Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987)

from: Brian McHale. Posmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Preface

• Brian McHale, Tel Aviv, July 1985 and Pittsburgh, May 1986
• xi: states that his book "falls under the category of descriptive poetics [...], it does aspire to contribute to literary theory"

Excerpt

 Part One: Preliminaries

1: From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant

• 4-5: acknowledges the variety of constructions of postmodernism but welcomes a hierarchy of these constructions based on several criteria: of self-consistency and internal coherence, of scope, of productiveness, and of interest
• 5: accepts Ihab Hassan's definition of the postmodernism as posterior to, not after modernism

The dominant

• 7 - Instead of turning to a catalogue of postmodernist features (quotes David Lodge, Ihab Hassan, Peter Wollen's binary definitions of modern and post-modern), he opts for the conceptual tool of the dominant (cf. Roman Jacobson) in order not to view the two as oppositions but to show the transitions between them.
• 9 - Example of William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!. "I will formulate it as a general thesis about modernist fiction: the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: '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 know 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? And so on." The above mentioned questions are handled "through the use of characteristically modernist (or epistemological) devices: the multiplication and juxtaposition of perspectives, the focalization of all the evidence through a single 'center of consciousness' […], virtuoso variants on interior monologue […] ,and so on."
• 10 - Faulkner's novel crosses the boundary between modernist and postmodernist because it shifts its "dominant from problems of knowing to problems of modes of being. "This brings me to a second general thesis, this time about postmodernist fiction: the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls 'post-cognitive': 'Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?' Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance. What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; what happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on."
• 11 - The above mentioned definitions are to be seen from the perspective of the dominant, i.e. it is not a question of either or but rather that of which set of questions is to be asked first, i.e. both sets need to be asked, they are "bidirectional and reversible".

Beckett

• 13 – When a text can be looked at from two angles, at one time displaying a focus on epistemological issues, at another on ontological issues, McHale speaks of “limit-modernist”, or “late-modernism”.

Robbe-Grillet

• 13 – The difference between modernist and postmodernist can be compared to the difference between the French terminology of ‘nouveau roman’ and ‘nouveau nouveau roman’
• 14 – “a modernist epistemological ‘’topos’’, the of the ‘’voyeur’’”
• 15 – in modernist texts, space is “modular or ‘’serial’’”, in postmodernist texts it is paradoxical, “defying out attempts at orderly reconstruction”

Fuentes

• 16 – “Science fiction, we might say, is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the ontological genre ‘’par excellence’’ (as the detective story is the epistemological genre ‘’par excellence’’), and so serves as a source of materials and models for postmodernist writers […].”
• 17 - The case with historical novels is more complex: traditional historical novels suppress the violations “between characters in their projected worlds and real-world historical figures”, while postmodernist historical novels highlight “ontological seams by systematically transgressing these rules”.

Nabokov

• 19 – ‘’Pale Fire’’ as “he paradigmatic limit-modernist novel”

Coover

• 21 – “Here characters of different and incompatible ontological statuses – real-world historical figures, corporate trade-marks […] and national symbols […], purely fictional characters – have been gathered together in an impossible, heterotopian locus which is also, according to Coover, ‘the ritual center of the Western World.”

Pynchon

• 21 – “in a stylization, the dominant of the original 8the model being stylized) is preserved, while in parody it is not”
• 25 – Based on a phrase by Annie Dillard, McHale concludes that postmodernist fiction “gives us a pretext for doing unlicensed ontology in a teacup”.

2: Some ontologies of fiction

The social construction of (un)reality

 Part Two: Worlds

6: Real, compared to what?

Historical fantasy

 Part Three: Construction

8: Chinese-box worlds

Which is reel?

 Part Four: Words

11: Worlds of discourse

Carnival

 Part Five: Groundings

13: Authors: dead and posthumous

Short-circuit

 Part Six: How I learned to stop worrying and love postmodernism

Comment

	modernism	postmodernism
dominant	epistemological	ontological
genre	detective story, historical fiction suppressing its seams	science fiction, historical fictions foregrounding its seams
topoi, motifs, themes	voyeurism, illusion and reality	a Klein bottle, roman à clef
time	memory	different periods telescoped into a single present
space	modular or serial	paradoxical, Foucault’s heterotopia
structure	the uncanny	'another world's intrusion into this one'
narration	unreliability, joint narration, multiple focalization and juxtaposed perspectives, interior monologue, deathbed monologue, mad monologuist, free indirect discourse	the impossibility to affirm the existence of the narrative voice