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 not 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,

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

• 27 – McHale suggests to move from philosophical thematics – which “will only tell us that there ‘’is’’ foregrounding; it will not tell us how this foregrounding has been accomplished, what strategies have been deployed – to poetical thematics. Also, he uses Thomas Pavel’s definition of ontology as ‘a theoretical description of a universe’ with emphasis on the indefinite articles.

Heterocosm

• 27 – the theme of ‘’otherness’’ as one of the oldest of the classic ontological themes
• 28 – In his ‘’Defense’’, Sir Philip Sidney “launches the themes of the fictional world as heterocosm, a universe apart, upon its modern career.” “In effect, the only ontological difference that the heterocosm approach admits is the opposition between fictional and real.”

"The old analogy between Author and God"

• 29 – “The heterocosm theme has a corollary which loomed even larger in Sidney’s thinking, namely the theme of the poet’s freedom and power, his demiurgic or quasi-divine function […].”
• 30 – The romantic solution: irony [cf. Lukacs!]. “As a corollary, then, to the artist’s paradoxical self-representation, the artwork itself comes to be presented ‘’as’’ an artwork.”

Ingarden

• 30 – “The shift of attention to internal ontological structure does not come about until the twentieth century, in particular with the work of the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden.”
• 30-33 – Ingarden distinguishes four strata:

1. The stratum of word-sounds
2. The stratum of meaning-units
3. The stratum of presented objects
4. The stratum of schematized aspects

Possible worlds

• 33 – As fiction is between belief and disbelief, “readers do not evaluate the logical possibility of the propositions they fin in literary texts in the light of the actual world […] but rather abandon the actual world and adopt (temporarily) the ‘’ontological perspective’’ of the literary work” [cf. Thomas Pavel]. McHale uses the distinction of necessity, possibility and impossibility to discuss Umberto Eco’s and Thomas Pavel’s concepts.
• 34 – “It is the tension and disparity among various characters’ subworlds, and between their subworlds and the fictional ‘real’ world, that formed the basis of modernist and, before that, realist epistemological poetics.” McHale uses the metaphor of fiction’s semipermeable, instead of impermeable, epidermis.
• 35 – “what romantic irony always aims to accomplish: it foregrounds ontological boundaries and ontological structure” – [cf. definition of postmodern historical novels]
• 36 – “So entities can pass back and forth across the semipermeable membrane between two texts, as well as between the real world and the world of fiction.”

The social construction of (un)reality

• 37 – “the postmodernist condition: an anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural”; McHale uses the sociological perspective of Berger and Luckmann who “regard reality as a kind of collective fiction”,
• 38 – which leads him to Cohen and Taylor, who focus on the “frequency and density of ‘escape attempts’ in normal, everyday life”, i.e. advertisements, TV, daydreams etc.
• 39 – “So postmodernist fiction ‘’does’’ hold the mirror up to reality; but that reality, now more than ever before, is plural.” McHale offers an outlook of what is to come next: an attempt “to describe the repertoire of strategies upon which postmodernist fiction draws in order to foreground the ontological structure of text and world” for which he uses “Hrushovski’s three dimension”, i.e. the reconstructed world, the text continuum, and – instead of the modernist dimension of speakers, voices, and positions – the postmodernist dimension of construction.

 Part Two: Worlds

3: In the zone

• 44 – McHale uses Foucault’s term of ‘heterotopia’ to describe the paradoxical worlds of postmodernist fiction, or rather zone. [Think of Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)]

How to build a zone

• 45 – “Postmodernist fiction draws upon a number of strategies for constructing/deconstructing space, among them ‘’juxtaposition’’, ‘’interpolation’’, ‘’superimposition’’, and ‘’misattribution’’. Spaces which real-world atlases or encyclopedias show as non-contiguous and unrelated, when juxtaposed in written texts constitute a zone.”

Ohio, Oz, and other zones

• 49-56 - popular zones in postmodernist fiction: inland US, Latin America [cf. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988): Latin American as opposition to Europe/US and as largely pluralistic], Africa – engrafted with zones of imagination which are difficult to be distinguished from the real ones

Intertextual zones

• 56 – “The disparate worlds that constitute the zone occupy different, incompatible spaces; as Foucault says, it is impossible to find any common locus beneath them.” Other possible spaces: “the physical space of the material book”, “the conceptual space of language itself”, and “the intertextual space” [cf. Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man (2002) where the character Horst Ibelgaufts, previously known from Smith’s first novel, White Teeth (2000), reappears]

4: Worlds in collision

• 60 – “Science fiction, by staging ‘close encounters’ between different worlds, placing them in confrontation, foregrounds their respective structures and the disparities between them. It thus obeys the same underlying principles of ontological poetics as postmodernist fiction.” Special in sci-fi: construction of topoi to place different worlds into confrontation, often “displacement of ‘’space’’ is intimately bound up with displacement in ‘’time’’.”

Parallel lines

• 62 – Science fiction and postmodernist fiction can be spoken of as parallel developments, which have constructed several similar topoi along the line: “One of these is the ‘’topos’’ of the closed-system world in both science fiction and postmodernist fiction; another is the ‘’topos’’ of the death-world or ‘world to come’.” McHale insists that the development is parallel, not one of mutual influence, as the topoi are similar but their narrative reasons different.
• 65 – “the postmodernist preoccupation with death as the ultimate ontological boundary”, “the strategy of placing projected objects […] ‘’sous rature’’, under erasure” as a distinctively postmodernist strategy

The science-fictionalization of postmodernism

• 67 – “Most postmodernist futures, in other words, are grim dystopias – as indeed most science-fiction worlds of the future have been in recent years.”

The postmodernization of science fiction

• 69 – “As a noncanonical, subliterary genre, science fiction has inevitably tended to lag behind canonized or mainstream literature it its adoption of new literary modes.” [is it not so that if it did present innovations, it would no longer be seen as pure sci-fi but Literature?!]
• 72 – The example of Kurt Vonnegut’s use of Kilgore Trout as a parable for the interconnection between sci-fi and pomo: “Spokesman of one of the genres of ontological poetics, Trout finds himself inside a text belonging to the other ontological genre – this is the relation of science fiction to postmodernist writing, in a nutshell.”

5: A world next door

• 73 – “a ‘’dual’’ ontology, on one side our world of the normal and everyday, on the other side the next-door world of the paranormal or supernatural, and running between them the contested boundary separating the two worlds”, i.e. Gothic enclosure
• 74 – “postmodernist fiction has close affinities with the genre of the fantastic” because it, too, “is governed by the ontological dominant”

Hesitation

• 75 – “The postmodernist fantastic can be seen as a sort of jiu-jitsu that uses representation itself to overthrow representation.”
• McHale suggests that Todorov’s epistemological reading of the fantastic “simply does not get to the bottom” of the genre. It needs to be read ontologically.

Banality

• 77 – the distinctive feature of the fantastic since Kafka’s Metamorphosis, i.e. “[t]he rhetoric of banality [,] is carried to its logical extreme in the worlds” of postmodernist texts

Resistance

• 77 – “Thus, even in those postmodernist fictions which seem to acquiesce in the fantastic, reducing it to banality, some ‘’resistance’’ of normality against the paranormal continues to be felt – if not by any of the characters, then at least by the reader. As long as such resistance is present, the dialogue between the normal and the paranormal will continue […]. The other means is more direct: it involves ‘’dramatizing’’ the confrontation, turning the resistance of normality against the paranormal into an agonistic struggle.”

From "worlds" to worlds

• 79 – “Thus postmodernist fiction co-opts the fantastic genre in much the same way that it has co-opted science fiction, developing the fantastic genre’ inherent potential for ontological dialogue into a vehicle for a postmodernist ontological poetics. […] It also reaches the fantastic by literalizing a characteristic modernist metaphor.”

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 instance, i.e. putting it under erasure; revival of romantic irony