, Jimmy Buffet: 'We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.'
1 Anon., Lazarillo de Tormes, 1564.
2 First published 1898.
3 Waugh, Patricia 1992, Postmodernism: A Reader, Edward Arnold, London.
4 McHoul, Alec, Effective Semiotics, unpublished MS, Chapter 14: page 3 of chapter.
5 Frow, John 1991, What was Postmodernism? Local Consumption Publications, Sydney.
6 Frow 1991: 3.
7 McHale, Brian 1987, Postmodernist Fiction, Methuen, New York & London; repr. 1989, Routledge, New York & London.
McHale, Brian 1992, Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, London & New York.
8 McHale 1987: xii.
9 Harvey, David 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford: 41.
10 Culler, Jonathan 1977, 'Foreword,' Tzvetan Todorov 1977 [Fr. 1971], The Poetics of Prose, Blackwell, Oxford: 8.
11 McHale 1987: 4.
11a McHale 1987: 6, citing Roman Jakobson 1971, 'The dominant,' in Matejka, Ladislav, & Pomorska, Krystyna (eds) 1971, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.: 105.
12 McHale 1987: 9.
13 Woolf, Virginia 1964 [1927], To the Lighthouse, Penguin [Hogarth]: 150.
14 Woolf 1964 [1927]: 165.
15 Woolf 1964 [1927]: 219.
16 Woolf 1964 [1927]: 237.
17 McHale1987: 9.
18 Lyotard, Jean-François 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trs. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Foreword by Fredric Jameson: xxiii-xxiv.
19 Steiner, George 1974, Nostalgia for the Absolute, CBC, Toronto.
20 Hutcheon, Linda 1988, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, London and New York: 198; as cited by McHale 1987: 5-6.
21 Mepham, John 1991, 'Narratives of postmodernism,' in Smyth, Edmund ed. Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, Batsford, London: 147; as cited by McHale 1987: 6.
22 Harvey 1989: 301, quoting McHale1987 [n.p].
23 Harvey 1989: 301-2.
24 Hassan, Ihab 1975, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times, Illinois University Press, Urbana, Ill. Hassan, Ihab 1985, 'The culture of postmodernism,' Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3, 119-32.
25 Hassan 1985: 123-4.
26 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trs. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (from Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow, 1975), University of Texas Press, Austin and London: 61.
27 Bakhtin, 1981: 262-3.
Garry Gillard | New: 5 February, 2018 | Now: 20 December, 2018