Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessment in Literature, Theory, and Culture 9783110906813, 9783110177220

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Beyond Postmodernism

W DE G

Beyond Postmodernism Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture Edited by Klaus Stierstorfer

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 2003

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ISBN 3-11-017722-6 © Copyright 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover Design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

Contents Introduction THE PERSISTENCE OF THE MODERNIST HERITAGE PETER V. ZIMA, Why the Postmodern Age Will Last PHILIP TEW, A New Sense of Reality? A New Sense of the Text? Exploring Meta-Realism and the Literary-Critical Field LENA PETROVIC, Hear the Voice of the Artist: Postmodernism as Faustian Bargain BERND KLÄHN, The Threefold Way: About the Heuristics and Paradigmatics of (Post)Modernist Culture and Literature

1 11 13 29 51 77

PETER PAUL SCHNIERER, Modernist at Best: Poeticity and Tradition

in Hyperpoetry DORIS TESKE, Beyond Postmodernist Thirdspace? - The Internet in a Post-Postmodern World RE-READING POSTMODERNISM CHRISTOPHE DEN TANDT, Pragmatic Commitments: Postmodern Realism in Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ellroy

91 101 119 121

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, Why Derrida Is Not a Postmodernist

143

HELGA THALHOFER, Paradox vs. Analogy: De Man and Foucault PETER MORTENSEN, 'Civilization's Fear of Nature': Postmodernity, Culture, and Environment in The God of Small Things

157

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM IHAB HASSAN, Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust KLAUS STIERSTORFER, Wobbly Grounds: Postmodernism's Precarious Footholds in Novels by Bradbury, Parker, Rushdie, Swift VERA NÜNNING, Beyond Indifference: New Departures in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century DIETMAR BÖHNKE, Shades of Gray: The Peculiar Postmodernism of Alasdair Gray

179 197 199 213 235 255

vi

Contents

American Postmodernist Literature at the Turn of the Millennium: the Death and Return of the Subject SUSANNE PETERS, The Anglo-Irish Playwright Martin McDonagh: Postmodernist Zeitgeist as Cliche and a (Re)turn to the Voice of Common Sense LAURENZ VOLKMANN, Extension of the Battle Zone: Ian McEwan's Cult Novel The Cement Garden VICTORIA LIPINA-BEREZKINA,

List of Contributors Index

269

291 303 319 325

Introduction: Beyond Postmodernism - Contingent Referentiality? In a much-quoted survey Lance Olsen1 reported an astounding increase in occurrences of the term 'postmodern' in American newspapers from 1980 through 1984 to 1987 at a ratio of 2 : 116 : 247. In his turn, Hans Bertens2 charted a "history of the debate on postmodernism from its tentative beginnings in the 1950s to its overwhelming self-confidence in the early 1990s". From the later 1990s onwards, however, this narrative of the progress of postmodernism appears to lose direction. Although no statistical data are available, the quantity of references to postmodernism in scholarly publications as well as in the daily press seems to decrease, as does the heatedness of the debate. Major disputants, such as Ihab Hassan or Linda Hutcheon, have long since shifted their focus to other fields. Scholarly publications of the past decade or so are less geared to breaking new ground than to serving educational purposes for student consumption,3 either in the normative form of readers4 or as compendiums.5 Otherwise, subtitles such as Hans Bertens' Ά History', 6 cited above, or 'Eine Bilanz' in the Merkur special issue on postmodernism,7 seem to suggest that we have entered a period of stock-taking and that a long-standing dispute is entering the process of being archived. Looking at postmodernism as an 'entity', as something which can be summarized, analyzed, and taught leads to a situation analogous to the point in time which Malcolm Bradbury used from hindsight as his delimitation and turning-point from modernism to postmodernism when he wrote:

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

Lance Olsen, "The Next Generation in Fiction", Virginia Quarterly Review 65 (1989), 277-87, 277. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern. A History (London, new York: Routledge, 1995), 14. On the specific concern of postmodemism's consequences and implications in the educational field, see Klaus Stierstorfer, Laurenz Volkmann (eds.), Teaching Postmodernism-Postmodern Teaching (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2003). See for example Joseph Natoli, Linda Hutcheon (eds.), A Postmodern Reader (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1993). Peter V. Zima, Moderne / Postmoderne. Gesellschaft, Philosophie, Literatur (Tübingen, Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1997,2nd ed. 2001). Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern. A History. Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Kurt Scheel, Postmoderne. Eine Bilanz. Sonderheft Merkur 52/9f. (1998).

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Klaus Stierstorfer

We might argue that the moment when Modernism became an entity was roughly the moment when we assumed that the entire tendency lay behind us, in the past. And in this sense Modernism may be distinguished from Postmodernism, a term that began to be necessary once we had displaced Modernism from the immediately contemporary scene.8 If this, then, is a time when critics and scholars become aware of postmodernism as an entity and stock-taking has set in, two questions present themselves: first, as to any forthcoming results of this stock-taking and, second, as to any new paradigms that one might expect to discern emerging against the demise of an old one. If indeed such a transition beyond postmodernism were currently taking place, it would, in view of the heavy infighting during the earlier discussion, seem a curiously quiet exit, unworthy of a movement which had been expected to end Western noetic systems and bring to grief centuries of misplaced confidence in truth, values, morality, representation, reality and a host of other quasi sacrosanct traditions - most of which can presently be observed to be leading a vigorous afterlife. In this situation of disunity and uncertainty about the fate of postmodernism, a new effort to chart the ongoing discussion about the current continuities and ruptures in the postmodernist discourse seemed justified. As with most of the sporadic earlier attempts in the same direction,9 no definitive answer to the title question could be expected. Too many divergent views are currently on the market; too many departures, old and new, are seen to crop up year by year; and too many definitions of what postmodernism is or has been exist in the first place, to allow for a smoothly consistent argument. Thus, the rationale of the essays collected in this volume is that of a field study, probing in various directions, with the intention to re-enliven a debate which seemed to have significantly cooled off in recent years. This volume has thus become a platform for scholars from many parts of the world to compare notes regarding these rumours of a quiet farewell to a paradigm. Clearly, the wide-spread interest the call for papers raised did not tally with the impression given by the decline in new book publications in the field, suggesting that the debate was far from settled and that any solid lines of agreement would still be hard-won. 8

9

Malcolm Bradbury, "Modernisms/Postmodemisms" in Ihab Hassan, Sally Hassan (eds.), Innovation / Renovation. New Perspectives on the Humanities (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983), 311-327, 318. See for example Heide Ziegler (ed.), The End of Postmodernism: New Directions. Proceedings of the First Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies, 04.08-18.08.1991 (Stuttgart: Μ und Ρ, Verlag für Wissenschaft, 1993); Joseph Margolis, "Beneath and Beyond the Modemism/Postmodemism Debate", International Yearbook of Aesthetics 1 (1996), 59-68; Herbert W. Simons, Michael Billig, After Postmodernism. Reconstructing Ideology Critique (London: Thousand Oaks, Sage, 1994); and Jos£ Lopez, Garry Potter (eds.), After Postmodernism. An Introduction to Critical Realism (London: Athlone Press, 2001) where a new paradigm is, however, seen in 'Critical Realism'; for the link to postcolonialism, see Hena Maes-Jelink, "Postmodernism and Its Others: Cross-cultural Counterpoints in British Fiction", Anglistik 8/1 (1997), 61-73.

Introduction

3

While it is a privilege to editor and publisher alike to be able to welcome some prominent figures, notably Ihab Hassan or Christopher Norris, who had shaped the debate on postmodernism from the earliest years and, certainly in Hassan's case, must be counted among the founding fathers of the very paradigm, the lively feedback and wealth of contributions from younger scholars can be taken as an indicator that this is an ongoing argument which new generations of academics have willingly taken up for further pursuance and development. Unsurprisingly, the uses of the term and concept of 'postmodernism' vary widely among the contributors to this volume, with Vera Nünning drawing the logical conclusion in generally suggesting the plural 'postmodernisms' from Brian McHale's 10 insight that "postmodernism exists discursively, in the discourses we produce about it and using [sic] it": If there are various discourses there will be various 'postmodernisms'. And yet, Hans Bertens' attempt at finding a framework for these various postmodernisms so as to be able to discuss them coherently in his study seems equally pertinent and viable with reference to the present volume:" Yet, there is a common denominator. In their own way, they [i. e. the various postmodernisms; K.St.] all seem to transcend what they see as the self-imposed limitations of modernism, which in its search for autonomy and purity or for timeless, representational, truth has subjected experience to unacceptable intellectualizations and reductions.

Building on the platform of this common denominator, a rich variety of attitudes to postmodernism then becomes discernible. As could be expected, no contributions were offered by scholars who hold that postmodernism never existed and was just one of those 'isms' which serious scholarship could happily do without. A second group, represented in this volume by Peter Paul Schnierer, Bernd Klähn and, partly, Peter V. Zima, point to the lasting validity and persistence of modernism beyond any paradigmatic thresholds of postmodernism; far from being over and pointing 'beyond' itself, postmodernism in this view is still very much in the ascendant, while modernist concerns, themes and approaches are far from being completely superseded or invalidated in the Western civilisation of postmodernity. A third, major group of participants shares the premise that postmodernism remains very much the dominant paradigm with all the discursive consequences this entails, such as instigating opposition against its negative implications or exploring its multifarious virtues and opportunities. Finally, a fourth group of contributors agrees that postmodernism is indeed approaching its end and that new directions are emerging just now. No consensus could be established on the specific forms and themes which distinctly pointed 'beyond' postmodernism, but several contributions share the sense that the movement is not so much towards new-found lands of an exotic 'other' but a revisiting of

10 Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 1. 11 Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern, 5.

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familiar themes, forms, and issues from the past, albeit sometimes presented in new guises, frequently indicated by an attributive 'new', such as 'New Realism', 'New Humanism', etc. In addition to these different views on postmodernism, it appears helpful to separate several discursive levels which may interrelate on many issues, but frequently produce stalemates in discussions if their specific problems are too freely intermingled. Three major fields of contention can thus be singled out. (1) Ontological arguments, such as 'does reality exist?' or 'does postmodernism exist, and if so what are its characteristics?' often stand against (2) epistemological issues of the type 'how can we perceive "reality" (if it exists) under postmodernist premises?' which in turn leads to yet another set of questions in the field of (3) ethics in the format 'what are the consequences for choosing, judging, or validating modes of behaviour on postmodernist premises?' To give an (admittedly simplistic) example: a 'quasi-ontological' position that value systems are contingent and constructed might be countered by the (ethical) assertion of the devastating consequences this position could have on the justification of systems of social order and control; but this assertion does not prove the postmodernist position wrong. In order to do that, a (quasi-)ontological counter-argument is necessary showing either that relativity of values does not inevitably follow from postmodernist premises or that those premises are themselves at fault. If a common trajectory can be singled out from contributions in this volume, it is the tendency, however divers in its specific realizations, towards a new anchoring of what is variously characterised as the free-floating signifiers or the irresponsible playfulness of the more 'radical' versions of postmodernism to a system of referents and values, however tentative or contingent. Three main groups of approaches emerged in the process, the first re-asserting such foundations vis-a-vis postmodernist claims, the second identifying them within the postmodernist paradigm, and the third taking them beyond prevalent concepts of postmodernism.

1. The Persistence of the Modernist Heritage The volume's investigations into postmodernism open with Peter V. Zima's magisterial proposal of reasons "Why the Postmodern Age will Last", partly because his intimate interlinking of modernist and postmodernist concerns on the one hand, and of modernity and postmodemity as eras in close relation to the former pair on the other, could also be subsumed under the thesis that modernist heritage accounts for much of what is understood as postmodern thinking. More importantly, Zima's essay sets out as lucidly as any introduction could ever hope to do the central issues of terminology and periodization, so that, rather than repeat this part of his argument in an introductory chapter, his contribution is taken as an apt opening of the discussion.

Introduction

5

In an attempt to revalidate modernist struggles for a realism under duress, so to speak, Philip Tew draws on philosophers Roy Bhaskar and Edward Pols and others to underpin the continuing relevance of ontological concepts of reality which predates and is presupposed by texts and, indeed, language in general. Much of his argument hinges on Pols' contention in Radical Realism12 that language, although essential in the construction of theories and doctrines, does not have a constitutive function when it comes to other forms of "directexperiential" interaction with reality. Thus, the natural sciences are not (entirely) reducible to narrative or linguistic patterns and rules, but are shaped by the reality, however specific and fragmented, with which they engage. It is in this sense that Bhaskar, in Reclaiming Reality,13 calls the collapse of ontology into epistemology an "epistemic fallacy" and the levelling out of the analysis of being with the discourse about being, a "linguistic fallacy". Bhaskar contradicts Baudrillard's thesis that signs are substituted for the real in postmodernist art, as it is not a substitution but a focussing on our cognition's dependence on signs which is characterised as the true concern behind the selfreflexiveness of this kind of art. Tew therefore concludes that all literary texts at some level relate to reality as an existentially independent constituent. In her critique of postmodernism, "Hear the Voice of the Artist: Postmodernism as Faustian Bargain", Lena Petrovic takes up another problematic issue of late modernity in her analysis of the loss of an ethics of the arts. Abandoning the traditional conception of an artist as an "independent, imaginative, questing mind" and of the artwork as the production of a creative subject, the concepts of 'art' and the artist are shown to disintegrate under postmodernism, sucked into the fragmenting maelstrom of a plurality of subject positions, plurivocities and intertextual relations. However, Petrovic argues, far from being a liberating movement which might free art from the constraints imposed by a dictatorial cultural elite, postmodernism targets the artist as a critic of society and culture, thus disguising, behind an anti-elitist, democratic gesture, hegemonic intentions set on abolishing the artist's critical voice. Adding a survey from the viewpoint of cultural philosophy, Bernd Klähn highlights the subsistence of the triad of subject, system, and reason on which his view of modern 'world-making' is based. Drawing on examples from Pynchon, Hawkes and others, this triad is shown to be still in place in postmodernism where it finds its ultimate and complete, often experimental or parodic unfolding. Interestingly, the two contributions which deal with the (chronologically) most advanced and most recent forms of writing and media, Peter Paul 12 Edward Pols, Radical Realism. Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (Ithaka, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), 17. 13 Roy Bhaskhar, Reclaiming Reality. A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (London: Verso, 1989).

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Schnierer's "Modernist at Best: Poeticity and Tradition in Hyperpoetry" and Doris Teske's "Beyond Postmodernist Thirdspace? - The Internet in a PostPostmodern World", see the brave new worlds of hypertexts and the worldwide web as largely anchored within traditional, generally modernist problematics. While pointing out hyperpoetry's rupture of sequentiality and its unstable textual presence, often inseparable from the individual reading event, Schnierer in particular proposes that, given the long tradition of 'hypertextuality' - found, at its simplest, when one consults a dictionary - the critical assessment of hyperpoetry can still be undertaken within existing, 'modernist' paradigms. In his analysis, hyperpoetry - for all the avant-garde hype - therefore hardly lends itself as a case in point for new departures beyond postmodernism. Similarly, Teske's investigation into the virtual realities of the internet discovers very traditional materialities and power structures underneath the promises of a postmodern thirdspace of democratic freedom, although she locates this 'thirdspace culture' more firmly within a postmodern era and hence provides a suitable bridge to the following section of this volume.

2. Re-Reading Postmodernism The second group of contributors seek new, eventually contingent foundations by revisions of generally-held views on postmodernism. Thus Christophe Den Tandt's reading of his three select authors in "Pragmatic Commitments: Postmodern Realism in Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ellroy" questions the demise of referentiality under postmodernism by demonstrating the conflation of both postmodernist and realist characteristics in their work. It is precisely the "paradoxic resilience of commonplace everydayness" that distinguishes what Den Tandt calls this "pragmatic realism" from the 'magic realism' characteristic of postmodernism. 'Pragmatic realism' does not, however, involve any Utopian realignment of signifier and signified; it represents, rather, an "interplay of utopianism and praxis" which shares with the traditional or modernist forms of realism only the provision of grounds for pragmatic action. Chris Norris re-asserts the gap between postmodernism and Derridean deconstruction, arguing in "Why Derrida is not a Postmodernist" that, for all its de(con)structiveness, Derrida's thinking has a stringency and inevitability which a brand of postmodernism epitomized by an "open-ended plurality" cannot accommodate. Clearly, deconstruction as a rigid method 'how to do things with texts' does not tally with this species of postmodernism, even if Norris may encounter proponents of kinds of postmodernism where poststructuralism might find more amenable contexts. Evidently, Helga Thalhofer takes her departure precisely from this kind of context. In "Paradox vs. Analogy: De Man and Foucault" she addresses the

Introduction

7

veiled presence of the real in poststructuralist theory and dismisses the view that postmodernism substituted 'playfulness' for 'meaning' and thereby lost literature's link to ethics, an issue treated from another angle in Petrovic's essay above. The fact, for instance, that De Man's 'theory of unreadability' is based on two incompatible interpretations of a text (image vs. emblem; linguistic vs. referential) does not, in Thalhofer's view, result in the abandonment of the question of meaning as in formalist criticism, but on the contrary needs the establishment of (divergent) meaning to state the incompatibility of readings. Similarly, by revaluing the importance of the local and the individual, in his later work Foucault breaks up the exclusiveness and fixation of structuralist universalism and de-privileges the discourses of language and literature. Some critics find a similar universalism in brands of postmodernism which are complicit with the new market hegemonies of globalisation. But Peter Mortensen argues in '"Civilization's Fear of Nature': Postmodernity, Culture, and Environment in The God of Small Things" that postmodernist theories need not lead to such unwelcome consequences. In the decentring of the human subject, he sees the possibility of a new respect for physical reality in general and for ecological concerns in particular, entertaining hopes for an 'ecological' or 'reconstructive' postmodernism to replace its 'nihilistic' or 'deconstructive' variants.

3. Beyond Postmodernism? Ihab Hassan authoritatively lifts the veil to look into a future after postmodernism in "Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust". This vision still remains dim, however, as there still is, as Hassan points out, no clear view of what postmodernism actually was. Nevertheless, he goes on to unfold his central thesis that postmodernism is currently expanding into a wider postmodernity while postmodernism in the narrow sense is shifting its focus from suspicion to trust. Hassan's use of terms such as 'truth', 'trust' and 'love' within a postmodernist context seems to hark back to the 'shamanistic' immediacy of 1970s postmodernist concerns as voiced by Suzi Gablik or dramatized and theorized by Richard Schechner and Herbert Blau, even if Hassan's new-found immediacy appears less mystery-laden and more rational. "Wobbly Grounds: Postmodernism's Precarious Footholds in Novels by Bradbury, Parker, Rushdie, Swift" (Klaus Stierstorfer) charts isolated moments of quasi-realist literary experience as a common feature in the novels of Malcolm Bradbury, David Parker, Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift, with their imagery of the loss of solid ground under postmodernism. Where Bradbury reasserts the value of liberal humanism in his quest for stabilising elements, Rushdie settles for the contingency of local, everyday normality

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Klaus Stierstorfer

wherever it is possible in a world of apocalyptic turmoil, and Swift rediscovers the sustaining powers of narrative. In his turn, David Parker shows how images can be reinterpreted locally: In the Australian context of his Building on Sand (1988), for example, shifting sands develop a reassuring sense of stability, in contrast to the house built on rock in European imagery. In "Beyond Indifference: New Departures in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century", Vera Nünning presents the refusal of generally accepted moral standards as coinciding with a return to ethical questions, often in combination with a revival of narrative and a heightened awareness of the functions of individual and collective memory and, as she demonstrates in an acute reading of Julian Barnes's England, England (1998), of the construction of national identity. This is also the drift in Dietmar Böhnke's "Shades of Gray: The Peculiar Postmodernism of Alasdair Gray" where he analyses the work of the Scottish novelist, finding postmodernist 'antifoundational' elements harnessed to a political agenda and an involvement in Scottish nationalism which would seem to call for a degree of essentialism. Again, notwithstanding the problematic implications of such a move, a writer's social or generally existential commitment seems to point 'beyond', to a cautious and newly defined realism of sorts. Victoria Lipina-Berezkina's "American Postmodernist Literature at the Turn of the Millennium: the Death and Return of the Subject" offers an illuminating comparative analysis of John Barth's and Stephen Dixon's novels together with works by Russian authors Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, highlighting a new subjectivity which, in her reading, both the American and the Russian authors can be shown to pursue. Exploring recurrences of traditional humanist as well as authorial elements in Martin McDonagh's plays, Susanne Peters describes the Irish dramatist's strategies of steering between kitsch on the one hand and, where the grotesque and surreal dominates, trash on the other. At the point of overlap between the two she places McDonagh's use of the stage letter, embodying, as a material form of written text and its traditional mode of communication (and traditional stage prop, one can add), a set of traditional values in an otherwise bewildering and violent postmodern environment. As with Lipina's newly developing form of subjectivity, Peters' "The Anglo-Irish Playwright Martin McDonagh: Postmodernist Zeitgeist as Cliche and a (Re)turn to the Voice of Common Sense" adumbrates a newly developing form of materiality which may be understood as pointing beyond a postmodernist agenda. "Extension of the Battle Zone: Ian McEwan's Cult Novel The Cement Garden", finally, is a further investigation of postmodernism's relationship to material reality. Laurenz Volkmann explores the many-layered metaphoric uses of sexuality and the body in cultural and literary contexts. What McEwan's taboo-breaking amounts to, however, in Volkmann's argument, is the

Introduction

9

exact opposite to the 'anything-goes strand' of postmodernism, in so far as value systems are provocatively obliterated to a degree which already is on the verge of tilting into an argument, ex negativo, for the upholding of the value system so recklessly overturned; hence pointing already ex negativo, as early as 1978, beyond a brand of postmodernism still lying in the future at that point in time.

Conclusion Reviewing the volume's discussions, there is, obviously, no simple answer to whether postmodernism is over or which new paradigm may have begun. But, pace Lopez and Potter,14 the tolling of postmodernism's death knells may be premature. What the contributors, in their various ways, do suggest, however, is that a decline in the recurrence of the term 'postmodernism' in the titles of recent publications may be less an indication of a waning interest in the topic's 'traditional' issues, but a focusing on issues postmodernism has continuously aggregated over recent decades under its cover-all term. Postmodernism as a whole may have become too blunt a tool to be useful in debating many of the most hotly contested issues today. Thus, while the umbrella concept may be less frequently invoked, many of the central issues it once automatically subsumed seem as important and contentious as ever. If that assessment is correct, can we identify possible causes for this development? Major factors might be pinpointed in a new regard for the role of ethics in the widest sense, and a growing interest in questions of identity, especially along the lines of culture or 'civilisation', nation, or gender, sometimes also skin colour. As Eric Miles Williamson aptly sums it up in a review on writers whose agendas he finds patently different from earlier postmodernist work by Barth, Barthelme or Gass:15 How big is the difference, finally, between having nothing to say and having nothing to say but the unsayable? A new generation of writers is now emerging, many of whom seem to believe that instruction can and should be one of the purposes of fiction. This is especially the case among women and minority writers, for whom didacticism and outspoken politics - sometimes loud and angry - can be a powerful tool[.]

Whether it is the more universal interest in the possible foundations of a general or literary ethics in a world of globalisation, or the more specific and local issues of identities, scholars and writers alike nevertheless continue to 14 "Introduction" in Lopez, Potter (eds.), After Postmodernism, 4: "[T]he single most significant fact about postmodernism as an intellectual phenomenon in the year two thousand is this: it is in a state of decline! It lingers on, its influence for good or ill continues, but postmodernism has 'gone out of fashion'." 15 Eric M. Williamson, "Beyond Postmodernism", The Southern Review 37 (2001), 174-81,174f.

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find themselves in the dilemma of facing the deconstructive gestures inherent in postmodernist thought while at the same time requiring some common ground on which ethical agreements can be based. Hence some form of referentiality, even some kind of essentialism is called for. As the essays in this volume help to demonstrate, the major lines of discussion today consequently seem to be directed at establishing these platforms, however local or contingent, where (re-)constructive strategies might find their common grip, while at the same time avoiding the nefarious consequences of essentialist realism and structuralist models of signification. If a summary term for this volume, and perhaps even for the preoccupation of the current scholarly discussion and literary practices, were, therefore, to be found, the best I could suggest is something like 'contingent referentiality', which at least expresses the paradox to be accommodated here. The variety and constructive controversy which characterize the contributions to this volume testify to the continuing relevance and topicality of postmodernism as a point of contention as much as, increasingly, a point of departure. This particular discussion on postmodernism had its origin in a seminar entitled 'Beyond Postmodernism' at the conference of the European Society for the Study of English held at Strasbourg in July 2002.1 would like to thank all participants for their papers, the lively discussion and helpful feedback, and in particular Laurenz Volkmann for acting as co-convenor of the seminar. Many of the revised seminar papers have found their way into this volume. 16 The discussion was continued at the 2002 convention of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) which coincidentally stood under the overall heading of 'Beyond' in that year. 17 1 wish to thank the conference organizers there for their openness and co-operation. Thanks are also due to those contributors who showed their trust in this project by joining in later and submitting papers further enriching and rounding off the volume in various ways. On the publisher's side, this volume owes much to Dr. Heiko Hartmann's openness and support in seeing it through print. Finally, the help of Stephan Schmieding, Μ.Α., in editing this volume has been invaluable, while any shortcomings or infelicities remain, as always, entirely the responsibility of the editor. Düsseldorf, May 2003

Klaus Stierstorfer

16 For a report on this seminar see Klaus Stierstorfer, "Reviewing Postmodernism at ESSE-6," The European English Messenger 12 (2003), 78-82. I wish to thank the Messenger's editor, Martin Kayman, for permission to re-use material from the ESSE report for the introduction to this volume. 17 The papers of this conference can be consulted in the special issue of Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures (BELL) n.s. 1 (2003), edited by Christophe Den Tandt.

The Persistence of the Modernist Heritage

PETER V . ZIMA

Why the Postmodern Age Will Last The chronological argument is relatively simple: if modernity as an historical period begins with the Enlightenment, i. e. sometime in the 17th century, and lasts for about three centuries, until the Second World War, then postmodernity is unlikely to end after fifty years or so. In this context, titles announcing the end of postmodernity - e. g. After Postmodernism1 - seem to stem from rash conclusions. In order to avoid rash conclusions of a different kind it seems necessary, however, to clarify a blurred terminology and to distinguish 'postmodernity' from 'postmodernism'. On the one hand, 'postmodernity' is being defined in contrast with 'modernity' in an historical, sociological and philosophical sense, i. e. as a critical reaction to the great social and ideological projects which determined the lives of Europeans and Americans for three to four centuries. 'Postmodernism', on the other hand, is usually seen as a literary and artistic reaction to late nineteenth-century and (or) early twentieth-century modernism. The easy (but probably wrong) way out would be to argue that the two concepts are unrelated since they originate in different theoretical contexts. This kind of 'separatism' not only lacks imagination but leads to a simplification and a distortion. For modernism is not a purely literary or stylistic phenomenon: it is also a self-reflection and an auto-critique of modernity in the last phase of its development. Modernist novels such as Virginia Woolf s Orlando, Kafka's The Trial or Musil's The Man without Qualities initiate a radical criticism of modern (Enlightenment) categories by casting doubt on Reason's ability to organise the world according to its principles, by revealing the complexity or multiplicity of the individual subject and by questioning the meaning of historical progress. Long before Lyotard's increduliti ä l'egard des metarecits, Albert Camus took a very sceptical view of the historical meta-narratives of Christianity, Hegelianism and Marxism. All this goes to show that modernism, far from being a purely literary phenomenon, is a modern auto-critique of modernity which announces the

1

Cf. Herbert W. Simons, Michael Billig, After Postmodernism. Critique (London: Thousand Oaks, Sage, 1994).

Reconstructing

Ideology

14

Peter V. Zima

more radical and more one-sided critique of postmodern discourses in the philosophical, sociological and literary sense. In other words, 'modernism' which could be defined more generally as 'late modernity' - is a period of transition which prepares and anticipates the postmodern age. The continuity between modernity and postmodernity is due to the fact that postmodernity develops and radicalises many of the modernist (late modern) arguments directed against modern ideologies and philosophies.

Periods as Problematics It seems important not to reduce historical periods such as classicism, romanticism or modernism to philosophical ideas, ideologies or literary styles. Romanticism, for example, is a highly complex political, philosophical and aesthetic constellation which cannot be identified with conservative ideas (Chateaubriand), a longing for medieval times (Novalis) or lyrical sentimentalism (Lamartine). Although all of these features are prominent in European romanticism, they neither account for Victor Hugo's social criticism nor for Shelley's anarchism, nor for Heinrich Heine's rebellious irony. As a historical constellation or problematic romanticism is a contradictory whole which it is impossible to identify with an ideology or an aesthetic. Considering this heterogeneity of romanticism, it seems more appropriate to define or rather construct it as a problematic·, as a historical constellation of complementary problems and questions which each politician, philosopher and artist attempts to solve in a different way. The unity of a problematic thus appears as being made up of a number of related problems situated at the centre of social debates during a certain period of time. The romantic period was dominated by the problems of industrialisation (in the first half of the 19th century), the validity of traditional values, national identity, the opposition between nature and civilisation and the problem of the subject, of the subject's unfulfilled desires. In the literary realm, each author offered different political, metaphysical, aesthetic and stylistic solutions. Any attempt to unify these solutions in order to construct an ideological, philosophical or aesthetic system is doomed to failure. The common denominator of all romantic texts seems to be the network of related problems some of which have been mentioned here.

Late Modernity or Modernism: Ambivalence and the Subject What applies to European romanticism also seems to apply to modernism or late modernity and postmodernity. Although literary modernism certainly exists as an aesthetic and stylistic phenomenon, it ought not to be detached from the late modern (modernist) problematic as a whole. Very much like

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romanticism, this problematic has political, philosophical, sociological and artistic components all of which converge towards a certain number of problems situated at the centre of the modernist scene. The latter is dominated by the ambivalence of social values, characters, emotions and utterances, i. e. by a noetic, aesthetic and ethical coincidence of opposites which marks the works of such different authors as Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Nietzsche announces the central problem of late modernity when he points out in Beyond Good and Evil: "The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to pause and doubt here on the threshold, where however it was most needful they should: even if they had vowed to themselves 'de omnibus dubitandum'". Nietzsche radicalises the doubt by adding: "It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and honoured things resides precisely in their being artfully related, knotted and crocheted to these wicked, apparently antithetical things, perhaps even in their being essentially identical with them."2 In this passage he maps out the central problem of the late modern problematic: the ambivalence as a coincidence of opposites which can no longer be systematically overcome by a Hegelian synthesis in the sense of Aufhebung. Nietzsche's rejection of Hegelian syntheses and of systematic thinking as a whole is announced in the writings of the Young Hegelians (Stirner, Feuerbach, Vischer, Ruge) who begin to doubt the identity between subject and object, between systematic philosophy and a reality whose contradictions can no longer be glossed over by idealist thought. Alongside Stirner and Ruge who denounce the growing discrepancies between individual and state interests, Friedrich Theodor Vischer casts doubts upon the unity of nature and culture, the object and the subject as spirit (Geist). In this Young Hegelian and Nietzschean perspective, the individual appears as a divided being, split between nature and culture, the conscious and the unconscious, wake and dream. Vischer quite rightly points out that Hegel's attempts to harmonise all of these instances have failed and that humanity appears as torn between the natural world to which it also belongs and the spiritual world of culture which it has produced in the course of centuries. It is not by chance that in one of his texts on aesthetics Vischer abandons Hegel's division of aesthetic evolution into three phases - the symbolic (Persian, Egyptian), the classical (Greco-Roman) and the Christian-Romantic - by suppressing the symbolic phase and adding a modern phase to the dialectical scheme, the tripartite character of which he seems anxious to preserve. For he

2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (London: Penguin, 1990), 34.

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quite rightly feels (around 1850) that the Enlightenment inaugurates a modern age which cannot be subsumed under the terms 'Christian' or 'Romantic'. This insight comes about in the face of "a great crisis [...] which separates the modern age from the Middle Ages".3 Naturally, Vischer means the 'great crisis' triggered off by the Enlightenment and its processes of commercialisation, individualisation and secularisation. In itself this discovery is not particularly original because many of Vischer's contemporaries were well aware of living in an age that could no longer be referred to as 'Christian'. Simultaneously with the Young Hegelians, Baudelaire articulated a modern social and artistic consciousness which was neither Christian nor Romantic in the Hegelian sense. The question is why Hegel - who in his younger days enthusiastically supported the French Revolution - could still believe that the art of his age could be defined as belonging to the 'Christian-Romantic' period that superseded the classical (Greco-Roman) heritage. The answer is that his system was a secularisation of the Christian 'meta-narrative' (in the sense of Lyotard) which did not allow for a perspective beyond the Christian, the Prussian state. This perspective was opened after Hegel's death in 1831 by his disciples and critics who experienced the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and the first class conflicts. These conflicts were interpreted by many thinkers from Ruge to Marx - as symptoms of a fundamental contradiction: societies no longer appeared to them as being held together by the wisdom of Christian states, but as historical scenes of class domination and class struggle. In this context, Vischer's expression 'great crisis' reveals its ambiguity: it does not only denote the crisis brought about by Enlightenment politics (from 1688 to 1789), but also connotes the second crisis of modernity: the crisis of 1848 marked by the first appearance of the proletariat. In other words: in the discourses of the Young Hegelians, of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, it became obvious that modernity could no longer be subsumed under a secularised Christian (Hegelian) meta-narrative. The crises of 1848 made it clear that between 1688 and 1789 a new development had begun which pointed not only beyond Christianity but also beyond the rationalist faith in Progress: beyond both Comte and Hegel. Modernity thus became self-reflexive and its critical discourses began to question religion, reason, progress and the state. Unlike Marx who held on to the Hegelian idea of History considering the latter as a process of emancipation, Nietzsche resorted to the figure of the eternal return which expresses a fundamental scepticism towards all linear (rationalist) and dialectical representations of History. His philosophy is a first thorough reflection and self-criticism of modernity as a whole. It inaugurates the late modern or

3

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kritische Gänge, vol. IV (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), 175.

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modernist problematic by revealing the ambivalence of Christian love (associated with the will to power), of progress (associated with decadence) and of truth (associated with the rhetoric of tropes). It is not by chance that Nietzsche has influenced virtually all important writers of late modernity or modernism: Robert Musil and Andre Gide, Luigi Pirandello and Thomas Mann, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Gottfried Benn, Ρίο Baroja and Ezra Pound. The works of these writers are marked by Nietzschean ambivalence even in cases where a direct influence cannot be traced. The fact is that ambivalence as a late modern figure exists independently of Nietzsche in the works of such authors as Baudelaire and Dostoevsky who can be considered - along with Nietzsche - as initiators of the modernist or late modern problematic. Like Nietzsche they question the central notions of (rationalist and Hegelian) modernity: the notions of reason, progress, truth, science and the individual subject. While Baudelaire and Musil establish a (carnevalistic, Bakhtin would say) link between reason and superstition (Baudelaire), reason and mysticism (Musil), Kafka shows in his novels that it is hard to distinguish truth from lie. Like Nietzsche,4 most of these authors cast doubts upon the integrity of the individual subject which in Pirandello's novel Uno, nessuno e centomila appears as a fragmented world that anybody can construct according to his illusions and desires.3 In Virginia Woolfs novel Orlando, the individual subject, one of the central categories of modernity, is 'deconstructed' long before FrancoAmerican deconstruction becomes fashionable. It is deconstructed in conjunction with ambivalence and androgyny: And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on the gale.6

This passage could be read as a model or metonymy of modernism: 1. ambivalence appears here in the figure of androgyny; 2. it leads to a crisis of subjectivity as the subject vacillates between the sexes; 3. this crisis in tum leads to reflection, criticism and a search for one's own subjectivity, identity: to a recherche in the Proustian sense. All of these features characterise late modern thought: in literature, philosophy and sociology.

4 5 6

Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigeijahre" in id., Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. VI (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 627. Cf. Luigi Pirandello, Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926) (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 19-20. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 152.

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It is interesting to observe to what extent the discourses of the founding fathers of sociology are geared towards the late modem problematic as outlined in some modernist novels. After the young Marx who shows that money as exchange value tends to convert all other (cultural) values into their opposites,7 Georg Simmel stresses the indifferent character of money and reveals how it negates the individual's subjectivity and identity by reducing all specific characteristics of a person to the latter's role on the market: to the exchange value.8 At the same time, however, Simmel recognises the emancipating function of money and refers to "the importance of money for our intellectual freedom".9 But the price we have to pay for this freedom is high, according to Simmel, for we are set free in an anonymous world governed by indifferent market laws. Much later, Anthony Giddens gave this price a name calling it social "disembedding".10 In France, Emile Dürkheim analysed the opposition between mechanical and organic solidarity, revealing the ambivalent character of both: The freedom which organic solidarity (based on the division of labour) affords us weakens social integration and tends to undermine our social identity (our belonging to a cultural community); mechanical solidarity (based on communitarian resemblance) may guarantee our cultural identity and our 'belonging', but it tends to cancel our subjective freedom. Dürkheim sums up: "Mais ä ce moment notre individualite est nulle."11 Considering Durkheim's and SimmePs arguments within the late modern problematic, one could argue that they reveal the dilemmas and the aporias of this problematic which is governed by ambivalence. Whatever we do, there is no univocal solution, no easy way out - and there is always a price attached to each solution in a market society. The modernist nexus of ambivalence and subjectivity also underlies Max Weber's individualist sociology which is geared towards social action {soziales Handeln). Haunted by an ever expanding and increasingly oppressive bureaucracy, Weber proposes to invigorate social action by strengthening the position of the politician vis-a-vis the bureaucrat. In his sociology, the charismatic individual becomes the "revolutionary force"12 capable of overcoming bureaucratic resistance, of bringing about change by breaking 7

Cf. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften. Von 1837 bis zum Manifest der kommunistischen Partei 1848, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1971), 298-301. 8 Cf. Georg Simmel, "Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben" in id., Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Essais (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1984), 193. 9 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Berlin: Duncker und Humbolt, 61977), 311. 10 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Oxford: Blackwell, Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 17-20. 11 Emile Dürkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: PUF, 'i960), 99-100. 12 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, vol. II (Tübingen: Mohr, 5 1976), 658.

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through ossified structures. However, the charismatic subject is an ambivalent, Nietzschean figure because it appears to be simultaneously rational and irrational, constructive and destructive. On the whole, it seems that charismatic politicians have done more harm than good and that Weber's theory, like Musil's novel, tends to combine "reason and mysticism".13 In retrospect, the whole of classical sociology appears as a systematic and critical reflection on modernity: on progress (as rationalisation and division of labour in the sense of Weber and Dürkheim); on the disintegration of traditional forms of life and of Gemeinschaft (in the sense of Tönnies); on the emergence and the decline of individual initiative in a market society and on the Nietzschean ambivalence of values such as rationality, freedom, equality, autonomy and subjectivity. Finally, the discourse of psychoanalysis reveals to what extent even Freudian science deals with the problems articulated by sociology, literature and philosophy. Like modernist writers, like Virginia Woolf, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Italo Svevo and Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud discovers psychic ambivalence: the coexistence of incompatible drives, of admiration and envy, love and hatred, despondence and courage in an individual's 'soul'. Freud goes one step further when he refers to some anthropological evidence which indicates that 'God' and the 'Devil' were originally the same instance.14 The question is not, of course, whether this hypothesis is borne out by facts but whether ambivalence in the Freudian sense can be related to ambivalence as defined by late modern philosophy, sociology and literature. Although ambivalence has different features in the psychoanalytic, the literary, the philosophical and the sociological realm, it can always be related to the individual subject. In virtually all modernist discourses - be they psychoanalytic, sociological, philosophical or literary - the latter appears as a "divided self' (Laing): as an actor torn between logic and dream, reason and unconscious drives, culture and nature. It is not by chance that most of the modernist writers mentioned here were not only influenced by Nietzsche but also by Freud. And those among them who were not influenced by Freud were 'Freudians' avant la lettre: for example Proust (who uses the word "inconscient" in a protopsychoanalytic sense) or Schnitzler to whom Freud confesses in a famous letter that he envies the writer who intuitively anticipates certain insights which the psychoanalyst can only obtain by means of patient psychoanalytic

13 Cf. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. I (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), chap. 61: "Das Ideal der drei Abhandlungen oder die Utopie des exakten Lebens". 14 Cf. Sigmund Freud, "Der Teufel als Vaterersatz" in id., Studienausgabe, vol. VII (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 301.

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investigations.15 He could have (posthumously) written a similar letter to Nietzsche who had mapped out a psychology of resentment long before Freud was born. The global discursive feature which seems to link psychoanalysis to late modern literature, sociology and philosophy is critical reflection and selfreflection - and above all a self-reflection of modernity as a culture in crisis. Freud's famous essay on "Civilisation and its Discontents" is such a reflection in that it reconsiders the individual subject's position between nature and culture, a position Enlightenment philosophy invariably described from the point of view of culture, of reason. Freud, who is anything but an irrationalist, cautiously reveals the dark, unsurveyed side of subjectivity: its natural, nonrational components which the Young Hegelians began to notice and which Nietzsche focused on before Freud. This is the reason why the late modern or modernist problematic can be considered as a self-reflection of modernity. Its most important discourses deal with the same or similar problems·, ambivalence, the crisis of the subject, the critique of reason, progress and the conflict between nature and culture. Although each discourse proposes solutions which are often incompatible with those envisaged by other discourses, all discourses involved seem to converge in one focal point: in a critical reflection of the modern age as Christian civilisation, Enlightenment or Hegelian dialectic. This critical reflection announces a more radical, postmodern critique.

Postmodernity and Postmodernism: Indifference and the Decline of the Subject The question whether and how long postmodernity or postmodernism will last can only be answered - albeit in a very hypothetical manner - in the context mapped out above. The complexity of this context which has been constructed here as a problematic explains why prognoses are so difficult in the social sciences. It may be relatively easy to establish correlations between the increase of the number of cars and (ceteris paribus) an increase in the number of road accidents or aggressive traffic behaviour. Prognoses concerning the transformation of problematics are far more dicey because they involve a vast array of relatively heterogeneous elements most of which can be interpreted or re-constructed in many different ways. However, as long as we continue using such macro-theoretical concepts as 'modernity' or 'postmodernity', more speculative hypotheses, more adventurous constructions become inevitable. Whenever historical or literary 15 Cf. Sigmund Freud's letter of May 8th 1906 quoted by Hartmut Scheible, in: Arthur Schnitzler, Die Braut. Traumnovelle (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976), 105.

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periods are involved they can hardly be avoided because such periods are complex structures that can only be described or re-constructed on an interdisciplinary level. If we wish to know whether or not the postmodern age will last we should try to avoid a reductionist approach which identifies the postmodern with its literary components, highlighting a number of stylistic aspects. Ihab Hassan, who associates modernism with the names of Valery, Proust, Gide, the early Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, Rilke, Mann, Musil et al.,16 focuses on such aspects and completely disregards literature's links with society, sociology, philosophy or psychology: "But if much of modernism appears as hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neo-avant-garde."17 Among the distinctive features of literary postmodernism Hassan mentions "chance", "play", "desire", "parataxis", "irony" and "indeterminacy". If one accepts these criteria it becomes hard to distinguish postmodernism from romanticism, let alone from modernism, forever marked by Italo Svevo's and Robert Musil's irony. But romantic irony is no less prominent (in the works of August and Friedrich Schlegel, in the works of Jean-Paul Richter), although it may differ from that of the modernists. "Chance" and "play" are as important in Mallarme's and Valery's texts as in those of any postmodern author: "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard...". Unfulfilled desire can be considered as the secret motor of Huysmans' and Proust's novels, and Adorno chose the notion of 'parataxis' in order to describe the structure of Hölderlin's poems. Thus the stylistic features chosen by Hassan hardly fulfil a distinctive function. One might add that there is nothing "hieratic, hypotactical and formalist" about Musil's, Proust's or Svevo's novels which - on the contrary - tend to subvert systematic (hypotactical) discourse in the rationalist and in the Hegelian sense. "He was not a philosopher", remarks Musil's narrator about the hero Ulrich, "philosophers are domineering figures who attempt to subjugate the world by locking it up in a system".18 This quotation from Musil's The Man without Qualities not only casts doubts upon Hassan's scheme; it reveals its fundamental weakness which consists in separating the literary discourse from philosophy, sociology and psychology. For Musil's critique of systematic philosophy ought to be read in a Nietzschean context marked by an anti-Hegelian bias which Adorno's modernist (late modern) philosophy renews and develops. In other words: only somebody who completely disregards the philosophical implications of 16 Cf. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern (Columbus: Ohio UP, 1987), 90-91. 17 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 91. 18 Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, I, 253.

Theory and

Culture

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Musil's great novel can associate the Austrian writer's name with "hieratic, hypotactical and formalist" writing. There is also a certain disregard for the social and political implications of Musil's, Proust's and Svevo's novels in Hassan's analyses. For these novels show a striking affinity with the discourse of Adorno and Horkheimer's Critical Theory when it comes to criticising social domination in some of its linguistic forms: in elegant conversation (Proust), in psychoanalysis (Svevo) and in systematic philosophy (Musil). Musil's essayistic novel anticipates many aspects of the essayistic discourses of Critical Theory whose authors believe - like Musil - that only an essayistic or paratactic approach can do justice to the objects treated by rationalist and Hegelian discourses as pretexts or instruments of self-enhancement. Hassan's case shows that it is unhelpful to isolate the literary world from the rest of culture. It seems more appropriate to consider postmodernity as a problematic analogous to late modernity and to relate the philosophical to the literary, sociological and psychoanalytic (psychological) features. The fundamental philosophical problems of the postmodern problematic have been mapped out by three authors who have put forward three complementary theses: Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Lyotard's thesis is well-known: the postmodern world is marked by an "incredulity towards the meta-narratives" ("incredulite ä l'egard des metarecits"19) and by an increasing pluralism of languages and cultures. Baudrillard argues that the political and the ideological have been superseded by a media-dominated hyper-reality in which all values are subsumed to the only value left: the value-indifferent exchange value (referred to by Baudrillard as "la valeur").20 Fredric Jameson's thesis is complementary, for he believes that the phenomena described or postulated by the other two thinkers can be explained with reference to what he calls - following Ernest Mandel21 - late capitalism. These three hypotheses can be related to one another as follows: In a late capitalist society, the market laws and the exchange value dominate all spheres of life and undermine the ideological (Christian, rationalist, Marxist or fascist) engagement of individual and collective subjects. In this situation, the great Christian, Marxist, fascist and rationalist meta-narratives decline and give way to local ideologies in the ecological, feminist, eco-feminist, ethnic or anarchist sense. The languages of these ideologies are incommensurate (as Lyotard

19 Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 7. 20 Cf. Jean Baudrillard, La Gauche divine (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 19. "C'est 9a le capital: le regne sans limites de la valeur d'echange". In L'Echange impossible (Paris: Galilee, 1999), 159, the exchange value is referred to as "la valeur" (tout court). 21 Cf. Ernest Mandel, Le Troisieme äge du capitalisme (Paris: Ed. de la Passion, 1997) and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 4 1993), 3.

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points out), and their incompatibility yields a social and linguistic situation of radical pluralism. One might add that in this situation, where it becomes impossible to subsume a vast number of particular languages under a universally valid meta-narrative, pluralism, particularisation and indifference form a nexus: to the uninvolved observer (e. g. the undecided floating voter) the innumerable particular viewpoints and languages (from Jehovah's Witnesses to regional nationalists) appear as interchangeable, as in-different. Unlike the meta-narrative of the Marxists who believed - in the 1920s and 1930s - that they could stem and reverse the fascist tide, the particular languages in a strongly fragmented, consumerist society no longer seem to matter to anybody (except to the members of militant groups, of course). Inextricably linked to the exchange value in late capitalism, indifference as interchangeability of values and viewpoints thus appears as the central problem of the postmodern problematic. It supersedes modernist ambivalence which was the starting point of a quest: for truth (Huysmans), art (Proust), Utopia (Musil), Law (Kafka) or the subject's identity (Woolf). In postmodern literature, this quest disappears. Or rather, it is parodied, played with. Ihab Hassan is certainly right when he considers "play" as one of the features of postmodernism. For a postmodern novel such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose cannot be read as a Christian quest in the sense of Chretien de Troyes' or Wolfram von Eschenbach's courtly romance. It toys with the medieval, the modern and the late modern quest making the contemporary reader consider it with playful detachment - without "naivete", as Eco himself emphasises.22 A similar argument applies to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman: a pseudoVictorian narrative which plays with the Victorian novel by adopting a detached postmodern perspective. At one point the narrator quotes RobbeGrillet and Roland Barthes in order to enhance the critical distance of the reader, in order to avoid Victorian naivete: "But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word."23 It is a postmodern novel which plays with the modern and modernist quest, with Proust's recherche. The same can be said of the nouveau roman which is rightly considered as postmodern by various literary critics. The writer Maurice Roche thinks that all nouveaux romans (Robbe-Grillet's, Butor's, CI. Simon's) are literary "gadgets"24 (he uses the English word) which invite the reader to play the narrative game, the game of literary innovation. Naturally, the nouveau roman 22 Umberto Eco, II nome della rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), 529 (Postille a "II nome della rosa"). 23 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's (Vornan (1969) (London: Jonathan Cape, Picador, 1992), 85. 24 Maurice Roche, Compact (Paris: UGE-10/18, 1966), 168.

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is quite different from Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Eco's The Name of the Rose. But it is postmodern for the same reason: it abandons the metaphysical quest of modernity and late modernity in order to transform it into a game with old literary forms. Along with the search for truth, art and law it abandons the search for the subject's identity. In Robbe-Grillet's or Claude Simon's novels, for example, character and identity are no longer literary topics. Robbe-Grillet himself observes that the decline of character sets in during the modernist and existentialist period: in the novels of Kafka, Sartre and Camus.25 In the nouveau roman and in postmodern novels such as Patrick Süskind's Das Par/urn, characters in the traditional sense hardly occur. More often than not protagonists are pseudo-actors who obey mechanically certain irresistible drives. In Robbe-Grillet's novel Le Voyeur, for example, Mathias, a traveller trading in watches, pays a day's visit to a fictive island where he hopes to maximise his profits. At the same time, however, he is driven by a sexual obsession: he intends to rape Violette, a native of the island (violer Violette), in a carefully planned ritual. The economic and the sexual obsessions run parallel, determine all of the traveller's (voyeur-voyageur) moves, leaving no room for critical self-reflection, autonomy or freedom. These components of individual subjectivity seem to belong to a modernist problematic which has long since disappeared. In this respect, the situation is similar in Süskind's Das Parfüm where a fantastic hero called "Grenouille" (French for 'frog') is driven by an irresistible urge to produce the best perfume in the world. In order to achieve this goal he kills a number of young girls whose scent he absorbs in very much the same way as a tick absorbs the blood of animals and humans. This is why he is also referred to as 'the tick' ("der Zeck"). Apart from the fact that Das Parfüm can also be read as a parody of the European artist novel, because the 'art' of perfume replaces music, writing or painting, the text parodies subjectivity as such. As in Le Voyeur, action is entirely determined by psychic or physical factors and no room is left for reflection, autonomy or criticism. Although parody prevails throughout the narrative, so that Süskind's novel cannot be read as a plea for the art of perfume (or anything else for that matter), it is a symptom of postmodernism insofar as it denies the possibility of subjective autonomy and of a meaningful search for religious, ethical or aesthetic authenticity (in the sense of Kierkegaard, Kafka, Mallarme or Proust). In a problematic dominated by indifference, i. e. by the idea that all values are - at least in principle - interchangeable, a meaningful search of the late modem or modernist sort becomes inconceivable: for it is always a search for lasting values. Moreover, it is a search which frequently derives its meaning

25

Cf. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 32.

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from one of the great meta-narratives Lyotard considers with scepticism. Examples in point are the Christian novels of the mature Joris-Karl Huysmans (Les Foules de Lourdes, La Cathedrale) or the revolutionary novels of Andre Malraux (Les Conquerants, La Condition humaine). When pointing out that we (i. e. contemporary intellectuals) consider the great melarecits with scepticism, Lyotard should have added that we do so, because the values underlying these mitaricits - be they Christian, rationalist or revolutionary have become problematical in a society governed by the exchange value. The literary problematic sketched here has its counterpart in contemporary sociology which, especially in Germany, relies heavily on Luhmann's systems theory. In the past, Adorno already pointed out that functionalist systems theory tends to eliminate the individual subject dividing it up into roles, rolesets and role-sequences.26 In Luhmann's systematic approach, this process of elimination culminates in the sociologist's well-known statement that the notion of the subject can be dispensed with: "Therefore we can also give up the concept of subject."27 The latter is replaced by the idea of an autonomous (auto-poietic, i. e. biological, psychic or social) system, which functions in accordance with specific rules that do not apply in other systems. For Luhmann, 'human' is not a useful category because the human being is divided up between the biological, the psychic and the social systems. In his discourse the system turns out to be the main (mythical) actor insofar as it usurps all active functions of the individual subject.28 Far from being a freak phenomenon, Luhmann's sociology is a symptom of the postmodern decline of the subject that is confirmed in a different context and on a different level by Althusser's Marxism and Lacan's psychoanalysis. Although these closely related discourses (Althusser has always acknowledged his debt to Lacan) have little in common with Luhmann's strongly anti-Marxist approach, they tend to agree with systems theory in arguing that 'the Subject' is a metaphysical or ideological (humanist) illusion which dissolves as soon as we come to realise that history and science are processes without a subject and that what is commonly called a subject in the psychic context tends to coincide with the language of the unconscious (in the sense of Lacan).29 It goes without saying that a lot more could be said on the critique of the subject in Luhmann's, Althusser's and Lacan's theories.30 All that matters in 26 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, "Über Statik und Dynamik als soziologische Kategorien" in id., Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 45. 27 Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984; 1987), 111. 28 Cf. Peter V. Zima, Theorie des Subjekts. Subjektivität und Identität zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne (Tübingen, Bale: Francke, 2000), ch. IV, 3: "Die Liquidierung des Subjekts durch seine Allgegenwart: Niklas Luhmann". 29 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre II, Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 286. 30 Cf. Zima, Theorie des Subjekts.

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the context mapped out here is the fact that, within the postmodern problematic, scepticism vis-ä-vis the great meta-narratives goes hand in hand with a radical critique or an outright rejection of the notion of subjectivity (be it collective or individual) and that this rejection can be observed on a philosophical, a literary, a sociological and a psychoanalytic level. Naturally, counter-arguments and counter-movements exist, especially in philosophy and sociology, where Paul Ricceur, Manfred Frank and Alain Touraine defend the notions of individual and collective subjectivity against all postmodern attempts to prove its illusory or ideological character.31 But perhaps it is not sheer chance that Ricoeur and Touraine belong to an older generation (both were born at the beginning of the 20th century: 1913, 1925) which cannot come to terms with indifference, irresponsibility and reification in markets and systems. Their - very relevant and clear-sighted - reactions show that late modernity (modernism) is still with us and that postmodemity is not as firmly established as some of us might be led to assume. This is a first good reason for believing that postmodemity (not just literary postmodernism) will last: it has just begun, and the postmodern problematic geared towards indifference is not yet consolidated, as the numerous late modern reactions show. In fact one could argue that the late modern (modernist) problematic has not yet entirely disappeared and that the two problematics still overlap in many sectors of social life - in very much the same way as the Enlightenment and the romantic period overlapped in various European countries. The second reason is the invasion by market forces and the exchange value of virtually all spheres of social life - including the family, education, health and leisure. Where the exchange value comes to be recognised as the dominant criterion, the supreme arbiter under which all other values can be subsumed, the central principle of indifference (as interchangeability of values) can only be reinforced. One of the cases in point is contemporary university where a subject - e. g. Ancient Greek - is no longer important in itself, because it is at the origin of European culture, but only if it attracts masses of paying students. The argument that the five students who feel attracted are highly motivated and well above average no longer counts. The quantitative argument that the chair in Ancient Greek ought to be replaced by a chair of 'Tourism' (which does attract masses of paying students) has a far better chance to succeed. The idea that - from a scientific and theoretical point of view - 'tourism' is rubbish

31 Cf. Paul Riceur, Soi-meme comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Manfred Frank, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis. Essays zur analytischen Philosophie der Subjektivität (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991); Alain Touraine, Le Retour de l'acteur (Paris: Fayard, 1984); and id., Critique de la modernite (Paris: Fayard, 1992): "Troisieme partie: Naissance du sujet".

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compared with Ancient Greek could only be successfully defended by a powerful Platonic elite which is nowhere in sight. This leads to the third reason for believing that postmodernity is there to stay: what applies to 'powerful conservative elites', namely that they are conspicuous by their absence, also applies to 'powerful revolutionary elites'. No revolutionary elite in the Marxist or Leninist sense is in sight which would challenge the market forces and abolish the 'Chair of Tourism' for other reasons: in order to replace it by a 'Chair of Marxism-Leninism'. The only event which could disrupt postmodern market society would be an ecological disaster leading to massive ideological reactions against the market forces which have always threatened the natural environment (e. g. by tourism). Although ideological reactions to indifference are always possible (and frequently occur), an ecological disaster does not seem to be imminent. For the time being, the main problem seems to be a gradual but steady erosion of the natural environment by market forces. This often imperceptible erosion is unlikely to provoke ideological reactions on a large scale (at least not for the time being). The global reason for believing that postmodernity will continue is the notion of problematic itself. Problematics do not change overnight. The fact that late modern and even pre-modern elements exist within postmodernity shows that a problematic is a slowly changing constellation and that changes occur almost imperceptibly as certain problems, which were at the centre of a problematic, gradually move to the periphery, as they are superseded by new problems. Thus the male subject who was at the centre of the modernist novel (in the sense of Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Marcel Proust or Italo Svevo) is gradually being replaced by pseudo-subjects whose quests are parodies of modern and modernist recherches - or by female anti-subjects who challenge the validity of a male social order (for example in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time). At the same time, the modern problem of a revolutionary change (its possibility or impossibility) is being superseded by the problem of ecological survival. In this context, the notion of nature (which changed substantially between romanticism and modernism) is once again redefined. Nature no longer appears as a refuge of the lonely subject or as a threat to it, but as a collective, ecological problem. This means that modernity, late modernity and postmodernity can only be dealt with in an interdisciplinary set-up where philosophical, sociological, psychological and literary (artistic) problems are related to one another. Any attempt to define one of these problematics on an exclusively philosophical or literary level is bound to reduce complexity in an unacceptable manner: for example by defining the postmodern as a style, an aesthetic or an ideology. Although the model mapped out here contains inevitable gaps or distortions and is by no means identical with reality, it avoids this kind of one-sidedness.

PHILIP T E W

A New Sense of Reality? A New Sense of the Text? Exploring Meta-Realism and the Literary-Critical Field Whatever the ongoing and seemingly interminable debates concerning the exact parameters of the terms 'postmodern' and 'postmodemity', it appears to have occurred to many academics and philosophers that the intellectual activities that these two terms have come to represent are either at a radical turning point or they are facing an insurmountable crisis in terms of conceptual credibility. Certainly postmodern critiques are being challenged, and my cartography of key aspects drawn from such challenges is a significant part of the subject matter of this present paper. However, I hope to do more than simply summarize the negation of these theories by others. In exploring these tensions and negations I seek to suggest that in the critical field a new sense of a dialectical reality principle is emerging variously, and if drawn together such strands, themes and critiques may well contribute toward a new sense of the textual (and of course of the cultural and social since it will diminish their semiotic textualization). In so doing I hope to establish something of the potential within the literary-critical field for such a sense of meta-realism, whose critique emerges in the analysis that follows. Moreover, in this context the present paper seeks to develop and deepen the critical investigation that I began in an earlier exploratory chapter "Reconsidering Literary Interpretation".1 Nevertheless even here my present work remains introductory and expository in part because of the limits of the present paper. Nevertheless in its theoretical scope it draws broadly from theoretical sources including suggestive historical fragments, in part to indicate that some supposed preconceptions of postmodernism are not new, and aspects of contingency, variability and so forth have been read quite differently in the past in persuasive fashion. Hence, I call upon concepts found in Hegel among others. However, my emergent critical positions are drawn in the main from more contemporary sources, in particular from a pair of philosophers working in

1

Philip Tew, "Reconsidering Literary Interpretation" in Jose Lopez, Garry Potter (eds.), After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (London: Athlone, 2001), 196-205.

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England and America, Roy Bhaskar and Edward Pols, whose work is discussed and quoted at length below in order to introduce them to AngloAmerican academics in the literary-critical field (given not only the unfamiliarity of their texts, but despite this neglect the extensiveness of their critical positions). Affiliate theory from a range of other theorists is called upon not only to supplement these two central critiques, both to elaborate and deepen these interventions, but also to demonstrate the existing extensive grounds for retrieving such a complex notion of the real as a set of coordinates to which one must return for a sustainable cartography of intellectual and more general knowledge. For over a decade among certain 'radical leftish' thinkers postmodernism has come to be regarded not only as vexatious as an account of an antienlightenment critique, but with increasing suspicion as to its other underlying principles. Christopher Norris, for example, in The Truth About Postmodernism (1993) details the hostility of various postmodern theorists toward truth-claims and what he regards as their reductive conflation of the fiduciary and veridical with enlightened universalism, describing any such postmodern critique as representing a '"Dogmatic relativism' [...] an apt enough description for the kind of reflex response that associates truth-claims of whatever kind with the workings of a brutal and arbitrary will-to-power [...]". 2 Moreover, in general postmodernists themselves have read discourse as either constructing our reality, or being the dominant model suggestive of its complexity, whilst maintaining that the discourses upon which both of these are based can themselves be deconstructed only in such a manner that exaggerates the problematic at the crux of Michel Foucault's view of a generic 'madness' in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961; 1964) whose very punning title serves to suggest that the text offers itself as an ironic undercutting of the whole basis Enlightenment thinking per se. This remains a grandiose intention based on a range of semiotic quibbles. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, thefigureno longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. [...] The image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. The symbolicfigureseasily become nightmare silhouettes.3 Foucault offers an example of the exemplary nature of deconstructive poststructuralism for postmodern thought. In this sense the movement of his 2 3

Christopher Norris, The Truth About Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 285. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Robert Howard (London, New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 16.

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thought is instructive. Foucault can be deconstructed in terms of an understated set of transformations without which his critique is either unanchored or meaningless. In essence, things lose an original form, which loss can somehow be acknowledged as a process when that originary, objective presence resistant to articulation - is under challenge from formal meaning where so framed it becomes subsumed in toto by the symbolic. Consequently this residue of such things then becomes accessible only linguistically (and otherwise presumably inaccessible even to Foucault, but perhaps retrievable unconsciously in Freudian fashion). Moreover, setting aside the influence of Foucault's own allusive and performative procedure, firstly his vocabulary and secondly his implicit abandonment (or moving our emphasis away from) of 'things' and the real would appear to be both instructive in terms of the movement of the Foucauldian meta-narratives that followed in his wake and so influenced postmodern populist discourses. Other basic objections remain. Is the thing itself dissolved along with our sense of its meaning? Could anyone intelligent have ever imagined a reading that could have ever been immediately perceptual in terms of a fullness of meaning? As noted by Norris Foucault's position appears contradictory and misinterpreted.4 Certainly, it is perplexing quite where Foucault situates in madness "beyond imagination and yet profoundly rooted in it" the image's "spontaneous value, total and absolute truth"5 and its "immediacy" or from where madmen access or intuit these elements or relations. But there is a larger ground for reservations. Certainly, in its focus such deconstructive textualizing readings of knowledge and its lacunae serve to variously narrow and marginalize the nature of the real itself. In Intimations of Postmodernity (1992) Zygmunt Bauman suggests that "[o]nce we remember that incoherence is the most distinctive among the attributes of postmodernity (arguably its defining feature), we need to reconcile ourselves to the prospect that all narratives will be to a varying extent flawed", 7 and yet he insists there remains a reality available to be modeled 4

5 6 7

The issue of Foucault's duality and dependence on truth is discussed in terms specifically of Richard Rorty's misreading. Norris adds of Foucault in this context "the signs of tension are there, as I have argued, in Foucault's protracted series of engagements with Kant, in the talk of 'truth' - however elusively defined - that figures so often in his late essays and interviews, and above all his growing resistance to that strain of facile ultra-relativist talk that forms such a prominent (and depressing) feature of the avant-garde cultural scene. All of which suggests that he cannot be so easily recruited to a postmodern-pragmatist or counter-enlightenment ethos whose watchwords are the 'end of philosophy', the demise of Enlightenment critique and the eclipse of the subject - the Kantian knowing, willing, and judging subject - as a phantom entity whose lineaments have now dissolved into a 'random assemblage' of 'contingent and idiosyncratic needs'". Norris, Postmodernism, 70-71; also more generally for his critique of Foucault consult Norris, Postmodernism, 29-99. Foucault, Madness, 88. Foucault, Madness, 89. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), xxiv.

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"both in its present shape and in its plausible prospects". 8 In order to make such observations it seems that Bauman must conceive of reality both as fragmentary and yet as determinedly, intersubjectively material. To this one might add in mediation Henri Lefebvre's critical commentary concerning the real in Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (1961; 2002). The dialectic of what is real and what is apparent is well known. There is no pure appearance, no phenomenon which could only be phenomenon without something behind it. The 'real' displays itself by means of phenomena, thus by means of appearances: what is essential is made manifest. Thus every appearance and every phenomenon contains a certain reality. They reveal and they conceal this reality. To reach the essential, knowledge must both grasp it and push it to one side.9 At first sight this conceptual fluctuation of the real might seem familiar enough with regard to later postmodern critiques, but there exists a key point of alternate procedure in the latter's conscious and ongoing diminishment of the phenomena as ontological priorities. Rather its textualizing deconstruction is too ordered and schematic to uncover and articulate this fluctuating, evanescent fullness indicated by Lefebvre. My emphasis here remains a theoretical one, and I seek a critical stance that avoids what Lefebvre describes as "the confusion between 'reality' and 'structure'". 10 Hence, my present analysis is not so much concerned with specific examples of literary criticism or the specificity of textual reflection in literary fiction on language, events, factualities of the world, as it is concerned with the grounds for the continuing existence, efficaciousness and relevance of such ontological interventions into the reality that constitutes and/or produces such texts. Nevertheless, such particularity can never be overwhelmed, effaced or negated. I concentrate simply upon other, less familiar, dialectic meanings (or presence) of these textual 'realities', a term I adopt since to textualize is both an ontologically and practically oriented activity. Such texts also offer, as Roy Bhaskar explains in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, a continuance of "spatio-temporal traditions",11 a spatial presence, and are part of an existentially intersubjective process of identity,12 a concept enmeshed in that of the quotidian that Lefebvre regards as crucial to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological critique.13 For Mario J. Valdes in Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (1987) the concept of

8 9 10 11 12 13

Bauman, Postmodernity, 65. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (London: Verso, 2002), 27. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 198. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London, New York: Verso, 1993), 123. Bhaskar, Dialectic, 124-25. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 24.

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intersubjectivity helps determine "[t]he proposition that a shared meaning of a text is a reality in the world of action in which we live"14 where "the ontological status of the text is primarily its capacity to redescribe the reader's world in intersubjective terms and not in a private language".15 Additionally one must assume that logic presumes that human realities predated texts (archaeologically and anthropologically provable unless one adopts a postmodern position equivalent to that of a creationist where even such knowledge is somehow preemptively 'textualized'), an a priori intersubjective structure of community and being. Moreover such an ontology in fact produced texts as if miraculously, evoking a realm of extra-material realities relating to other such realms, drawing on the insubstantial to make of texts something so needful and efficacious as to permeate most corners of our existence. In so doing man was nevertheless exploring what Ernst Cassirer describes in An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture as seeking "a phenomenology of human culture"16 as a supplementarity of sorts, for "in sense perception we are content with apprehending the common and constant features of the objects of our surroundings. Aesthetic experience is incomparably richer. It is pregnant with infinite possibilities which remain unrealized in ordinary sense experience. In the work of the artist these possibilities become actualities; they are brought into the open and take on a definite shape".17 Given these general grounds for some kind of reality principle, this present exploratory critique focuses on the discursive and intellectual possibilities in applying the methodology and discursive structures of a 'critical realism' and a 'radical realism' to the literary-critical fields. Moreover, one might suggest a tentative progress within this kind of critical engagement. Recently these areas of critical interest have been alluded to in terms of a 'meta-reality' or 'metarealism', a pair of terms that are beginning to serve as a useful umbrella for describing the reworking of the phenomenological, the dialectical and a range of other theoretical-realist critiques dealing with the social and the objective that may supply perhaps both a new sense of the text, both fictional and nonfictional, and a sense of proportion as to the grounds and extensiveness of the textual.18 One must stress - a point clear from the range of theorists used and 14 Mario J. Valdes, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (London, Toronto, Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1987), ix. 15 Valdes, Phenomenological Hermeneutics, 71. 16 Emst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944), 52. 17 Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 145. 18 This is a term that I first used verbally in trying to situate, explain and extend my critique that combined phenomenology and a dialectical interpretative mode after delivering a paper on critical realism to those attending the aesthetics section of the Second International Conference of the Centre for Critical Realism (1-3 September 1998) at the University of

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alluded to in this exposition - that this undertaking is not entirely an original project, but one that involves both drawing together and re-emphasizing the often misrepresented, the neglected and even the self-evident. If so, why should it be necessary to reconsider these elements? In part this responds to what many like Norris consider the almost wrong-headed 'excesses' or 'deviances' of a post-structural-postmodern axis of thought and its popularizers. The errors of such popularizers have been almost more significant than the work of its major theorists, which has had its considered and significant moments, in that the majority of its proponents propose reality as if it were either a semiotic or grammatical system expressed textually. To contextualize this tendency, let us take what could be argued to represent a typical example, the position that Linda Hutcheon adopts in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) and thinks is worth establishing explicitly in terms of what she describes as the 'political phenomenon' of the postmodern: In general terms it takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, selfundermining statement. It is rather like saying something whilst at the same time putting inverted commas around what is being said. The effect is to highlight, or 'highlight,' and to subvert, or 'subvert,' and the mode is therefore a 'knowing' and an ironic - or even 'ironic' - one. Postmodernism's distinctive character lies in this kind of wholescale 'nudging' commitment to doubleness or duplicity. In many ways it is an even-handed process because postmodernism ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalise some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees. 19

Hutcheon's analysis of these forces depends upon a gross oversimplification, since the whole point of the concepts of civilization and culture is that their many proponents saw them as developmental, as mediations, and as spiritually directed advancements on the plenitude of nature. Such 'dominant features' as she attacks may represent what Matthew Arnold saw in Culture and Anarchy as "a high development of our humanity" toward his concept of 'total perfection' and yet his description of its revelation is of a mutative, Essex. Later the term's implications were integrated into a new philosophical project by Roy Bhaskar in Reflections on Meta-Reality: Transcendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage, 2002). In fact in the artistic field this term 'metarealism' offers a longer provenance; it was used to describe an avant-garde poetic form as it emerged in the late 1970s in the Soviet Union. Its use suggests a critique of change, describing in contrast to literalism as a new poetic incorporating the metaphoric to transcend figurative meaning through a metamorphosis that reintegrates into the grasp of reality a whole range of actual and possible transformations. 19 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1989), 1-2.

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illuminating and social process going even beyond religion.20 Clearly his conception is not one of static forces and a reductive 'naturalizing' rationality, and nor is such a dominating imposition part of Hegel's notion of culture, expressed in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), in that any such recognition and shaping is dependent upon inward and intuitive acts of reflection since "nature in all its spread of wealth does not have a relation to the subject, but is rather totally dense" and an understanding of whose laws involve an "inward essence [...] and are not an immediate relationship, but rather are the product of thought only by means of penetrating into intuition and sublating the sensible relationship of unmediated externality".21 This is a more persuasive sense of a 'de-naturalisation' than Hutcheon's, who overestimates and overburdens her notion of "the conventions and presuppositions" which she fails to locate precisely or even sociologically (by which omission she surely universalizes despite her best intentions). Moreover, the position taken here by Hutcheon must be either deceptive or self-contradictory, especially if one accedes to Edward Pols' position in The Acts of Our Being: A Reflection on Agency and Responsibility (1982) where he indicates that language cannot supersede language,22 even in the sense of being able to construct its own reflexive, referential limitations (which suggests a species of supersession). The challenge to 'dominance' that is implied in Hutcheon's definitional discourse purveys a subtextual assumption of radicality or intervention which yet retains an 'even-handedness'. 'Capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism' are reduced to an anthropomorphic state or at least an entirely embodied one divorced from the forces that influenced and even instituted them. Underlying these comments it seems to me there is generally a presupposed disengagement, a liberal sense of 'balance', a conceptual defeatism in terms of radical possibilities, and yet a knowingness that transcends (and even contradicts) her claim that the postmodern "points to politically un-innocent things - like the expectation of shared meaning".23 Surely there is an imposition of such meaning, in the insistence upon a cultural textualization that makes of any 'real life' project a palimpsest. Such characteristics are common to postmodern positions taken in the literary-critical field. This all combines to form an aspect that Christopher Norris calls the 'linguistic turn', which pervades Hutcheon's critique. Norris' more detailed critique in "On the Discrimination of Discourse Theories" in Reclaiming Truth: Contributions to a

20 See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 19, 29,45-46, 48-49. 21 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. Ill: The Consummate Religion (London, Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985), 98. 22 Edward Pols, The Acts of Our Being: A Reflection on Agency and Responsibility (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982), 77. 23 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 4.

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Critique of Cultural Relativism (1996) points to the phenomenological in Jacques Derrida that is neglected and effaced in this emphasis. 24 Norris opines "what remains puzzling is the ease with which this orthodoxy captured the minds of so many otherwise intelligent philosophers and theorists". 25 Even what one might term the 'textualizers' reach toward something more than a framing consciousness. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson remind us in Metaphors We Live By (1980), "Ideas don't come out of thin air". 26 Nevertheless, they dismiss an 'objectivist emphasis' and its 'universally valid point of view' as missing "what is important, insightful, and coherent for the individual". 27 And yet perhaps most significantly they do concede that: understanding emerges from interaction, from constant negotiation with the environment and other people. It emerges in the following way: the nature of our bodies and our physical and cultural environment imposes a structure on our experience, in terms of natural dimensions [...]. Recurrent experience leads to the formation of categories, which are experiential gestalts with those natural dimensions. Such gestalts define coherence in our experience.28 What is noticeable - despite the gestures toward an undefined cultural relativism of 'truth', and the insistently individualistic emphasis, and in spite of the assertion that "what's meaningful to me is a matter of what has significance for me. And what is significant for me will not depend upon my rational knowledge alone but on my past experiences, values, feelings, and intuitive insights. Meaning is not cut and dried; it is a matter of imagination and a matter of constructing coherence" 29 - is that in Lakoff and Johnson, however anti-universal their stance, rational knowledge and moreover additionally a broad category of the objective and the social are retained and all of these elements recur. Interestingly many critics like the feminist Sylvia Walby in "Post-Post-Modernism? Theorizing Social Complexity" have come to sense that postmodernists have proceeded "too far in their dispersal of identity and power". 30 Simply to identify a problematic in the grounding of both the subject and of knowledge is neither radically new nor does it serve to undermine the necessity of sharing such knowledge as we do possess of ourselves as plural subjects in recognition of each other and of the world itself. If such 24 Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contributions to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 52-57; 236-43. 25 Norris, Reclaiming Truth, 65. 26 George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1980), xi. 27 Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 227. 28 Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 230. 29 Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 227. 30 Sylvia Walby, "Post-Post-Modernism? Theorizing Social Complexity" in Middle Barrett, Anne Phillips (eds.), Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 31-52, 35.

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problematics exist, then these are ontological rather than simply textual concerns (or semiotic ones). Georges Bataille begins The Unfinished System of Knowledge (2001): "It is a banality to claim that there is a fundamental difficulty in human communication. And it is not hard to recognize in advance that this difficulty is partially irreducible."31 This 'banalization' in critical thinking has been misread as offering something profound, but its recurrent procedure of foregrounding (and assuming) language's supposedly epistemic self-referentiality is being challenged increasingly. In Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (1992) Pols argues that the act of knowing is intrinsically both experiential and rational,32 stating that "my positive purpose is to draw attention to the experiential engagement of our rationality with reality and, in doing so, to show that the function of language in the life of rationality is not what the consensus claims it to be. To anticipate: although language is essential to our construction of theories and doctrines, it does not function constructively, or constitutively, in other cognitive transactions and so does not make a direct rational-experiential engagement with reality impossible".33 The notions underpinning his critique are central to a paradigm shift toward a meta-realism that have been operative albeit tentatively in a range of theoretical sources and frameworks used in the past few years in the humanities and social sciences in particular. As monolithic intellectual structures post-structuralism and post-modernity are flawed in the priority they share with modernity of subject individuality whilst setting such subjects against modernity's universalism. To reach this conjuncture requires one to elevate individuation (modernity's egocentricity) whilst negating its abstraction (universality) in a context where it is as if discourse is finally both unrelatable in terms of any overarching commonality and constantly in flux. As Bhaskar has pointed out this is more than paradoxical: it is unsustainable.34 And broadly, as both Bhaskar and Pols indicate variously, irrealism and relativism underwrite the postmodern view. The practice of situating ourselves and our evaluations in a general sense counter such assumptions, providing a range of objections included in which are a 'radical' and 'critical' realism moving toward a concept of meta-reality that is objectively and intersubjectively rooted. This is not to return to the kind of realism that depends upon (not that it ever really could) a simple correspondence (which is the grounds of Woolfs famous objection to the so-called 'materialists' of her day), but this range of meta-realist thinking offers a recuperation of an appeal

31 Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Knowledge, tr. Michelle Kendall, Stuart Kendall (London, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), 5. 32 Edward Pols, Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1992), 2. 33 Pols, Radical Realism, 17. 34 Bhaskar, Reflections on Meta-Reality, 81.

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to a reality principle that involves an extension of an ongoing complexity of understanding of being and objectivity, incorporating an acknowledgement of provisionality (even though this concept presented a challenge that seduced many into attempts to dispel its very elusiveness by prioritizing it as a determining constant). Such awareness is hardly novel or limited to the contemporaneous (or even post-modern). Marcus Aurelius reminds his reader aphoristically in Meditations Book IV that "[t]he Universe is change; life is opinion" as useful maxim for meta-reality.35 Why has this kind of critique been marginal in at least the recent past? Very generally, for the specifics are a tome in themselves, the liberal humanist and Amoldian traditions in the literarycritical field have been seen contemporaneously by feminists and postmodernists as if these previous critical positions were themselves epistemically closed, part of an overall hegemonic ambition expressed by patriarchal forces through the medium of an ideology surrounding aesthetic idealism that included all of reality within such enclosures. Quite simply this was never true and negates the admission of (a dialectic of) humility and limits inscribed in an age of continuing belief in which these discourses emerged. The concepts of belief and God were mediations in themselves on humanistic transcriptions of knowledge and its expressions of concepts of totality. This parodic reduction of past critical schools of course, in terms of theory that is admissible, serves a double purpose of attacking the grounds of all male authority and within the romantic sublime all features of idealist philosophy. Although blinkered and elitist, the grounds for such liberal humanist ambitions, although understated, often provide a glimpse of a residual recognition of a disordered, uncontrollable world upon which such mostly male critics hoped to impose a framework of order, upon a reality neither fully effaced nor seen even in its reordered state as any sort of totality. F. R. Leavis admits as much in the middle of the Second World War in Education & the University (1943). "I assume that the attempt to establish a real liberal education in this country - to restore in relation to the modern world the idea of a liberal education - is worth making because, in spite of all our talk about disintegration and decay, and in spite of what we feel with so much excuse in our many despondent moments, we still have a positive cultural tradition."36 Even more revealing than Leavis' fetishization of the approved tradition's 'persistence' is his outline of a plenitude of oppositional forces and relations (and his endemic anti-Marxism expressed in the same piece). It is in contexts such as those outlined above that my overall critical project is in part an ongoing response to the legacies of a supposedly post-modern critique, such as the position found in Hutcheon's A Poetics of 35 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. A. S. L. Farquharson (London: Everyman's Library, 1992), 19. 36 F. R. Leavis, Education & the University (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 18.

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Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), yet one more in a plethora of critics full of notions of 'disintegration and decay' which she sees as capable of recuperation by postmodernity through a transposition of such negation into contradictoriness, self-contradictoriness, discontinuity and the subversions by admission of such ruptures of any rational totality and philosophical realist interventions. It seems essential to me to refute the major determinants underpinning such supposed radically subversive critiques, especially given Hutcheon's (perhaps representatively postmodern) ability to reduce Marxism much as Leavis does when referring to the "romantic and irresponsible vision that, in the Marxising days, acclaimed a human triumph that was to emerge out of catastrophe" 37 - at least in part to "the long tradition from Hegel and Marx through Lukäcs to Eagleton that tends to see only the past as the site of positive values (though what the past is changes - from the classic novel to modernism), always in direct contrast to the capitalist present (and that to changes) which, by definition, must be incapable of great art. This line of descent values only the past and rejects the art of the present as being totally complicitous with capitalism, while (implicitly) positioning itself safely outside it." 38 This 'line of descent' does very few of the things she supposes, if any at all, if considered in sufficient detail (and those who know my work will recognize that I am far from being an apologist for critics like Eagleton). I cannot fathom quite whom or what Hutcheon feels she is parodying here: these so-called 'Marxists', maybe herself or even perhaps critical discourse in general? More significantly and very tellingly, Hutcheon reduces the notion of the dialectic to a residual interplay of source and negation, and even more importantly parodies the possibility of recuperating an extended meta-realist critique. Using Fredric Jameson and his limitations to create an 'Aunt Sally' figure - that is a parody figure used reductively to represent in his specific limitations a broad range of dialectical critical possibilities - her claim is that his call for a new realism is naive. "He does not want the contradictions and paradoxes; he does not want questioning. Instead he wants answers, totalizing replies - which postmodernism cannot and will not offer [...]. While the postmodern and the Marxist do share a recognition of the contradictions in social and aesthetic practice, postmodernism has no dialectic, no tool with which to effect a return to any ideal totality. In fact, it refuses such a tool." 39 Certainly Jameson's vision may be occluded, yet the reality is that Hutcheon cannot apparently either fathom or embrace intellectually any 'joined up' notion of totality or material referentiality. She reduces less than parodically any conceptual plurality in totality, assuming its encompassing idealism to

37 Leavis, Education & the University, 24. 38 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1988), 212. 39 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 214-15.

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permeate and disallow its critical usefulness. Epistemic and localized dominance however hegemonic is neither a fully performative nor a critically ontological and persistent totality. The sources of Hutcheon's opposition to totalization and her misconception of its categorical applicability may well be Derridean in their overall dynamics. In For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991) Slavoj Zizek confronts Derrida's criticism of Hegel's absolute, where "Derrida misplaces as a limit of reflection what is in Hegel the very fundamental feature of 'absolute' reflection".40 Furthermore Zizek sees in this Hegelian supersession or annulment a totalization that never totalizes all and where one perceives "the unattainable, ever-elusive excess of the 'infrastructure' which can never be fully mirrored within the text [...] a redoubled reflection, the reflective re-marking of the very surplus that escapes reflection",41 offering a notion of an absolute that mediates and acknowledges its own impossibility, of which Hegel makes use dialectically as Zizek demonstrates.42 Totality is in a Hegelian sense always concerned with the kind of absolutes implied in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832) where only God as spirit offers the "the unity of concept and reality". Hegel comments upon the limits of concrete human thinking and representation, where "the understanding is also a form of thinking, but does not advance beyond the identity: 'concept is concept' and 'being is being.' These categories always keep this one-sided form for it, whereas in truth these finite forms do not count as [independently] self-identical [simply] because they are; on the contrary they are only moments of a totality".43 This is crucial to Lefebvre's thinking on reality and ontology, for as he explains, one must challenge "the right of the particular and fragmented sciences to encompass the whole. Not one of them can claim sole right of access to 'totality', but each is entitled to continue pushing its investigation farther and farther, without barrier or impediment. But they can only grasp partial totalities" and yet concurrently "while we recognize the difficulties inherent in the concept of 'totality', we cannot do without it. However, only if our methodology is scrupulously prudent have we the right to use it".44 Textualization and its overdetermination cannot provide such a 'prudent' methodological base, nor in any definitive sense object to an ongoing critique that lies beyond its intrinsic characteristics. In A Course on Aesthetics (1989) Renato Barilli notes that the real capacity of man in language that separates him from animals is the symbolic for "the final symbolic dimension (that is, the act of signifying over

40 Slavoj Ziiek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 86. 41 iiiek, For They Know Not What They Do, 87. 42 Ziiek, For They Know Not What They Do, 81-89. 43 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 357. 44 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 272.

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long distances, in absentia, and without a physical correspondent) is bom precisely from the fact that humans have been able to extricate their signifiers, or the physical parts of the symbolic function. We have been able to elaborate them exactly as if they were formed from material objects [...]".45 As Barilli indicates, such aspects neither disappear nor mutate, but remain efficacious.46 As Richard Sheppard notes in his magisterially astute study, Modernism Dada - Postmodernism (2000) "when Hutcheon says that modernist art challenged the realist notion of representation to the detriment of the referent 'by emphasizing the opacity of the medium and the self-sufficiency of the signifying system,' she is simplifying the concerns of modernism to purely aesthetic ones. Consequently, she is doing less than justice to the urgent sense of so many modernist writers and artists that a seismic upheaval was taking place in Western consciousness of what constituted reality, with which it was necessary, nolens volens, to come to terms".47 As Sheppard outlines, the aesthetic and cultural responses to enlightenment modernity are recognitions of what exists "beyond the apparently stable and harmonious world of classical physics, [where] there lay a 'metaworld' or 'fourth dimension' that was not describable in Newtonian terms".48 Moreover, Hutcheon and other such 'postmodern' critics might bear in mind Bhaskar's understanding expressed in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom that "reflexivity is the inwardized form of totality",49 much as Hegel predicates when he says that: "the universal as such can only be inwardness, only in thought, not as an external reality".50 For Bhaskar - who makes evident in Dialectic the closure and inadequacy of the Hegelian totality51 and the inadequacy of the Kantian totality52 - there are perhaps two further essential points of understanding. Firstly that "totalities are not aggregates"53 and secondly that "the only plausible concept of a totality is that of a partial totality, rife with external as well as internal, and (not the same thing) accidental as well as necessary connections, replete with gaps, discontinuities, voids as well as pockets of thoroughgoing (sub-) totality".54

45 Renato Barilli, A Course on Aesthetics, tr. Karen E. Pinkus (Minneapolis, London: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 37-39. 46 Barilli, A Course on Aesthetics, 39-40. 47 Richard Sheppard, Modernism - Dada - Postmodernism (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2000), 45. 48 Sheppard, Modernism - Dada - Postmodernism, 36. 49 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 272-73. 50 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 116. 51 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 24,121-23,270. 52 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 121-23. 53 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 293. 54 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 270-71.

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As Barilli describes the process, language reaches into the physical, objective and the eventful in its signification. 55 In this context, in exploring Bhaskar's defence of naturalism and Pols' 'radical realism', one is drawn to investigate and incorporate the relevance of what Pols accounts for as the 'epiphanic' emergence of language and its ongoing appeal to a basis beyond the self. For Pols this involves a recognition that he explores in Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (1992), where as cited earlier he argues that the act of knowing is both experiential and rational. 56 This is an extremely suggestive concept since it offers part of the grounds by which one may contain and regulate the current exegetical drift into logocentricist hermeneuticism, since as Pols specifies the constructive and constitutive view of language may well be not only erroneous, but appears to be critically misleading. 57 To construct a theory of language and ontology is to enter into a field of reference where it seems necessary to acknowledge that, as Pols indicates, to theorize at all is no more than to call attention to something 58 and: Calling attention is nothing more than calling rational awareness into play. It is a naturally reflexive function, for some reflexive aspect coexists with its actualization in the reality of whatever it is directed toward. There is no act of rational awareness that does not deploy its reflexive component in at least an incipient way [...]. 59

As Hegel comments, "immediacy of natural being itself exists only as something posited, as a willing, a transition",60 and later he adds "only through cognition does human being exist - because it exists only through knowledge and consciousness. Human will is not unconscious, it is not an instinct". 61 This is neither a linguistic movement nor simply a limitedly objective one, but its roots are within the real despite Hegel's concern being the spiritual and metaphysical within the temporal and objective, which constitute points of reference for 'representation'. 62 Pols resists the broadly anti-realist tradition that fails to contextualize in any significant fashion (ontologically or methodologically) the lived manner of experience, understanding and conscious reflection. To be embodied is in itself an insufficient explanans for him. What he describes as a 'radical realism', one that accounts for the emergence of language and its ongoing appeal to a basis beyond the self, involves recognition of what I summarize as:

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Barilli, A Course on Aesthetics, 41. Pols, Radical Realism, 2. Pols, Radical Realism, 17. Pols, Radical Realism, 35. Pols, Radical Realism, 35. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 102. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 103. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 379.

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A. an understanding that knowledge is never simply a particularity or knowing the particular ever without a hold on (or capable of excluding hold on) being in general.63 B. that a rational-experiential engagement with the real precedes our notions of identity, body, mind, causality and substance rather than being created in entirety by those factors.64 C. that aspects of engagement with the real are not part of a body of theory and interventions of the independently real are always dialectically and implicitly present in cognition and knowledge.65 These conceptual observations offer the first steps toward asserting a metarealist reading of the world and the text. Clearly there exists potential in exploring the literary-critical dimensions of these theoretical positions, for any textual example represents at a certain level (secondarily or in a tertiary fashion) in the overall sense of Pols' critique something more than a reflexity or self-referentiality, in fact would appear to be concerned, as Barilli appears at least residually to concur, with something beyond language. Despite this extensiveness (reaching outward) of course all texts - most especially the literary (even supposedly experimental ones) - have the potential to appear to be primarily about texts at an epistemological level and to be capable of using a self-reflexivity as a foregrounded motif, but never solely or coherently so to the complete (or even partially consistent) exclusion of the objective. This applies variously to fiction, criticism and dialogue itself. I argue for the need to acknowledge a 'radical' realism in criticism, that is unless theory and exegesis are to simply offer an extreme cultural and critical relativism. My methodologically critical assumptions include a presumption that one has to recuperate any such fragmentary forms - among which texts, critical endeavour and literary categorizations such as modernism must be included - through a synthesis of the following modes: 1. critical endeavour as a recuperation of extended relationships beyond the textually self-referential; 2. the textually seen as evidentially as reflective of an eventfulness in itself; 3. a necessary recovery from texts as conjoined and co-dependent of theoretically and pragmatically-inclined perceptions. Moreover, in terms of the above, one must take the words of which narratives are constituted at the very least as a trace of a phenomenological, historical presence rather than regard them as simply self-conscious textualizations. Any such reflexivity is not primary, but a factor within the horizon of expressive eventfulness. As Pierre Bourdieu's account of the concept in terms of 'social agents' in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992) reminds us: "The field is a network of objective relations (of domination or 63 Pols, Radical Realism, 28. 64 Pols, Radical Realism, 29. 65 Pols, Radical Realism, 30.

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subordination, of complementarity or antagonism, etc.) between positions ^ j » 66

Like science, at multiple levels language as discourse intervenes in the world and attempts to account for both that world, and its own and the world's variability. Science is both discursive and a field of activity, as is literature. Both exist within the physical, material sphere, either enframed or integrative depending upon one's interrogative and explorative stance. In its efficaciousness science can be argued to be more than simply another grand narrative, although such narrative characteristics and procedures make up part of its nature. Literature has its own effect, less direct materially, but perhaps equally diffuse ideologically, which provides a multiplicity of material consequences. Both science and linguistic discourse involve taking positions and that too has material consequences. As Pols determines in Mind Regained "the notion of a concrete (physical) system is a relative one: any PS [physical system] we choose to investigate will be enframed by a larger PS and will itself enframe smaller physical systems".67 It may be possible to conceive of textuality in a similar fashion, since not only is it related to such physical systems at a remove (as perception may be), but moreover it may intersect with other conceptual systems in a similarly relative fashion as that of the interrelationship between physical systems. Admittedly Bhaskar's critical realist account is primarily concerned not with literary discourses but with explaining the relationships between philosophy, science, the social sciences, social relations and reality (of which all the preceding elements form a part of a potentially unitary whole that is always understood fragmentarily). Nevertheless his critique is relevant to the complex of relations and concerns that constitute variously the subject matter, methodological patterns, traditions, obsessions, relations and so forth of the literary-critical field within its life-world contexts. In Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (1994) Bhaskar rejects the Derridean 'textualization' of reality, Derrida's elision of the referent, and says: "in his critique of logocentricity he underplays both the importance of the mutuality of the hermeneutic interpretation and the necessity for the duality of immediate and mediate knowledge if sentences and actions are both to be understood and to have their understanding understood".68 In Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (1989) as part of his refutation of Thatcher's infamously ignorant individualistic dictum that society doesn't exist Bhaskar insists that "the existence of society is a transcendentally necessary condition for any 66 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 231. 67 Edward Pols, Mind Regained (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1998), 72. 68 Roy Bhaskar, Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (London, New York: Verso, 1994), 200.

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intentional act at all. It is the unmotivated condition for all our motivated productions. We did not create society - the error of voluntarism. But these structures which pre-exist us are only reproduced or transformed in our everyday activities; thus society does not exist independently of human agency - the error of reification. The social world is reproduced or transformed in daily life".69 In that sense texts are quotidian and socially integrated into events and ideology. Bhaskar alerts us to a further potential error "for realism is not a theory of knowledge or of truth, but of being" and citing Gaston Bachelard's recognition that all philosophy 'presupposes' a reality, Bhaskar warns against diminishing the importance of the objects of knowledge and "the epistemic fallacy - that ontological questions can always be reparsed in epistemological form: that is, that statements about being can always be analysed in terms of statements about our knowledge (of being), that it is sufficient for philosophy to 'treat only the network, and not what the network describes'". 70 In Plato Etc. Bhaskar addresses another category of critical and theoretical misinterpretation: "transposed to the social world and set in a hermeneutical or otherwise linguistified register, the collapse of the intransitive dimension takes the form of the linguistic fallacy, viz. the analysis of being in terms of our discourse about being".71 The refutation of any integration of the linguistic frame within being (from which it is self-evidently emergent) sets up recursive accounts that deny ontology in its holistic or fuller sense. Hutcheon attempts some residual mediation of these forces, but unconvincingly. The postmodern discourses I have been studying here do not 'liquidate referentials* so much as force a rethinking of the entire notion of reference that makes problematic both the traditional realist transparency and this newer reduction of reference to simulacrum. It suggests that all we have ever had to work with is a system of signs, and that to call attention to this is not to deny the real, but to remember that we only give meaning to the real within those signifying systems. This is no radical new substitution of signs for the real, as Baudrillard argues. Postmodern art merely foregrounds the fact that we can know the real, especially the past real, only through signs, and that is not the same as wholesale substitution. 72

Hutcheon effectively summarizes many of the theoretical-conceptual problematics that have come to be inscribed in the Zeitgeist of literary criticism and popular critical theory. If one replaces the sign system by a notion of faith (and spiritual light) and God an eternal mediatory force (a constant fact) by which alone man may access nature, then Hutcheon's account and supposedly ontologically analytical structure of understanding might become culturally 69 Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary (London, New York: Verso, 1993), 4. 70 Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 13. 71 Bhaskar, Plato Etc., 50. 72 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 229-30.

Philosophy

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reminiscent of the Victorian liberal humanist ambition (where one can only know reality through God and a structured faith). There is little provisionality or indeterminacy in Hutcheon's own critique. She might consider that Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion also reflects upon the immediacy of finite history and spirit where the consciousness confronts unmediated nature as a state of "internally unresolved contradiction"73 consigned as "natural humanity [which] does not exist in the form that it ought; it is determined by the singularity of its existence".74 So where does this situate us in a literary-critical context? Clearly, I think at this point one must insist that all literary texts - as knowledge of the objects of knowledge and as ontologically, in Woolf s highly suggestive phrase, 'moments of being' primarily and secondarily - whatever their imaginative excursions and deviations presuppose a reality both as constituent of themselves and existentially independent of themselves. And importantly, criticism can never be entirely concerned with critical paradigms, the world of the text, or even its linguistic (semiotic) characteristics. In Reclaiming Reality Bhaskar factors into his critical project an account "of the new transcendental realist ontology [...]. The principle of epistemic relativity, which states that all beliefs are socially produced, so that all knowledge is transient".75 In Plato Etc. he recognizes that "truths, including alethic truths, may be changing (in which case they may be said to be reflexive), or unchanging (irreflexive). Metacritically we are situated within limits".76 Here we are moving toward a meta-realist version or account of provisionality and indeterminacy. Moreover, this is not simply a response to postmodernity, but more a reworking of a longer critical tradition. To make provisionality central to critique, which many postmodernists often appear to do, is both less original than they imply. Despite a contemporary claim for such thinking as originary, in fact such provisionality is common in the apparently scientific and naturalistic age that postmodern thinkers like Hutcheon appear to dismiss; moreover such a scientific, naturalist critique is not necessarily dependent upon rejecting a consciousness of chaos or irreality. Take for instance Ralph Waldo Emerson for whom in "Circles" nature is perceived and expressed through metaphoric terms as approximating (or best represented by) a series of concentric circles with no fixed or privileged point77 and in "History" "nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. [...] Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet

73 74 75 76 77

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 92. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 93. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 23. Bhaskar, Plato Etc., 70. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, G. T. Betttany (London: Ward, Lock, undated), 78-79.

introd.

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never does it quite deny itself."78 This offers much akin to the dialectical integration of singularity and universality Bhaskar sees as essential to the 'transcendental identification' of meta-realism.79 This has been a recurrent theme for Bhaskar whose public intellectual development is crucial in establishing a 'meta-real' critique. In The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, he outlines the problematics that haunt the poststructuralist and postmodern projects and which in his account are resolved in the sphere of critique by what he labels transcendental realism. It can thus be seen that, denied ontological purchase on the phenomenal world of bodily movements and physical happenings, both the status of reason explanations in general, and the particular reasons adduced in explanation, must ultimately appear as arbitrary, and the practices that depend upon them as illusory. Indeed, in the end, the very distinction on which the language-stratum theorist pitches his brief, between things that we do (a), like catching buses, and things which happen to us (β), like catching colds, becomes impossible to sustain. 80

Some level of intentionality - say in literary production as with that of creating a text and thereby conveying certain aspects of a world view via either form or content - cannot be so effaced or so problematized as to be inoperable or absent. Its potential negation is less likely to involve its revocation since such attempted negation is more likely to offer merely its breach or reformulation, since it expresses an underlying relation with the objective. As Bhaskar comments "indeed intentional human actions may best be regarded as setting initial and boundary conditions for the operation of physical laws".81 And such 'laws' are ontologically primordial in Levinas' sense, who comments in On Thinkingof-the-Other: Entre Nous (1998): "Ontology, 'authentic' ontology, coincides with the facticity of temporal existence. To understand being is to exist in this world. [...] Ontology is accomplished not in the triumph of man over his condition, but in the very tension in which that condition is assumed."82 One cannot evoke a separate creative, imaginary and aesthetic field as a counter to a principle of meta-reality since it incorporates these vexatious and sometimes apparently conflictual dimensions. Essentially in this light the principles of referentiality and art that can be traced at certain points in Bhaskar's philosophical positions can be marshaled or synthesized to offer a framework of sorts (none will ever be complete or unadaptive like all else in reality itself). In Plato Etc. he distinguishes himself from Eagleton's notion of 78 Emerson, The Complete Prose Works, 8. 79 Bhaskar, Reflections on Meta-Reality, 259. 80 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (London, New York: Verso, 3 1998), 89. 81 Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 89. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, On Thinking-of-the-Other: Entre Nous, tr. Michael B. Smith, Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone, 1998), 2.

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a conflation of the aesthetic and ideology. "I want to distinguish (a) ideologies of the aesthetic from (β) art-criticism, (β) may be more or less ideologically saturated, but its authenticity is not to be gainsaid on that ground alone."83 Also crucially aesthetics serves - "from Kant on - to act as mediator between mind and body, society and nature (cf. the first and third critiques reconciled in the weak teleologies of the third), intra-subjective, inter-subjective and social relations at the plane of society".84 And there are variations of provisionality that can relate to the literary-critical field more generally. For Bhaskar "the past is real existentially intransitive and determined, though our knowledge of it is constantly becoming".85 At one level it can be argued that the inscription of the past into the text is a challenge to this intransitivity, in that it makes the textual experience as contemporaneous as it can be, given its reflected, symbolic and reified nature. Yet in its very inscription of that which precedes itself, even fiction addresses a set of relations and states, even if it interrogates such conditions through modernist or post-modernist devices (themselves part of an ongoing range of interrelated historical inter-subjective responses). And yet aesthetic responses, most particularly negation, depend upon an ontologically persistent 'reality principle', or a realist dialectic. Bhaskar sets out a range of non-reductive realist principles in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. He comments "if the traditional nominalist error has been to elide the signified, the customary post-modernist stance has been to elide the referent".86 He continues in terms of a referential detachment, arguing that the very ability to talk about something engages in and substantiates this detachment. It is a relationship that in itself is ongoing and underlies the linguistic act, intrinsic to the process both socially and naturally. Bhaskar says "one must be capable of non-anthropically detaching the referent from the human act which picks it out, which is also to detach oneself from the referent. Problems about the status of the referent - is it real or imaginary, transfactual or actual, positive or negative, in relation or a self-subsistent entity, an aspect or totality, social-relation-dependent or not? - then become much more tractable".87 In Reflections on Meta-Reality he concludes "post-modernism was not only characterized by an incapacity to sustain a coherent totality, but ultimately, just in virtue of this, an incapacity to sustain any notion of itself', 88 and that it fails "especially in its denial of [...] the capacity for rational assessment of philosophical and other positions, [whereby] it undermined its own capacity to sustain itself, for the post-modernist discourse must be real, if

83 84 85 86 87 88

Bhaskar, Bhaskar, Bhaskar, Bhaskar, Bhaskar, Bhaskar,

Plato Etc., 155. Plato Etc., 155. Plato Etc., 72. Dialectic, 222. Dialectic, 223-24. Reflections on Meta-Reality, 171 -72.

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it is to have any effect at all [...]".89 Such reservations are applicable to the creative as well as the critical sphere, especially given their underlying if not often explicit grounds for a pre-requisite engagement with the intersubjective dimension upon which creative exposition and reception depend. Bhaskar's position amounts to far more than simply a negation of postmodernists in general terms, since taken together his critical co-ordinates undermine both post-modernism's over-burdening of the detachment and the reflexivity of the text whether this is perceived within a critical or an aesthetic act. And, this of course returns both the literary and the critical processes to their relationship with reality to its relationship to reality where all such acts (or interventions) are meaningful and referential, especially where the imaginary offers aspects of the transfactuality of variously "a structural, theoretical, vertical or existential realism".90 This may be claimed since "fictional disclosure is dependent on a matrix of factual discourse [...] absences are only identifiable via the network of positive material things. To this objection there are a number of ripostes. First, the identification of a positive existent is a human act. So it involves the absenting of a pre-existent state of affairs, be it only a state of existential doubt".91 Moreover, as Bhaskar insists "only in a state of eternal all-pervasive monism would the category of absence not be necessary for the deduction of coherent concepts of space and time (which would be really redundant)".92 If we are to textualize then implicitly this very act places us outside of such insupportable assumptions because by its very nature those actions and their objective, recoverable traces by their very nature, offer referential, ontological acts and models, but emphatically evidentially and existentially so. Perhaps modernist solipsism (and subsequent playfulness) seems to have confused many critics as to its extra-textual efficaciousness and the plurality of post-modernity supplemented the anti-realism that this overdetermination encouraged. What may be labeled as a meta-realist critique (an ongoing fusion of phenomenological, critical and radical realist principles) would appear to be the only really sustainable and theoretically coherent critical mode for future meaningful developments in the literary-critical field, but it will mean a great deal of rethinking and re-coordination for literarycritical studies. It offers a creative and critical access to a facticity replete in what Bhaskar describes in his recent work as a 're-enchanted reality' where beyond duality comes in that meaningful reality "the re-emergence of rich concepts of identity, process and totality".93

89 90 91 92 93

Bhaskar, Reflections on Mela-Reality, 172. Bhaskar, Dialectic, 225. Bhaskar, Dialectic, 44. Bhaskar, Dialectic, 44. Bhaskar, Reflections on Meta-Reality, 270.

L E N A PETROVIC

Hear the Voice of the Artist: Postmodernism as Faustian Bargain I would much sooner subject Derrida to the criteria of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Derrida's criteria.

J. M. Coetzee I have always been more willing to dwell on what artists have to say about criticism and theory than what critics say about art. Thus I find a brief, punning remark by Heiner Müller - besides Coetzee's laconic comment, probably the most summary treatment postmodernism has received so far more rewarding on close examination than many pages of postmodern discourse on literature. Asked for his opinion about what might constitute the truly postmodern drama and theater, he replied: "The only postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, who was a modernist and worked in a postoffice." 1 Underlying this joking dismissal is a number of implied convictions about the meaning not only of modernism and postmodernism, but of art in general. Had Müller bothered to theorize these assumptions, they would amount, I believe, to a contemporary re-statement of the kind of endemic romanticism which is defined by a belief in the type of genuine individual and the highly independent, imaginative, questing mind, through which romanticism persists and is perpetuated in modernism. Postmodernism, in so far as it means an obliteration of this kind of the creative self, its dispersal, to use the current idiom, into a plurality of subject positions inscribed within language, is the negation of art. The term 'postmodern' has its uses, of course. It is employed meaningfully to describe the massive material and political changes that have lead to the post-industrial, consumer, or mass media society, and to the re-colonization by that society of the rest of the not yet so postmodern world. It is valid, too, when applied to a mood or a state of mind accompanying or generated by

1

In an interview Heiner Müller gave to Carl Weber, published in Chapter 19: "Answers by Heiner Müller" in Carl Weber (ed.), Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publication, 1984), 137.

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these changes - ranging from resigned acceptance to euphoric celebration which pervades popular media culture and is endorsed and promoted, whether intentionally or not, by major postmodern theorists. The effectiveness of their theories, as some of them cheerfully testify, depends on the kind of discourse that tries to persuade without the notion of traditional argument.2 This, in fact, involves what Eco, speaking of McLuhan's ecstatic welcome of the media culture, called a cogito interruptus: the imposition upon the reader, carried out in the most insidiously illegitimate way imaginable, of the technique of nondefinition of terms. The ultimate goal of McLuhan's 'equivocations of a cogito that is denied' is the reader's loss of the ability to differentiate between phenomena, and thus the loss of moral discrimination, too.3 But it is perhaps not necessary to subject these theories to a logical deconstruction, such as Eco so brilliantly and wittily performs on McLuhan's The Medium is the Message, in order to examine their validity. For much of what is confusing in contemporary theorizing can be understood if one approaches it from a pragmatic angle: if one asks not how postmodern thinkers arrived at their antihumanist propositions but why these views became so rapidly and so immensely popular. Asking the Grail question - Whom do you serve with this? - may in fact show the term 'postmodern' to be hardly more than an accurate description of the intellectual and moral compromise by which postmodernism's leading proponents have hyper-adjusted themselves to postmodernity; and of their theories, which prove to be a sophisticated example of hypocritically correct political thinking. The perspective was first suggested to me by Nietzsche, and once again proved fruitful as I read Chomsky on MisEducation. The Introduction, by Donaldo Macedo, and Chapter 2: 'Democracy and Education' deserve special attention. In the Introduction Macedo describes the strategies employed by the dominant sector in the U. S. since the sixties in order to contain the general democratic participation of masses of people in questioning their government's criminal involvement in the Vietnam War. One of them was the Trilateral Commission, which dropped all pretensions about schools as democratic sites charged with the teaching of democratic values, and declared them instead as institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. The colonial model of education perfected for this purpose aims at preventing the development of the kind of thinking that enables one to read the world

2

See Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 154. Sarup writes: "Lyotard supported Marxism but he now sees it as one of the grand narratives he is against. He writes about the force of language beyond truth and wants to develop a theory of philosophical fiction - a discourse that tries to persuade without the traditional notion of 'argument'."

3

Umberto Eco, "Cogito Interruptus" in Travels in Hyperreality (London: Pan Books, 1987), 221-238.

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critically and to understand reasons and linkages between the facts: the priorities of education are reduced to the pragmatic requirements of the market, whereby students are trained to become "compliant workers, spectorial consumers, and passive citizens".4 Whereas the ruling class makes no apologies for the undemocratic role of schools, Macedo continues, to maintain capitalism's cultural hegemony it has been necessary to create a cultural middle management composed of teachers, professionals and experts, who are expected, through a reward system, to propagate the myth that schools are democratic sites where democratic values are learned. Among various means these cultural commissars resorted to in order to achieve their mission one of the most insidious was to place the responsibility for 'the social catastrophe of the sixties' precisely on those who sought to avoid it by a democratization of institutions, and a change in relations of power: Thus it became necessary to frontally attack the experiments in democracy that questioned the unethical and sometimes criminal behavior of the governments and squarely put the blame on the great society programs not only for financial losses but also for the drop in high school test scores, drug problems and a generation of children and youth with no fathers, no faith and no dreams other than the lure of the streets. 5

Macedo's comments are confined mostly to the situation in grad schools in the U. S., but can also clarify the point I want to make about the postmodern theories currently promoted in leading American and European universities. It is not an irrelevant coincidence, for example, that in the late sixties and seventies the major teaching posts at U. S. universities, hitherto held by teachers and philosophers of German origin and some of them deriving from the Frankfurt School, people like Marcuse, Adorno or Fromm, whose common standpoint in criticizing the consumer society was that of traditional humanist values, began to be taken over by a new set of postmodern thinkers, mostly French, whose anti-humanist orientation soon became the order of the day. This replacement, I believe, was part of the campaign Macedo speaks of: the newly installed teachers were promptly assimilated into the 'bought priesthood', their ideas, whether they intended it or not, utilized in a common endeavor, namely, to prevent independent critical thought while appearing to defend it. Thus, for instance, Fukuyama's jubilant proclamation of Good News - the end of history, which has reached its supreme goal in the globally achieved liberal democracy and the capitalist free market - depends on a cynical distortion of the meaning of democracy and a consequent falsification of historical facts, as Derrida pointed out in his reply to Fukuyama. But there 4 5

Donaldo Macedo (ed.), "Introduction" to Chomsky on MisEducation (New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 1-14. Macedo, "Introduction", 2.

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is a group of postmodern thinkers, including, besides Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault, Derrida himself, whose views are less accessible to critical analysis than Fukuyama's rather obvious hypocrisy. For one thing, they are highly ambiguous, combining quite incongruously their radical critique of ideology with the acquiescence in, or even fascination with, various manifestations of its ubiquitous power. This hardly gives us reason to be optimistic about the possibility of resistance and transformation, for, as a recent critic of postmodernism reasonably asks, "if [...] individuals are wholly constituted by the power/knowledge regime Foucault describes, how can discipline be resisted in the first place?"6 (How, one might add, could the sixties happen in the first place?) The difficulty of finding a revolutionary vocabulary is a problem that does not only haunt Foucault, the comment goes on, but also many other proponents of post-structural politics. Yet - and this is cogito interruptus at its most insidious - their target seems to be precisely those traditional thinkers who did possess the kind of revolutionary vocabulary that they themselves lack. The strategy Macedo unmasks - that of blaming the cultural catastrophe of the sixties on what only could have prevented it - is also employed by postmodern cultural critics: they justify their anti-humanism by seeking not only to instill the view that liberal humanist tradition has proved definitely wrong in its emancipatory hopes but, in fact, to blame it for the failure of these hopes. Quite a different picture emerges in Chomsky's essay "Democracy and Education": it is not the conventional one, the author warns, "but it does have one merit, at least - namely, the merit of accuracy".7 Chomsky identifies the humanist tradition with the independent Left, which grew out of the

6

7

Honi Fern Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), 101. This, by the way, is one of the few valid insights the book provides. Haber's critique of postmodernism soon turns into a demand for a kind of ultrapostmodernism. Thus Lyotard's attempt to transcend the relativism of his position by an appeal to Kant's categorical imperative as a ground for "the justice of multiplicity" is, according to her, a betrayal of his initial, more desirable, "pagan", "Nietzschean" [!] concept of "multiplicity of justices", paganism, according to her, being a correct name for "a situation in which one judges without criteria" (32-33). This should be compared with contrary, and much more cogent arguments to be found in Kenneth Dyson, Walter Homolka (eds.), Culture First! Promoting Standards in the New Media Age (London, New York: Cassell, 1996). In the editors' Preface (ix-xiii), for instance, postmodernism is criticized precisely from the standpoint of Kant's criteria, without which the "development and exercise of moral intelligence", and "reflective judgments that intellectual inquiry should enable us to make" are impossible. It is through the abandonment of these criteria and the "fascination with and celebration of free-floating media images, the openness and lack of objective content of 'texts' and power of the reader to define and create textual meanings" that postmodernism has provided professional groups, from advertisers and marketing specialists to media studies lecturers, with an ideology that justifies their roles and serves their interests. Noam Chomsky, "Democracy and Education" in Macedo (ed.), Chomsky on MisEducation, 38.

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Enlightenment and included progressive thinkers, from the grossly misunderstood Adam Smith, and his contemporary J. S. Mill to Dewey and Russell, together with the leading elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and, of course, the popular libertarian and labor movements long preceding Marx. He reminds us that the values common to them all were formulated in reaction to what Adam Smith called "the inherent vile maxim of masters of mankind: all for ourselves, and nothing for other people", the guiding principle of capitalism which "nowadays we are taught to admire and revere". In contrast to this vile maxim Smith stressed sympathy, the goal of perfect equality and the basic human right to creative work. Chomsky recalls that the founders of classical liberalism, people like Wilhelm von Humboldt, also "regarded creative work freely undertaken in association with others as the core value of a human life".8 In support of a humanist conception of education, he quotes Russell and Dewey, in whose views we readily recognize the orientation shared by teachers and critics such as Leavis and Trilling, Fromm and Marcuse. Russell claimed that the goal of education is "to give a sense of value of things other than domination, to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty and individual creativeness, which means that we regard a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light".9 Together with Russell, Dewey considered these ideas revolutionary: if implemented, they would bring about a more just and free society in which "the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another in terms of equality".10 To the tradition delineated by Chomsky one should add Isiah Berlin and the names of nineteenth-century thinkers Bernard Bosanquet and Τ. H. Green, evoked by Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modem History at the University of Cambridge, in the Isiah Berlin Memorial Lecture delivered to The British Academy in December, 2001." Professor Skinner used the occasion to raise serious doubts about the validity of contemporary political theory and its power to define a program for liberation. He spoke about two traditional concepts of liberty. The first, negative liberty, is identified with absence of interference: it is freedom from external constraint. This negative definition must also include, but it no longer does, a concept of freedom as independence, the knowledge, that is, that the exercise of our rights will not depend on the goodwill of others. This is significant. But what is of even 8 9 10 11

Chomsky, "Democracy and Education", 42. Chomsky, "Democracy and Education", 38. Chomsky, "Democracy and Education", 37. Published under the title "A Third Concept of Liberty" in London Review of Books (4 April

2002), 16.

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greater interest in the present context is that in contrast to this juristic concept of negative liberty as freedom from interference or from dependence, there has traditionally been recognized a fuller or positive understanding of the term as freedom for self-realization. Professor Skinner quotes Isiah Berlin, who suggested that for all those who wished to give a positive content to the idea of liberty, "the freedom of human agents consists in their having managed most fully to become themselves". One of them was the nineteenth-century thinker Τ. H. Green, who wrote that "real freedom consists in the whole man having found his object"; it is "the end state in which man has realized his ideal of himself'. This argument can be carried a step further, says Quentin Skinner, if we recognize that what underlies theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realizing that essence in our lives. In support of this insight he might have quoted Nietzsche, too, whom postmodern anti-humanists have adopted as their patron saint, but whose passionate adherence to creative freedom is evident in the very titles of his works: Ecce Homo or How to Become What One Is; or D. H. Lawrence, who foresaw that the flight of the first American immigrants from the authoritarian old world would not flower into new freedom as long as they refused to be mastered from within, by their deepest, most creative self. Yet while remaining strictly within the domain of political theory, Professor Skinner says exactly the same thing. He deplores the fact that contemporary political theory, especially in Britain and the USA, has quite neglected the positive view of liberty. Only the first definition of freedom as absence of interference has been preserved as orthodox. But, detached from the sense of freedom as being identical with whatever is the true inherent goal of man, liberty, Professor Skinner insists, may and has become a name for what is actually servitude. To talk of liberty then, as our politicians and engineers of the new world order do, is to speak the language of tyranny.12 This hypocrisy is observable in practically all aspects of postmodern thought. As I have already hinted, one of the ways postmodern cultural analysts help ensure a counter-revolution, while appearing to serve progressive goals, is to employ all sorts of confusing and highly illegitimate argumentative procedures to persuade us that the views upheld by thinkers quoted and praised by Chomsky or Quentin Skinner are essentially 12 Another way of putting this is to say that it is not merely by neglecting the concept of positive freedom that postmodern cultural theorists have compromised their proclaimed adherence to the notion of freedom as absence of constraint. Worse: they have insisted on so many 'Thou Shalt Nots' being internalized - besides human nature, there is a taboo on teleology, and another on the wholeness of being, still another on nostalgia, etc. - that one immediately thinks of Roland Barthes's (but the early, critical Barthes) definition of bourgeois mythology as an apt description of most postmodern theories: they are "a prohibition for man against inventing himself'.

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reactionary, in unacknowledged yet deep agreement with coercive regimes. For example, the humanist idea of the free, creative individual is deliberately conflated with the economic notion of acquisitive, aggressive ego, or with bourgeois private man, and then accused of contributing to the triumph of the capitalist principle of "mastery over a world of slaves" (incidentally, the very same principle that the Nobel prize winning economist James Buchanan frankly endorsed as the "genuine aspiration of every person in an ideal situation"13). It is when postmodern thinkers proceed to suggest ways of resistance to cultural enslavement, that ironies increase and become quite mind boggling. Thus the remedy does not lie, as people like Macedo or Chomsky, who still believe in humanist education, claim, in the "teaching of the truth", i. e. in the development of the kind of knowledge that would ensure a "global comprehension of the facts and their reason d'etre";14 nor in the "pedagogy of hope" demanding from educators "to discover what historically is possible in the sense of contributing to the transformation of the world".15 For have not Lyotard and his followers taught us that truth is epistemologically and morally indistinguishable from falsehood? That to read, whether words or the world, with a view of arriving at a coherent moral interpretation is to perpetuate the sin of teleological thinking which is a form of mastery? That all total explanations are totalitarian, all global projects coercive, and that the history made intelligible by the great systems of narrative knowledge is, fortunately, a thing of the past, its end coinciding, again fortunately, with the death of man as knower. That homogeneity, unity or universality can be politically coercive and do accompany the regimes of terror is true - there is no better evidence than the eradication of differences by the current capitalist re-colonization of the world. But when, as a counterstrategy to the terror of the political logic of the same, the postmodern theorists prescribe a universal multiplicity - of language games, of free interpretations, of subject positions, none of which can lay claim to superior truth or justice - they end up as champions of a compulsory epistemological and ethical relativism that is fatal to political clarity and thus to one of the strategies of self-defense against the power of dominant culture.16 13 14 15 16

Noam Chomsky, "Democracy and Education", 39. Macedo, "Introduction", 9. Macedo, "Introduction", 13. That postmodern theory is politically suspect, representing a threat to the transformation it claims to seek, has been recognized within the context of postcolonial studies, too. Nancy Hartsock writes: "Somehow it seems highly suspicious that it is at the precise moment when so many groups have been engaged in 'nationalisms' which involve redefinitions of the marginalized Others that suspicions emerge about the nature of the subject, about possibilities for a general theory which can describe he world, about historical 'progress'. Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of

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Another is art. Here, as elsewhere, what in reality is a terrorist action is disguised as a rescue operation. Postmodernism has invaded literary debate carrying the banner of democracy and promising to free us from the hegemony of cultural elite. But far from being democratically inspired, the demolition of difference between 'high' culture and pop is, in fact, calculated to insure that whatever was potentially revolutionary in the canon is reduced to a clever ideological manipulation and repudiated.17 Combined with the universally accepted axiom about the destruction of the self, the assault on the canon is aimed ultimately against that high authority of the artist in his quarrel with culture on which, according to critics like Trilling or Marcuse, the culture's accurate knowledge of the self, and hence the possibility of effective transformation, depends.18 If in postmodern critique of the Enlightenment the targets have been rational coherence and intellectual comprehensiveness, in the current campaign against romanticism and modernism it has been necessary to discredit the aspiration both to formal unity and spiritual wholeness: the belief, crucial to artists from Shakespeare and Blake to Conrad

subjecthood becomes problematic?" (Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault On Power: A Theory For Women?", quoted in Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 107). 17 Another of Heiner Miiller's pithy remarks is worth quoting at this point. It comes as an answer to the question about the function of history and/or mythology in the contemporary theater, but is also an apt response to the fashionable rejection of the canon - the notorious 'dead-maleauthors' argument - in the name of the democratization of art: "The dead", he replied, "are in the overwhelming majority compared to the living. And Europe has a wealth of dead stored up on that side of the ledger. The United States, not satisfied just with dead Indians, is fighting to close the gap. Literature, as an instrument of democracy, while not submitting to, should nevertheless be respectful of majorities as well as of minorities." ("Answers by Heiner Müller", 39). 18 See Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), 90-91. Only briefly touched upon by Trilling, this problem is discussed at length in the chapter "Art and Revolution" of Marcuse's Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 79-128. Marcuse's criticism of what in the seventies was called cultural revolution and what we have since learnt to call postmodernism begins by questioning whether the efforts to break with bourgeois art are "really steps on the road to liberation", or whether, in view of the strong anti-bourgeois elements in the literature since the 19th century, they may not be "falling in line with the capitalist redefinition of culture", with the adjustment of culture to the requirements of contemporary capitalism. If, to the proponents of cultural revolution, "it is precisely this 'inner truth' [of'bourgeois' literature], this depth, and harmony of the aesthetic imagery, which [...] appears as mentally and physically intolerable, false, as part of the commodity culture, as an obstacle to liberation", then we may assume that the cultural revolution aims "far beyond bourgeois culture, that it is directed against [...] art as such, literature as literature". Against its contradictory, and essentially counterrevolutionary, tendencies - on the one hand, to give word, image and tone to the feelings of 'the masses' (which are no longer revolutionary) and, on the other, to elaborate anti-art, or anti-forms which are constituted by the mere atomization and fragmentation of traditional form - stand those, Marcuse claims, which, while radically revamping the bourgeois tradition, preserve its progressive qualities.

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and Lawrence, that emotions participate in cognitive processes and ethical decisions; that valid perceptions and responses to the world are those that involve our sensibilities, and that truth is accessible only when we 'see feelingly'. It seems that the degree of the vilification of this principle is what makes the contemporary author publishable. We read, again and again, that the romantic ambition to recover the repressed emotions is their greatest blunder, or fraud, since authentic feelings or desires are a pre-Freudian illusion and/or a bourgeois lie.19 Or if they do exist, as another line of attack concedes, then poetry evokes them only to arm us for "the battle with that enormity".20 "Poetry", says Camille Paglia, currently one of the brightest academic stars in the U. S., "is a connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpitation of the body".21 But if "poetry mirrors the stormy uncontrollability of emotion, where nature works its will", it does so - when it has not succumbed to romantic and modernist decadence - only to inspire "horror and disgust", which are "the reason's proper response to nature" and enclose us more firmly within the glorious world of technological artifacts. "Art is shutting in in order to shut out."22 In one way or another, we are being persuaded that art's proper function is not to include and coordinate but to exclude and disconnect. It is no wonder then if "that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism" should be recommended, by Fredric Jameson, a postmodern Marxist, as the best anti-dote to the modernist aesthetics of formal unity or expressive totality. Frye's suggestion that "the arts, including literature, might just conceivably be [...] possible techniques for meditation, ways of cultivating, focusing, and

19 Thus in his Practicing Theory and Reading Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) Raman Seiden explains his preference for contemporary anti-humanist, anti-Romantic theories by implying that in privileging the emotion and ascribing to them the power to heal the split subject, the romantics somehow supported the Imperialist view of culture (See esp. 36)! This, and similar pronouncements, derive from the uncritical acceptance, and additional reduction ad absurdum, of the Lacanian unconscious: no longer a repository of the other, i. e., of the real or the biological, the unconscious is thoroughly invaded by the Other, i. e., by the symbolic or the cultural Law of the Father; desire, far from being a spontaneous urge for the other, is the desire of the Other; and the effect of psychoanalysis is to reconcile the subject to the fact that his identity is a matter of accepting his radical self-expropriation, of realizing that he does not belong to himself: "Life does not want to heal [...] What, moreover is the significance of healing if not the realization, by the subject, of a speech which comes from elsewhere, and by which he is traversed?" Quoted by Shoshana Felman, in "Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis" in Maud Ellmann (ed.), Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London, New York: Longman, 1994), 89. 20 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily (London, New York, etc.: Penguin Books, 1992), 19. 21 Paglia, Sexual Personae, 18. 22 Paglia, Sexual Personae, 29.

Dickinson

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ordering one's mental processes, on a basis of a symbol rather than concept"23 is just one among the junk heap of discarded notions. The desirable effect is that of TV and video - forms par excellence of postmodern art: "a sign flow which resists meaning, whose fundamental logic is the exclusion of the emergence of themes"24 and which, therefore, will be bad or flawed whenever an interpretation proves possible. It is here that the significance of Müller's joke emerges most clearly: saying, in effect, that postmodern drama does not exist, that it is a contradiction in terms, is one way of protesting against the kind of fashionable theorizing which prescribes what can only be called various forms of cogito interruptus as a criterion of what constitutes postmodern art, and implies moreover that, thus defined, postmodern art is a welcome democratic development. My own response to these definitions is to claim that what is currently promoted as postmodern art is either not art or it is not postmodern. The literary techniques and devices usually singled out to distinguish the specifically postmodernist outlook are not decisive. For such deliberate interruptions of the processes of knowing, and of feeling, such a compulsory dispersal of experience and understanding into elusive intellectual and aesthetic games at which formal literary devices like, say, heteroglossia, or heterotopia, allegedly aim, are, in fact, contrary to the purpose of art, which still is what it was for Conrad: "to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions [...] and [...] make you feel, [...] above all, make you see [...] that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask".25 There is no postmodern literature, there is only postmodern interpretation of literature. If this should still seem an overstatement, or a simplification, I can only reply that sometimes it is justified or even necessary to overstate or simplify in order to point to the obvious, especially at a time like this, when it is so systematically and deliberately obscured. The child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim accused his colleagues of being incapable of interpreting symptoms of emotional disturbance in children because they have forgotten "the art of the obvious".26 The degree to which the formidable obfuscation of postmodern literary debate may interfere with the reader's, especially the literature student's, perception of the obvious is equally alarming. An experience of one of my own students attending a seminar on the modern novel at the Summer School of English in Edinburgh in 2001 may serve as an 23 Northrop Frye, "The Expanding Eyes" in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), 117. 24 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", New Left Review 146 (1984), 53-92. 25 Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1984), xii-xiii. 26 Bruno Bettelheim, Alvin Rosenfeld, The Art of the Obvious (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

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apt illustration, particularly so since it ties back to my quotation from Conrad. He read a paper on The Heart of Darkness and scandalized practically all the participants by saying that the story was, among other things, about western imperialism. What he had assumed everybody would agree about, what was obvious to him, became unexpectedly a matter of fierce contention. They denounced his reading as a misreading; or rather, as so simplistic, so naive, so unsophisticated as to be no reading at all. It took him considerable time and effort to compel his listeners to remember the relevant parts of the story and concede, though reluctantly, that, yes, there may be some such theme, but anyhow, imperialism belongs safely to the past, hence it is no longer part of the work's (post)modern meaning. The meaning, presumably, consisted in its being a sum of formal devices, whose purpose was to subvert referentiality, forestall closure and precipitate the reader into abysmal indeterminacy of irresolvable aporias. Now I cannot help remembering that for Kenneth Burke the purpose of any literary formal device was to serve as a strategy for survival. Similarly in the works of Ihab Hassan, a widely recognized and often quoted (but also misquoted or misunderstood) authority on contemporary American and British literature, one does not find any indication that the author assumed a radical discontinuity between modernism and so called postmodern fiction in this respect: survival, Ihab Hassan insists repeatedly, is the secret and paramount obsession of the post-war writers, and of those, too, that succeeded them: "Whatever illusion they retain after the war, these seem necessary to survival; whatever techniques of literary evasion or assault they invent, further the same aim."27 If in the forties the novelists' war torn experiences demanded complex, mythic forms in order to be understood, the more recent strange paradox of a world 'extensively homogenized, yet intensely fragmentized' has given rise to new modes (or sometimes to the re-invention of the old picaresque or gothic forms) whose purpose is to create a new consciousness, equal to the perplexities of the day. The hero of the postmodern novel is still the Opposing Self. He 'incarnates the eternal dialectic of the primary Yes and the everlasting No: and his function is to create those values whose absence in culture is the cause of his predicament and ours'. Finally he uses Philip Roth's words to summarize the challenge confronting the American novel: "[...] the American writer in the middle of the XX century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates. And finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination."28

27 Ihab Hassan, Contemporary American Literature 1945-1972: An Introduction (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), 2. 28 Hassan, Contemporary American Literature, 20-26.

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This also sounds as a very good account of Conrad's task in The Heart of Darkness. Whatever devices Conrad used (polyphony and heterotopia among them, which, incidentally, shows that they are not exclusive to 'postmodern' fiction), their ultimate purpose was not to induce ontological or epistemological uncertainty, but to render the hidden and sickening truth visible and credible: the revelation of a world driven by greed to its apocalyptic end, which, in its turn, would initiate an urgent examination of the possibilities and conditions of survival. Francis Copola understood that much, at least. The students in Edinburgh did not. One should stop and think of it: a hundred years after Conrad wrote his story, his exposure of the hidden motives and devastating effect of the colonial mission, as we are entering the new millennium and history continues in the same direction, the power states of civilized west showing no intention of renouncing their imperialist tradition except for wrapping it up in new excuses, at the moment, therefore, when it is more urgent than ever to see clearly through these deceptions and establish connections, students of literature and of culture are being trained in what I can only call interpretative blindness. They have assimilated the postmodern techniques of cogito interruptus successfully enough to confuse a thorough, comprehensive, responsible reading of what in itself was a problematization of a closure (how many people at the time doubted that the colonization of the Congo was anything but a noble project?) with the sin of interpretative closure - and then to confuse this confusion, this intellectual and moral frivolity, with sophistication. This blindness to the obvious that postmodern interpretation fosters may well be one of the reasons Edward Bond does not, as Müller or Coetzee do, stop at casual jokes at postmodernism's expense or simply let his drama speak for itself, but finds it necessary to write books of essays in addition, where he re-states the purpose of art in contemporary conditions. He, too, is obsessed with survival. In The Hidden Plot, he calls postmodernism a state every species must enter before it becomes extinct. "Western democracy", he writes, "has become a secret Culture of Death", and postmodernism is its final phase: Postmodernism is a turning point not yet an end. It is as if human life were a last dream flickering in the minds of the dead. Soon they will fall asleep for ever. For a while we can still hear the echo of human language; it is not spoken in our courts, legislatures, factories, and seldom in our schools and theaters. But we still hear its echo on the walls of prisons, madhouses, children's playgrounds, the derelict ghettoes of our cities [...] Our task is to teach the dead to listen. 29

To survive, without being corrupted by our survival, we must be radical, he insists, we must not compromise. It is not the creator's, the writer's, job to compromise: that is the job of manufacturers. When manufacturers compro29 Edward Bond, The Hidden Plot: Notes on the Theatre and the State (London: Methuen, 2000), 8-9.

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mise they change our dreams; when creators do not compromise they change reality. Bond's refusal to compromise is evident in the very manner he says what he says. He does not make the concession even of entering any frontal theoretical polemic with postmodern thinkers, because it would involve speaking their language, which corrupts the imagination. But the utterly personal, and highly resonant words and images that he uses to evoke the problems and difficulties of being human build up a philosophy that is an indirect refutation of the whole of postmodern anti-humanist orthodoxy: of its axioms about the death of man; about the totalitarian nature of comprehensive explanations; about teleological thinking as a delusion of the past. He takes it for granted, for example, that there is such a thing as human nature and that demand for justice is its imaginative birthright, part of its radical innocence; that human nature does not feel at home in this world and that a child's cry is a rebellion against its injustice; that the purpose of schools is to stifle the child's anger and its imagination, and adjust it to social madness; and that drama - art - is a struggle to regain our sanity and recreate our humanity: that is, to re-imagine the world in terms of values that the alchemy of the capitalist economy turns into dross. Drama, unless it is corrupted, which most contemporary drama is, reminds us that being human involves asking questions - questions that cannot be answered yet that must be answered. Not 'what' questions the answers to which are mechanistic and fragmentary and warranted by the objective order of things; but 'why' questions, which are holistic: asking about one thing, one has to ask about all things; the answers must be total and they emerge from imagination or Utopian dreams. "There could be no stories of human beings without Utopia",30 he says, and no drama whose theme is not justice. There have been signs lately, coming from within the academic establishment which itself helped create the phenomenon of 'postmodern art', that postmodernism has reached an impasse and that it is time we looked for a way beyond it. They are welcome, but should be approached cautiously, rather than with unqualified enthusiasm. One such hint, surprisingly - and perhaps dubiously - enough, comes from Francis Fukuyama.31 Another, earlier and 30 Bond, The Hidden Plot, 4. 31 Francis Fukuyama, who announced the End of History in 1992, has been worried recently about the future of human nature. Human nature, he warns in his latest book The Posthuman Future (reviewed by Bryan Appleyard in "The Threat to Factor X", TLS, May 17, 2002) is threatened with extinction by experiments in biotechnology. At present millions of schoolchildren in America are 'cured' from 'attention deficiency disorder' by Ritalin, while cases of depression are treated with Prosac. The former, Fukuyama observes correctly, medicalizes an invented illness - schoolboys are not programmed to sit still in classrooms; the latter promotes the most prized of contemporary attributes, self-esteem, without one having to do anything worthwhile. He points to a disconcerting sexual symmetry between Prozac and Ritalin: women with low self esteem take prozac to give them a serotonin high - the alpha

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more serious than Fukuyama's, is to be found at the end of Postmodernism for Beginners, where the authors remind us that shortly before his death, Foucault called for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment, observe that Europe is haunted by two specters, those of Marx and of romanticism, and conclude, in the last paradoxical sentence, that "the only cure for postmodernism is the incurable illness of romanticism". On the whole, however, I tend to regard the increasingly excited talk about 'going beyond postmodernism* with suspicion. The difference of my own position remains radical: while the contemporary artist is, indeed cannot help being, implicated in postmodern condition, his art is 'always already' on its way beyond it. I propose finally to test this view by reading Mark Ravenhill's play Faust (Faust is Dead) in the light of Coetzee's comment quoted above: to see, that is, what the result may be when some of the major postmodern ideas are re-interpreted by art. ***

Gay, HIV positive, but fending off the fatal end by combo therapy, still on anti-epilepsy pills, and on his own admission "just as confused by advertising as anyone", Ravenhill must have personally experienced the effects of what is now glibly called the destruction of the subject, multiple sexualities, or the male feeling; Young boys are given Ritalin to make them more passive and compliant, more feminine. One can anticipate a future, says Fukuyama, when the two sexes will merge into that androgynous median personality, self-satisfied and socially compliant, which is the current politically correct outcome in American society. Prozac and Ritalin are only one of the ways in which biotechnology may flatten our conception of humanity. This must not happen, says Fukuyama - and here he sounds very much like Professor Skinner - or else all talk about liberation, equality, freedom, will be merely a politically correct form of words. To be meaningful equality requires a substructure of the metaphysic of human nature, what he calls "the essential factor X": it cannot be reduced to the possession of moral choice or reason, or language, or emotions, or consciousness, or any other quality, that has been brought forth as a ground for human dignity. It is all those qualities coming together in a human whole. To protect its sanctity, Fukuyama calls for the immediate establishment of institutions with real enforcement powers (sic!) to regulate biotechnology. At the beginning of my paper I referred to Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man as an example of cogito interruptus. This new publication is not quite free from it either. Fukuyama still displays that superb capacity to overlook the obvious: that children should not feel at home in America and must be controlled by chemicals does not at all undermine his thesis that western liberal democracy is Paradise regained where history may safely abolish itself; nor does he wonder what the inherent logic of this best of all worlds might be if it is capable of generating such a monstrous future. But despite the inconsistencies, the book is good news. For one thing, it is gratifying to hear a man who did so much to make postmodernism the doctrine of the capitalists suddenly speak up against the chief premises of both: against anti-humanism and technocracy. And even if the doors of perception are only partially cleansed, it may be the first step towards a complete clarity of vision. But this still remains to be seen.

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implosion of the real. His art is an attempt to understand that experience. An explorer of hyperreality, he begins by checking whether the directions inscribed on its entrance really lead to the promised land or rather deeper into hell. The answer suggested by his plays, particularly Faust, is quite unequivocal. Its hero, Alain, is a composite character, reminiscent of Fukuyama, Foucault, Baudrillard: we glimpse him first in a TV chat show Madonna's presence and comments contributing to the postmodern mixing of styles - being introduced to the American public as a famous French philosopher, and the author of two widely acclaimed books, one on sexuality, the other entitled The End of History and the Death of Man. In the next scene we find out that he is gay, too. To Pete, a rich and seemingly cool, but disoriented and deeply troubled adolescent whom he meets by chance and eventually rapes, he confides the reason why he has left his university teaching post in France and come to 'to live a little' in the West Coast of America. In Europe, where obsolete humanist traditions still persist, "we are ghosts, trapped in a museum, with the lights out and the last visitor long gone". For him and for so many children of the twentieth century, he goes on as Pete videos him, America is the only true home: it is in America, where the 'death of man' can most authentically be experienced, that paradoxically "we really believe that we are alive, that we are living in our own century". If, at this point, Alain may sound like one of Eco's Parusiacs, Ravenhill certainly does not belong in this category: the end of history, if it has come to an end, is no Good News. The Faustian situation established by the title - Faust (Faust is Dead) - indicates clearly that if America is the proper symbolic realm of postmodern man's posthumous life, then he is condemned to live it in hell. The story of Faust, at least Marlowe's version, which Ravenhill knew, is about the signing of a contract with demonic forces for the sake of a kind of knowledge that is divorced from and destructive of the soul. It is a soulless world that Mephistopheles has in mind when he says: "This is hell, nor am I out of it." Similarly, as Ravenhill's play unfolds - as Pete accompanies Alain across America on an educational journey involving forced sex, drugs, a suicide of another boy, the Internet obsessed Donny, and Alain's own decision to end his life - his version of hell becomes synonymous with the world drained of feelings. There are no new feelings, Eliot said once speaking of the poet's task. The business of the poet is not to find new feelings, but to combine the existing ones into new wholes, within which the truly significant emotion might emerge. Slightly modified, this notion would serve to describe Ravenhill's (and other contemporary artists') strategy in the face of postmodern indifference, which is to search, from play to play, for new images, new, ever more disturbing ways of juxtaposing them, in order to demonstrate the absence or perversion of feelings and locate the responsibility. Reading Ravenhill's plays

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in this key, rather than as sums of formal devices, enables us to resist the cogito interruptus imposed by current interpretations of the 'anti-social' behaviour of the young. By a neo-conservative thinker, such as Daniel Bell, for example, the unnerving mixture of brutality and hedonistic escapism that constitute the lives of Ravenhill's characters would be attributed to the unwholesome effect of modernism. According to Bell, Madan Sarup informs us, modernist culture has infected the values of everyday life. Because of the forces of modernism, the principle of unlimited self-realization, the demand for authentic self - experience and the subjectivism of hyperstimulated sensitivity have come to be dominant. This unleashes hedonistic motives irreconcilable with the discipline of professional life in society. In his view, hedonism, the lack of social identification, the lack of obedience, narcissism, the withdrawal from status and achievement competition is the result not of successful capitalist modernization of economy but of cultural modernism.32 Quite contrary to this hopelessly muddled interpretation, Ravenhill's plays trace modern sickness not to a desire for self-realization, but to its prevention and place the responsibility on the capitalist ideal of 'the mastery over the world of slaves'. Thus in Shopping and Fucking he relates the crippled lives of a group of young drifters, reduced to drugs, masochistic fantasies and prostitution, to the inversion which according to the early Marx precipitated the fall of western man - the one demanding that the exchange of love for love should be substituted by the exchange of money for money. Not quite completed yet, the process requires a joint enterprise of all ideological state apparatuses, from television, school, church, to those responsible for the mental health and protection of the young. Thus, on leaving a mental hospital where he was treated for drug addiction, Mark is warned that emotional dependencies are just as, or even more, addictive, that craving personal attachment is his greatest weakness, and that he should avoid it at all costs. He tries at first to follow this advice and carefully confines his relationship with the fourteen-year-old Gary to a strictly financial transaction. Gary has been raped, ever since he was nine, by his stepfather, but his single appeal for help was met by the social worker's matter-of-fact question: "Does he use a condom?" Mark's final attempt to save him comes too late: his explanation that "the world has offered us no practical definition of love" and that Gary yearns to be owned because he has never been loved, cannot prevent the fatal climax of Gary's masochistic fantasies in a morbid ritual of enslavement and rape. That Mark agrees to kill Gary out of pity is disturbing enough, yet even more so is to find the act crucial in bringing off the bargain whose concealed purpose, as it emerges in the end, is to finally convert Mark and his friends from their faith (however residual) in feelings (however perverted) to money32 Quoted in Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 144.

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worship. The sum Gary paid them for his murder turns out to be the only means of ransoming their own lives from Brian, a maker of TV commercials for soap opera videos (his favorite a grossly distorted version of Hamlet), a sadistic drug pusher and an authoritarian father masquerading as his son's savior. He allows them, however, to keep the three thousand pounds they owe him as a reward for having learnt the crucial lesson: that money is civilization and civilization money. The change of faith is sealed as Brian forces upon them the veneration of the new, the only authentic, Bible, the one whose first words are "Get. The money. First". The getting may be cruel, he explains - it may necessitate the suffering of numberless children such as Gary - but their deaths will be redeemed by the happiness of the generations to come, by which, of course, he means the generations of privileged children and particularly his own boy. To drive this point home he showed them, during an earlier interview, a video of his son playing the cello - a poignant image of prelapsarian purity and beauty, at which he wept uncontrollably-but then abruptly switched it off to show them another tape, of two of his men with a Black and Decker drilling out an eye of a wretch who had proved unteachable. This gruesome exercise had been undertaken and recorded as an admonition to all those who fail to understand that the flow of cash, kept up by any means including drug dealing, is the only way to a future paradise - a world where impure chemicals will finally be replaced by a more innocent anesthetic of television and shopping. He concludes his tragicomic capitalist gospel with a horribly sentimental conflation of his own criminal enterprise with the kind of work Irena embraces at the end of Chekhov's Three Sisters: "We must work. What we've got to do is make the money. For them [...] We won't see it, of course - that purity. But they will. Just as long as we keep on making the money [...] For that is the future, isn't it? Shopping. Television." The use of the chorus, at crucial points in Faust, serves a similar purpose. It does what the victims cannot do themselves: identify the logic that necessitates their suffering. The chorus is the disembodied collective voice of the American poor narrating the process of systematic emotional starvation to which they are exposed from the moment they enter school, until they are taught to repress their natural needs and feed on surrogates. The earliest memory the chorus conjures up is of a seven-year-old insomniac, who whimpers night after night at the world being such a bad place, but eventually learns to cry so mother, worried crazy that teachers are doing evil things to him, won't hear him ever again. At a later stage the voice is of a teenage delinquent, who smashes the window of a store and gets himself a VCR, the latest model, and to the mother's exasperated cry that had he listened to God, he would have gone to the food store, replies that there is no point of food in the house when you have nothing to watch while eating it. Next it tells of the Minister of a local church deciding to install a terminal and modem right there

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in the church so the young people can spread the word way into the future. When the mothers protest, seeing that they are losing their kids to the Net, he reminds them of the Lord's mysterious ways, which may seem to take their children away, but are in fact working for a brighter world, and appeals to them to raise the funds for more terminals. For a moment, preceding the critical episode of Donny's suicide, the chorus speaks in his voice, recalling his childhood attachment to a slushie-machine in a store where his mother worked night shifts and he consoled himself gulping cherry slush until his mouth, and teeth and tongue were red. The machine was suddenly removed, and deprived of that compensation, Donny developed symptoms of 'pathological' aggression, first against the teachers at school, (the doctors typically overlooking the obvious and blaming his anger on some toxic substance in cherry slush33), and then against the only object still in his

33 Bettelheim's argument in The Art of the Obvious is highly relevant to this episode. In the chapter entitled "The Laziness of the Heart" (104-145) Bettelheim speaks of the failures of modern child psychiatry research projects, which assume that the emotional disturbance of children under observation is due to all sorts of biological factors and chemical imbalance, and disregard the obvious contribution of the unnatural and inhuman social environment, including the research environment itself, which would elicit abnormal reactions in even perfectly healthy persons. Instead of enabling empathy, which is the obvious first step in the treatment of autism, the conditions of the research are deliberately designed to reproduce and re-enforce the autistic situation. The refusal to relate to the disturbed child, according to Bettelheim, is not justified by the ideals of scientific objectivity, as it is usually claimed, but is due to the laziness of the heart. Another illuminating comment is to be found, once again, in Chomsky on MisEducation. Among the sources of information used to document his devastating report on the life conditions of children in America are the results of a UNICEF study called Child Neglect in Rich Societies. The author, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, points out that in European and other less developed countries, the standards of child-rearing, initially higher than in America, have further risen in the last fifteen years. By contrast, and despite much talk of traditional and family values, "the anti-child spirit is loose in the U. S. and Great Britain". The effect on children of the economic, emotional and moral deterioration of family background in these countries, due to what is euphemistically called "the ideological preference for free market" (which in reality affects only the wages of the poor, while the rich still enjoy a high level of public subsidy and state protection) and "flexibility in the labor markets" (which simply "means you better work extra hours, without knowing whether you have a job tomorrow, or else") is that of "silent genocide": A sharply increased reliance on television for the supervision of what are called "latchkey children", "kids who are alone, is a factor in rising child alcoholism and drug use and in criminal violence against children by children and other obvious effects in health, education, ability to participate in democratic society, even survival". Hewlett's book, published in 1999, has not been reviewed yet; instead, in book review sections devoted to this topic, eminent magazines feature publications whose authors, full of somber forebodings about the fall of IQ's, the decline of SAT scores and so on, attribute these alarming symptoms to bad genes. (Well, if not the art of modernism, what else could have caused this decadence, but nature!) "Somehow", Chomsky's bitterly ironic comment runs, "people are getting bad genes, and then there are various speculations about why this is. For example, maybe it's because black mothers don't nurture their children, and the reason is maybe they evolved in Africa, where the climate was hostile. So those are maybe

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control: his body, on whose surface he now cuts red patterns of bloody razor marks, hoping that one day Jesus will explain why he does that to himself. Finally the chorus modulates into the voice of an adult, who is still looking about for the signs that the world is getting better, as mother promised it would, but finding none, discovers that he does not feel a thing about it. And like Donny, who remembers the facts but has been conditioned to forget their meaning, he too wonders who made him that way. It is this lack of comprehension accompanying the loss of feeling that Donny, the person at the end of food chain, shares with Pete, the boy from a good family, and that dooms the desperate attempts both make to recover the reality of experience. To the story of Pete (in whom one may recognize the video-image of Brian's cello-playing son come alive to enjoy the promised happiness of his father's television-and-shopping paradise, just as Donny's suicide echoes Gary's tragic end), the reference to the legendary Faust supplies additional irony. Both are in hell: Faust sold himself in, Pete wants to buy himself out. He hates his father, a software magnate and self-appointed Messiah, who has just worked out an answer to the millennium. His solution, quite in line with the postmodern recommendation of disconnected multiplicity as a cure against over-determination, is chaos. Like one of Jim Morrison's Lords, who use art to confuse us,34 he has put on a disc a hundred of the world's most famous masterpieces, which, instead of purging and focusing perception - in Pete's already muddled understanding it would mean "mooding out the wrong mood down on you" - have been programmed to keep perceptions as blurred and chaotic as possible. Pete is on the run from his father, but has taken the trouble to steal the disc first and is now going to offer it back for a sum so vast, it will buy him "so many totally real experiences". Again, when he first makes a pass at Alain, mistaking him for the Artists and Repertoire agent, he intends it as a bargain on behalf of his rock idol, Stevie, whose lyrics ("Got a killer in my VCR/ Killer in my Rom/ Killer on the cable news/Killer in the floss I use [...]") and the way he sings them "like he really totally means it, which is like, totally marketable" bring back the memory of the sixties", of "Kurt's spirit [...] yeah [...] teen spirit" - and of the anger which no longer seems possible. The moment the misunderstanding is cleared the reasons, and this is really serious, hardheaded science, and a democratic society will ignore all this at its peril, the reviewers say. Well disciplined commissars know well enough to steer away from the obvious factors, the ones rooted in very plain and clear social policy". An eloquent illustration of this policy is that when Hewlett wrote her book, 146 countries had ratified the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, and one had not: the U. S. ('Chomsky on MisEducation, 48-52). 34 In Morrison's 1969 collection of poetry The Lords: Notes on Vision, we read: "The Lords appease us with images. They give us / books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. / Specially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us / and blind us to our environment. Art adorns / our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted, and indifferent."

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up, Pete withdraws, with an apology, as it were, for not quite fitting into the theory of multiple sexualities: he is "cool" about the "whole guys thing", but it just happens that he himself is not that way. Yet, seduced by the aura of authority in Alain's voice, Pete agrees to his conditions, hoping through this transaction to earn the spiritual illumination that, beneath his coolness, he secretly yearns for. Just like his father, however, and like the God-on-line Minister, the postmodern philosopher turns out to be a false prophet too. Far from helping Pete learn what his real desires are, the teacher violates what natural integrity his disciple has still left. The act is carried out under the aegis of Foucault, Baudrillard, and all those philosophers who claim to be Nietzsche's spiritual heirs. As Raymond Tallis reminds us in his article "Truth About Lies", the denial of objective truth brought Foucault much fame and uncritical admiration. He did not, however, always behave as if he actually believed it - nobody could but when he did, the consequences, for his disciples and lovers, were brutal. Dismissing the talk of a strange new disease as a mere effusion of words coming from anti-sexual forces of authority, he went on searching for 'new truths' in sadomasochistic sexual adventures at Berkeley, where he was a visiting professor. Even later, when he must have known that he was infected, he did not "communicate the death-or-life-dealing truth to his partners", and the resulting death toll, given that Foucault was wealthy enough to buy anything he wanted, can only be surmised.35 Alain does not infect Pete with

35 See Raymond Tallis, "The Truth About Lies: Foucault, Nietzsche and the Cretan Paradox", TLS (December 21, 2001) 3. Tallis's text is valuable for more than one reason. A witty and mercilessly dismissive review of Jeremy Campbell's The Liar's Tale, it invites incredulous laughter at the preposterous lengths one is prepared to go to defend postmodernism. To do so, Jeremy Campbell first confuses human failure with success, which is typical, but then resorts to evolutionary biology for an alibi, which in view of postmodern hostility to nature is very untypical. The Liar's Tale rests on the argument that truth has been overrated and falsehood has had an unfair press. The author welcomes postmodern skepticism, notably Foucault's denial of the truth of objective truths, and then refers to a whole tradition of thinkers who attacked the privileging of truth over falsehood. But he does not stop there: after Nietzsche, Ockham, Plato and Parmenides, even orchids which look like insects have their fifteen minutes. Thus nature is enlisted in the cause of lying. Since survival is all, lying is not an artificial, deviant or dispensable feature of life. On the contrary, "deceitfulness is a kind of ethics, small lies serving nature's larger truth". He instances orchids, that mimic the look of female insects and so invite pollination by males, cuckoos and butterflies and concludes: "Where simpler species disguise themselves with borrowed plumage, we obfuscate with words, plant doubt in minds we are able to read." The consequences of the denial of truth, Raymond Tallis writes, are rarely so immediate, attributable and brutal as they were in Foucault's case. This may explain, in his opinion, why those who attacked truth were treated with such respect and rewarded so handsomely in the twentieth century, when a 2500-year-long tradition of (often insincere) denial or relativizing of truth climaxed in an orgy of tenured skepticism. If this is so, all the more reason to persist in giving art a chance to reveal the less visible connections and attribute the crimes of the twentieth century to those truly responsible for them.

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quite the same disease, but the analogy, though not complete, is nevertheless striking. The reference to Baudrillard is also unmistakable. Baudrillard suggested that the only form of self-defense against the flood of media images is to regard them as detached from any reality, as mere signifiers without signifieds, surfaces emptied of meaning. But, of course, if a deliberate refusal of meaning can give any protection, it is the protection of blindness or indifference. The strategy Baudrillard recommends is precisely the one used to create what Robert Brustein called "dumbocracy in America", and thus "manufacture consent" to what would outrage a person unprotected in this way. It is also used by Alain to gain Pete's consent to his own abuse. As he masturbates Pete, Alain instructs him to conquer his spontaneous revulsion by viewing the whole affair through his camcorder, as an unreal TV spectacle. And it works - Pete doesn't feel a thing. As a practical introduction to the nihilistic sermon of hedonism and cruelty that he later preaches to Pete, the episode also reveals the degree to which Nietzsche's philosophy had to be falsified before it could be enlisted for postmodern cause.36 To Nietzsche, nihilism was an intermediary period, "before there is yet strength to reverse

36 See Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into Psychology of Ethics (London, Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 123-126. Despite Nietzsche's occasional overstatements, which his anti-humanist interpreters like to read out of context, the core of his philosophy and ethics, as Fromm's non-selective and far more intelligent reading demonstrates, was fundamentally humanistic. As his dictum - Good is what makes me grow - testifies, Nietzsche was not an immoralist but sought for criteria that would rescue morality from Christian ascetic authoritarianism and bourgeois respectability. The true significance of Nietzsche's philosophy in the context of the nineteenth-century seismic intellectual and moral shifts emerges with exceptional clarity in one of the most comprehensive, intelligent and inspired interpretations of romanticism and modernism, Ljiljana Bogoeva-Sedlar's Options of the Modern: Emerson, Melville, Stevens (Nis: Tibet, 1993). In the section on Emerson and Nietzsche we read: '"Henceforth be masterless' could not have remained the only slogan guiding man toward a more satisfactory future. Rejection of old masters, the negative definition of the self, had to be re-worked into a positive credo, into an affirmation of those values for the sake of which the radical transformation of the past was undertaken. The old masters were gone, but man could not survive without a source of moral authority, a system of values with which to master into meaning both himself and the world. [...] And even Nietzsche, the most violent destroyer of old tablets, sings his invocation of the Unknown God [...] The Satanic 'Non serviam' was thus often merely a proclamation of the readiness to serve someone else, namely the power that moved the New self discovered within the confines of the Old" (60). Her Afterword ends with a reminder that postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche involves a reversal of the values he most passionately held to: "A confusion must be avoided and a distinction made: saying 'yes' to the whole creative output of nature is not the same thing as saying 'yes' to everything being produced in culture. Especially the culture of postmodernism. Ultimately, it is a question of responsibility. Nietzsche, whom Paglia quotes repeatedly, was the fiercest and most uncompromising critic of culture. Yet we find 'Even the love of life is still possible [...]' recorded in his last published documents." (247)

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values" and "create the world as it ought to be";37 his will to power was the will to spontaneously productive life, experienced as joy rather than any hedonistic pleasure; and the unequivocal purpose of cruelty was to overthrow whatever inhibits, from within or without, this joyful self-overcoming and self-creation. This creative cruelty mutated into Derrida's unspecified "monstrosity",38 to become, in Alain's "free interpretation", a pretext for an act of sheer destruction: rape. But the true victim in the play is Donny, and Alain's sermon of cruelty is a decisive contribution to his tragic end. Alain's prescription that "we must be cruel to others and to ourselves" is translated by Pete and Donny into a lastditch attempt to revive their numbed feelings by self-inflicted wounds. The pain they feel as they cut themselves is the one remaining proof that they are still alive and the images of their lacerated bodies on their home page are transmuted into codes through which they communicate this message to the world. Yet seeing that the medium is obstructing his message, enclosing him in the spectral world of the virtual, Donny decides to prove that it is all "for the real": he accepts Pete's challenge to meet him in the flesh, posts a message on his home page that "he has had enough of it all just being pictures", and that he is on his way to a motel room where he intends to "go for his jugular". 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Will to Power" in Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Maiden: Blackwell, 1988), 366-367. 38 Derrida's allegedly Nietzschean affirmation of free play in his seminal essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences" is defined in purely negative terms and thus exemplifies the negative concept of freedom that may become, as Quentin Skinner warns, a disguised tyranny: it is "an affirmation of a world of signs, without fault, without truth, and without origin"; it is a repudiation of the "humanist ethic" of "self-presence", a rejection of the romantic "saddened, nostalgic, guilty" interpretation of man and history; it is a liberation from "remorse" (my italics). What this freedom is for is not specified; instead its imminent coming is merely welcomed in the rhapsodic anticipation, at the end the essay, "of the birth [...] of some as yet uruiamable [...] formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity". In his essay "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation", Derrida is more explicit: here cruelty is identified with a life force - the non-verbal instinctual energy released when the author, text and aesthetic illusion of theatrical representation have all been smashed up. Yet, it is highly instructive to return once again to Marcuse's Counter-Revolution and Revolt and compare his repudiation with Derrida's celebration of Artaud (incidentally, the only artist that he has singled out for praise). In abolishing the distancing aesthetic form, or "the secondary alienation" of art, Marcuse claims, and moving into the streets instead, the theater of cruelty appeals to the masses as masses, and not individuals; there, a "constant sonorization" insisted on by Artaud - and praised by Derrida - is addressed to the audience "long since become familiar with the violent noises and cries, which are the daily equipment of the mass media, sports, highways, places of recreation". There, violent physical images fail to shock "minds and bodies which live in peaceful coexistence (and even profiting from) genocide, torture and poison [...] They do not break the oppressive familiarity with destruction: they reproduce it" (111-12). Unlike Artaud's, RavenhilFs cruel images, surrounded by what I would call the controlling cognitive context, the critical perspective of the author's text, do shock.

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The reality of this last rebellious act soon, however, dissolves into another spectacle. Donny's suicide, committed in Pete's and Alain's presence, but also viewed on the net by hundreds of subscribers, is immediately turned into the subject of every talk show and into a song Stevie performed unplugged and is now showing three times an hour on MTV. This epilogue is one of the most shocking among the play's demonstrations of how "the potentially libertarian subcultures of the young are co-opted and their revolt transmuted into marketable commodity".39 Yet Donny's defiant gesture is not quite emptied of reality, at least not for Pete and Alain, and death as an exit out of the virtual, a No-saying, remains one of the two options defined at the end of Faust. Pete rejects it. Horrified at the brutal immediacy of Donny's blood - smeared body and blaming his death solely on Alain's doctrine of cruelty, he shoots his teacher and returns to his father, his 'hope' of survival, like the hope of so many penitent prodigal sons of wealthy American fathers, staked on the hopeless prospect of stupefied prosperity within the electronically controlled chaos. Alain, however, follows Donny's example: seriously wounded, he refuses medical help, and dies. Weariness, disappointment, desire for escape, guilt - whatever brought him to this decision, it is the final, decisive indication of his moral ascent beyond his real life prototypes. The first hint of his moral superiority is the despair audible in whatever he says. Another lurks in the two elusive parables that seem to obsess him. The riddles are, in fact, Baudrillard's and thus provide a further parallel between the original and its fictional counterpart.40 Yet this does not exhaust their manifold function in the play: while unmasking and repudiating the philosophy of violence espoused by both the historical and fictional thinkers, one of their effects is also to point to Ravenhill's hero's belatedly acquired capacity for self-searching and remorse. One of the parables tells of a Japanese businessman and a Dutch woman having lunch at a restaurant. The woman admits to being a poet and reads the businessman a love poem that he has inspired her to write; he shoots her, chops her up, and eats her, declaring all the while his undying love for her. The other is about a man who makes love to a beautiful woman, tells her that the part of her he finds most attractive are her eyes, and a few days later receives a gift from her, a shoe-box containing her two eyeballs. If their 39 Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, 84. 40 Ravenhill's comments on postmodern theory in general, which he read extensively, "starting with the Baudrillard for Beginners book", and particularly on the two parables he used in his play are reported in Aleks Sierz, ln-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 135. He felt that theorists such as Foucault and Baudrillard were "being quite chic, having these dangerous thoughts about violence and sexuality, but they lacked any responsibility". Baudrillard's riddles were "little teasers he used to give his students. He was playing a smart intellectual game, but his nihilistic philosophy seems like an easy option", and its "retreat from social responsibility is deeply reactionary".

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original function was to convey the ambiguities and, according to Baudrillard, inescapable cruelties of seduction, set within the thematic framework of Ravenhill's play, both stories open up to new interpretations: they add deeper, more disquieting resonance to the theme of the loss of feeling and the fragmentation of the self. The first recalls the great modernists', Ibsen's, for example, exposure of the west's inadequate knowledge of the self and the disorienting teleology deriving from it. Peer Gynt discovers at the end of his life-long pursuit of worldly success that he is 'defective goods', and that the only place he has ever been complete and whole is in Solvejg's love. The successful Japanese businessman encounters his own estranged soul embodied in a love poem about himself - his cannibalism being an accurate measure of his hunger to re-possess it. The second makes shockingly explicit the symbolic death and dismemberment implied in the fetishism of body parts, another of those psycho-sexual aberrations which allegedly make up the inherent polymorphous perversity of the human subject and which permissive culture has set free, that is, made available for commercial exploitation. But, as I already suggested, these parables can also be read as disguised confessions on Alain's part. The important questions he insists they give rise to: "Who was cruel, the Dutch woman or the Japanese man?" and "Who was the seducer and who was the seduced?"; the subdued hostility in Pete's response: "I'm not so good at the whole metaphor thing"; and finally Alain's own answer, a moment before his suicide, that it was the woman who was cruel, because she understood the use of metaphor, and the man understood nothing - all combine to project Alain's sense of responsibility for the effect his own metaphors have produced. That the absence of any ascertainable metaphysical truth or transcendental absolute makes all knowledge metaphorical is not any original, postmodern discovery, nor does it matter much. What does matter is the awareness that a choice of a metaphor is a moral commitment: for metaphors are interpretations and interpretations have power to shape conduct and thus generate their own confirmation. Speaking of the conflict of interpretations concerning human nature, Zygmunt Bauman observed that we "would never know for sure whether people as such are good or evil [...]. But it does matter whether we believe them to be basically good or evil, and consequently how we treat them", for "the image we hold of each other and of all of us together has the uncanny ability to self-corroborate".41 To paraphrase Bauman, we may not ultimately know what the self is and what it may become, but to speak of the postmodern crisis of identity as 'the death of man' and 'the end of history' is to immobilize the creative energies that might take us beyond it.

41 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 257.

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These energies, according to Ravenhill, are love and anger. Blocked or perverted in Shopping and Fucking and Faust, they are, if only tentatively and partially, released in Some Explicit Polaroids, Ravenhill's version of Look Back in Anger. A socialist and an anarchist just out of prison, Nick agrees to subdue his still unflagging desire to smash up things only to satisfy the even more urgent need to take care of somebody: it is under this condition that he is allowed to win back his wife, who has renounced her youthful belief in great narratives of liberation and convinced herself that playing the small game, according to the rules of that greater prison-house, the Thatcherite England, is a sign of adulthood. Yet she soon discovers that what binds her to Nick is the memory of his anger, and promises to turn him into what he used to be. If Ravenhill's hope of a breakthrough involves a return to the romantic individualism, it is because any genuine alternative to postmodernism must begin with a breach of its prohibition against nostalgia. To search for absolute novelty is to perpetuate the discontinuity and fragmentation on which postmodern, or any other theories whose concealed purpose is mind control, thrive. Looking back in anger may in fact reveal that postmodernism is not as new as it is made to appear: that beneath its permissiveness and hedonism it belongs to a tradition of repressive ethics whose proponents, from the great medieval defenders of the Church to ideologues of state power, imposed a concept of 'salvation' that required the destruction of the soul. Between this authoritarian ethics and the humanist upholding of the productive self, crucial to romantic tradition in art from Blake to the great modernists, there is, as Fromm repeatedly warned, not much else to choose. Ravenhill rediscovered and attached himself to the latter, at the most inauspicious of historical moments, when postmodernism, seemingly on the wane, actually persists in the way we crave novelty: new excitement, new distraction, new language games. But if we desire a true alternative to postmodernism, and not merely the old Faustian bargain in a new guise, we'd better listen to the voice of the artist.

BERND KLÄHN

The Threefold Way: About the Heuristics and Paradigmatics of (Post)Modernist Culture and Literature Introduction: Basic Ideas When - beginning in the late sixties - discussions about the conditions of a 'post-modern' culture began to invade the terrains of literary and cultural studies, it became clear that traditional modes of cultural orientation could no longer be applied in a standardized critical way by focusing (in a Kantian way) on the sources, limits and possibilities of a given method and its categorical background. While the classical pillars of self- and world-interpretation turned fragile and friable, tendencies towards partial and explicitly non-universal theory-making began to cover a respectable scope within the humanities. As a consequence, literary history and cultural studies developed into scintillating tableaus of divergent versions and visions, underestimating the classical aspects of modern world-orientation, including such concepts as subjectivity and rationality. This essay's aim is to sketch a simple heuristic idea, which may offer some new insights concerning a more coherent 'postmodernist' version of literary and cultural studies. It starts from the supposition that modern worldmaking has to rely on the threefold pattern of subject, system and rationality, presenting an adequate platform to most (at least: occidental) forms of cultural orientation. The analytical line will follow the special forms of paradigmatic realization of this triad in the territory of literary and cultural studies, allowing for coherent leitmotifs as structuring devices within the descriptive multiplicities of the given materials. The argumentation will converge on the idea that even postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptions may be understood as internal reconstellations and reconfigurations within the modern paradigmatics of subject, system and reason, reintegrating theories of a postmodern condition into a dynamic pattern of modem thinking. After an introductory tour de force, leading from antiquity to early modern forms of worldmaking and finally to modernism and postmodernism, the second part of this essay will deal with symptomatic narrative techniques

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widely applied in postmodernist fictions. As a result of this twofold method, these considerations as a whole will show two different sides of theorizing about postmodernism: firstly, an abstract groundwork of theoretical pillars and, secondly, a detailed look at various examples of postmodernist literatures. But, and this is a hopeful addendum, hybrid constructions like this may initiate new discussions, though they will never be able to replace a meticulously constructed multidimensional analysis.

The Paradigms of Classical and Early-Modern Worldmaking Following a radically synoptic mode, the subsequent line of argumentation will present some classical forms of cultural paradigmatics, based on the triad of subject, system and reason. Regarding some of Plato's main ideas, it becomes evident that the triadic fundament is already present at the core of classical ideology, without, however, attaining the status of a differentiated discourse. Confining world and rationality to the realms of a harmonious, unitary cosmos, where the circle represents the ultimate closing of Greek thought, classical subjects are not initiated into any form of independence. Their only chance to achieve a state of 'eudaemonia' is to approach this divine harmony by adapting their own subjectivity and outer social reality to this classical holism. But even in such a closed world, Plato's threefold structure concerning the internal and external organization of human life (state and soul) - that is 'composure', 'braveness', 'wisdom' - is correlated with the abovementioned paradigmatic triad.1 'Composure' is a form of hermetic and systemic self-paralysis, 'braveness' an outstanding variant of subjective determination, and 'wisdom' a highly developed status of rationality. In the Greek polis, these triadic elements converge, blending antiquity's ideas of harmony into an iron concept of hermetically closed world-orientation. The medieval phase, to apply another rigorous simplification, does not break away from this tradition of convergence and paradigmatic contraction. At the end of the last cycle of medieval cultural development, connected with the emergence of the Reformation, this preformed and static identity is stirred up and the coherent mode of subjectivity starts to disintegrate, moving into an eccentric position. Pushing this trend towards individualism further, Renaissance concepts of the creative artist prepare the ground for the Cartesian severing of the subject from the systemic unity of the classical universe. The dawning age of worldwide cultural and geographic explorations adds to this process of systemic de-framing, installing it as a leading element of cultural development on the threshold of modern times. Relevant in a similar way, the emergence of modem science (Galileo, Bacon), comprising empirical1

Piaton, Sämtliche

Werke, Bd. 2: Politeia (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994), 326-334.

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mathematical and cosmological de-centring, fosters the ongoing process of paradigmatic unfolding. Representing a point of culmination, Descartes' cogito ergo sum presents the first fully developed triadic differentiation of subject, system and rationality, though the autonomous subject is still selfreferentially bound up in structures of rationality, which turn out to be of external origin. But Descartes' subject is no longer restricted to function as the factotum of an external authority: the outer world appears as an assortment of strange paraphernalia, the zone of res extensa becoming almost totally incompatible with the inner processes of res cogitans? Solely rationality functions as a structuring and binding element, securing the cohesion of inner and outer reality. If, according to this simple model, modern times start with the Cartesian unfolding of the paradigmatic triad of subject, system and rationality, it seems likewise evident, that the highly developed narrative mode of the Discours de la methode introduces a new accent into occidental worldmaking. The novel as - to apply Hegel's words - the "bourgeois epos",3 achieves primary significance for understanding the subjective correlatives of modern selfthematizations, self-subjugations and self-enthronements. As an important consequence, the novelistic standards of modern world-construction may be considered as representative items within the paradigmatic evolution of occidental culture.4

Unfolding the Novel Paradigmatically: From Modern to Modernist Fiction Looking at the first narrative products of modern times (which might be called 'novels') the greatly increased importance of the subject's inner autonomy becomes obvious. This is true for Don Quixote's idiosyncratic heroism, as well as Tristram Shandy's diverging realities, both of them excelling in mixtures of semi-parodic reminiscences and constructions. Standing out as an exemplary form in this period of novelistic composition, the epistolary novel documents the turmoil of an irritated subjectivity, moving along the borderlines of rational and systemic demands. Even Robinson Crusoe's almost 2

3 4

Descartes, Discours de la methode (Paris: Gamier-Flammarion, 1966), 62. Interesting to note that in Descartes' original French version, res cogitans and res extensa are called "intelligent nature" ("la nature intelligente") and "corporeal nature" ("la nature corporelle"). This underlines the inner connection of his rationalism with forms of natural philosophy from the very beginning, leaving no doubt about the reasonable subject's intention, to get out of the rational asylum of the cogito back into the world. G. W. F. Hegel, Ästhetik III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 392. See for instance Georg Lukäcs' considerations about the origin of the novel: id., Zur Theorie des Romans (Berlin: Cassirer, 1920).

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classically closed world makes the subject a lonesome hunter - looking for personal survival, far from any godlike harmony. All of these famous examples, different as they are in their specific aesthetic horizon, remain within the territory mapped out by Rene Descartes. His cogito has transformed a dynamic process of paradigmatic disintegration into a convincing theoretical aper?u, confronting the de-centred subject with the invasive power of systemic and rational modulations of space, time and causality. Yet in all the aforementioned cases, the pressure of outer conditions leaves rationality in a consolidating position. Though already capable of controlling the divergence between subject and system by having recourse to the conciliatory competence of rationality, the paradigmatic triad is not yet completely unfolded. Ethical implementation, reflecting the changing footing of practical rationality, enriches 19th-century novels considerably. These ethical dimensions sever practical forms of subjective reasoning from systemic pressures of space-time-conditions. The subject achieves the position of a (more or less) skilful user of rational means, securing a fragile independence from a rigorously pre-structured environment. Melville's Billy Budd, Eliot's Silas Marner, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Dickens' Hard Times may be mentioned as outstanding literary examples.5 Realism and naturalism shove the rational component to the other pole of the paradigmatic triad, manifesting an almost deterministic coalition of systemic and rational modes. This new paradigmatic confederacy leaves the subject in states of 'adaptation', like revolt, acceptance or resignation, and sometimes leads to near regressions into pre-modern attitudes. Shaping and dramatizing scenes of deterministic rigidity, Frank Norris' McTeague6 and Theodor Dreiser's Sister Carrie1 may be singled out as representative narrative examples of this state of paradigmatic evolution. Almost written against the grain of this dualistic version of paradigmatic unfolding, Twain's Huck Finn8 shows all signs of a largely evolved pattern of triadic development, making this novel an orientational focus and unique place of enrichment for postmodernist prose. Psychologizing the inner realms of subjectivity, modernist ways of worldmaking (and novel-composition) introduce specifically adapted versions of rationality into the narrative and constructive apparatus. Thus, the paradigmatic tilt of naturalism is balanced out by opposite tendencies: rationality moves back into the subject, contouring a psycho-logical terrain, while - at the same time - outer reality becomes a fluctuating, free-flowing

5

6 7 8

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (London: Penguin, 1995); George Eliot, Silas Marner (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1861); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (London: Penguin, 1970); Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Penguin, 1994). Frank Norris, McTeague (New York, London: Norton, 1977). Theodor Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York, London: Norton, 1991). Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin, 1994).

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stream of data, impressions and stimuli. In this perspective, modernism may be regarded as a paradigmatic counterbalance to naturalism, preparing the final step to a fully unfolded paradigmatic organization of the world-making process. It is interesting to note that modernism shows traits of classical antiquity in its penchants for harmoniously closed systemic framings. Though "moments of vision" (Woolf), "epiphanies" (Joyce) and "moments bienheureux" (Proust) do not intend to constitute any kind of everlasting coherence, they celebrate its loss in the form of a heightened, coagulated remembrance. Even in the developing process of paradigmatic dispersions and disruptions, modern ideology is still nostalgically looking back at antiquity's static fusion of paradigmatic archetypes.

The Unfolded Matrix of Modernity: The Paradigmatic Extremes of Postmodernist Fiction Postmodernism turns out to be an extremely unfolded version of paradigmatic modernity, making the term 'post-modern' a contradictio in adjecto. The final considerations about the so-called 'postmodern condition' will try to contour those modalities of paradigmatic constellations, which are typical of postmodernist novels and primarily explicable as parodic turning-points in late-modernist aesthetic worldmaking. Discussing some outstanding examples of narrative postmodernism - novels by Pynchon, Hawkes and Coover - this essay will eventually give a demonstration of some symptomatic configurations and disruptive re-constellations leading from modernism to postmodernism. In Pynchon's novels, for instance, we are confronted with a reintegration of logical structures into the description of outer reality, reducing them to caricatures of scientific ideology. Underneath these formalistic patterns, nomadic subjects, scientifically deformed rationality and systemic wastelands constitute a triadic mode of uncertain relationships, stabilized with the help of iconic means. Hawkes' prose, on the other hand, is working on the project of dissolving the subject as a fixed identity, undermining modern(ist) camouflaged trends to fall back on classical ideas of closure. Coover's narrative impetus is directed against rational self-reference, regarding it as a fatal Platonic heritage in Cartesian disguise. What will be left out in the following paragraphs is a detailed listing of postmodernist authors and their works, creative phases, and stylistic means. The idea is not to give an overview of postmodernist fictional techniques and their enormous varieties of composition, but to substantiate the heuristics of triadic unfolding with appropriate and illustrative examples, taken from the centres of postmodernist fiction. In these and many other cases of postmodernist imagination, the main tendency is a complete (often

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experimental and parodic) unfolding of the paradigmatic triad, making subject, system and rationality equivalent and sometimes even partially compatible protagonists in the ongoing process of modem worldmaking. Pynchon's Novels: Systemic Digressions Thomas Pynchon's narrative achievements are looked upon as symptomatic realizations of postmodernist prose, refraining from excessive accents on formal playfulness. Ranging from the short story to accurately composed long versions of the novel, there is no immediate outer sign of experimentalism in Pynchon's writing: typographical insertions, narrative fragmentarism or technical exercises do not appear as main elements of his fictionalizing procedure. Regularly working with subtle strategies of transforming basic modes of modern writing, Pynchon inserts remodeled narrative levels and dimensions into the compositional patterns of modern writing, producing new stylistic effects of modern self-evaluations. His narrative innovations, often epitomized by labels like 'postmodern' or 'postmodernist', have been identified with a variety of styles and topics. On the one hand, his inclination towards scientific topics move into the focus of critical attention, accentuating their own narrative verve and autonomy without evolving into some kind of 'science-fictionalized' way of sense-making. On the other hand, critics praise his competence in diversifying subjectivity into different strands of protagonist movements, transforming the narrative (dis)course into a network of pluralized forms of subjectivity, correlated by self-referential modes of narrative playfulness. Turning back to the central thesis of this essay, resting on the assumption that modern ways of worldmaking, especially those concerned with aesthetics and narrativity, run in the tracks of a basic triadic paradigmatization within occidental culture, a short glance at Pynchon's narrative development will try to elucidate the relevancy of this triadic modern substructure and its differentiations. The main argument will focus on the question, if Pynchon's prose exemplifies the divergence of the triploid poles - subject, system, rationality - in a symptomatic way, implying, for instance, the emergence of paradigmatic incompatibilities within modern self-understanding. In his early short story "Entropy"9 Pynchon describes the evolution of a party, which is losing all forms of coherence. The host, Meatball Mulligan, is in need of re-imposing some kind of structural and ideological stability on his guests whose mental and bodily interactions have been deteriorating into some kind of abstraction, backed by the exhaustive use of drugs, alcohol, and bizarre aberrations from everyday communications. Besides, the apartment above presents to the reader a microcosm of opposing tendencies, in extreme 9

Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy", Kenyon Review 22 (1960), 277-292.

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contrast to the party's decline into entropy. Up there we have a pair of lovers, long since existing in a self-sealed hermetical asylum, isolated from the outside world. They are waiting for the entropic death to close in, to strangle their lives and all forms of order in fluctuations of eternal monotony. It is remarkable that a straightforward and suggestively plausible interpretation, fixed on the idea of entropy (i. e. the final thermal devaluation of energy in a closed system), does not bear closer examination. Carefully analyzing the situations depicted in the story it becomes evident that all anthropomorphic events are designed as open systems, though far away from any state of equilibrium. Thus the topic 'order out of chaos' is more appropriate for characterizing the thematic core of this story, than rubrics like 'entropy and heatdeath'. Without ascribing a prophetic vision to Pynchon (with regard to the physics of chaos), this story demonstrates his competence to anticipate the varieties of systemic modes, concomitant rational structures and the significance of minimal interactions between subjects ('butterflyeffect'). "Entropy" ends with the reinstallation of order in Meatball's apartment, while at the same time the hermetically sealed system in the rooms above gets opened up by the breaking of a window pane. This is more than just a preparatory exercise on Pynchon's side for his next novels. It is a consistent and unrelenting good-bye to the classical thematic conjunction of systems, rationality and a subjugated subjectivity. And all this is taking place in the territory of classical physics, where such topological constraints had been systematically worked out. True to this critical strategy, modem sciences remain in the centre of Pynchon's narrative interests. Their contextualizing procedures offer typical modern and pre-modern ways of constructing meaning, while yielding, at the same time, narrative standards, which are adequately tuned to his fictional realizations. Gravity's Rainbow as well as Mason & Dixon take recourse to these means of approaching reality, thus giving sense to a concept of the postmodern condition, based on extremely strained and extended paradigmatic constellations of self and world. In Gravity's Rainbow10 Pynchon has finally achieved a de-modernized concept of prose, which is not only able to eschew the recurring theme of hermetic closure still relevant in "Entropy" and The Crying of Lot 49," but also ideologically mature enough, to enter stages of fictionalized discourse which avoid a notorious focusing on parody and achieve new qualities of paradigmatic configuration instead. Pynchon installs these meticulously intertwined means of postmodernist narrative creativity in Nazi-Germany's post-war landscapes. Presenting the relevant components of modernity driven to extremes in the framework of this historical-political topology, he starts out 10 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Pan Books, 1975). 11 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).

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to accentuate their paradigmatic character within the scope of narrative remolding and (de)formation. Pynchon's tale about Nazi-Germany's 'retaliation-weapon' V-2 and its scurrilous and carnivalesque confederacy of science, history, and erratic subjectivity, fostered by a strange negative correlative emerging from a technomorphically fragmented no-man's-land, frustrates all classical hopes of reconciliation between basic modes of modernity and the narrative foci of this novel. In Gravity's Rainbow all these vain modern strategies of appeasement, applied to the dispersing forces of the paradigmatic triad, converge in the picture of "the fall of a crystal palace". 12 Here we are confronted with the breaking down of a pretentious fa9ade, which is, in an obviously paradoxical fashion, supported and subverted by diverging paradigmatic drifts. Transparent chimera - backed by contrasts between optics and gravitation, introspection and outer reality - and a fraudulent hermeticism have taken the helm of a late-modernist search for sense and sensibility. At the end of the novel this "crystal palace" has been transmuted into a Los Angeles cinema. Here the film has broken during a movie show, coercing all moviegoers to follow a sequence of pictures produced within their heads. This outcome resembles a scenario consisting of wrong identities: what seems similar at first sight turns out to be grossly different on nearer inspection. A rocket, the central symbol and icon of this novel, is a menace to both localities, based on a technical construction, which can be understood as an emblem of anthropomorphic disparity and estrangement. As long as rainbows are semicircular and geometrically different from rockets' parabolic arcs, filmprojectors cannot function as machines capable of social differentiation; in the same way, social actors are confined to the role of erratic subjects in noman's-land. Still intimately related with these territorial landmarks, but apparently moving away from this program of modernity's subversion, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon13 seems to offer fascinating deviations and reorientations. To achieve such an aim, this novel about the measuring of America by means of early modern and pre-modern geometry composes an almost complete matrix of styles and sceneries, typical of the historical novel. But, in spite of this enormous investment in the realm of fictional illusionism, Mason & Dixon presents more than a simple asymptotic approach to classical forms of narrative techniques. What looks, in the beginning, like a nostalgic reminiscence of a lost historical unity, similar to a kind of immersion into the modes of a stable view of the self and the world, soon turns into a genuine persiflage of occidental ideology. As the European geometers Mason and Dixon intrude into the New World in order to start a process of radical 12 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 3. 13 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997).

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differentiation within, they move into the centre of boundary-constructions, situated deep in the heart of occidental modernity. The Mason-Dixon-Line is not only intended to separate America's political systems and their inner confrontations, it is also designated to achieve this aim by the help of modern physics: astronomy and chronometry. Transforming the geometry of earth and sky into a catalytic instrument, intended to introduce a hiatus into the process of modernization, Pynchon's novel leads modernity back to the roots of antique worldmaking. But with his unerring instinct for precise iconographic and pictorial composition, he makes the Mason-and-Dixon-Line a demarcation within modern territory - a line separating the standardized versions of being modern from Utopian concepts, striving for transgression. Pynchon's European geometers make up for those errors, which induced Columbus to take America for a place in the orient. Being able to measure and calculate the earth's degrees of longitude, they are able and willing to decide, where the West begins. Fixing America as an occidental place, they keep it intrinsically divergent. Such a measuring of American territory does not only imply the use of quantifying techniques of early modern times, integrating America into a contextual relationship with European cultures of measuring rationality, it also relies on quantifications that do not unite, but divide. This rationality is basically disjunctive, breaking systems and dispersing subjects. So in the course of the novel's narrative unfolding, Mason and Dixon as antagonistic starting-points function as poles of crystallization, attracting more and more oppositional elements into their fictional environments. Irresistibly, their measuring analyses install a picture of America, consisting of scattered scenarios, spangled with deviant types of subjectivity. John Hawkes' Erratic Subjects While Pynchon's prose is primarily sustained by delimitating trends within the systemic groundwork of modernity, John Hawkes' writings exemplify narrative developments, which are intended to undermine modern paradigmatics by destabilizing another cornerstone of the triad: subjectivity. His early works, The Owl and The Cannibal, lean heavily on elements taken from gothic narrativity in order to unveil the self-disruptive energies, implied in processes of dissolving the subject from within. Choosing romantic forms of accentuated self-awareness for the mise en scene of this de-modernization, Hawkes' prose is tightly anchored in a realm of subjectivity, typical of modern self-centring. But, keeping a secure distance from any elevation of nature in contrast to the subjects' nervous alertness and orientational anxieties, Hawkes is not to be reconciled with a cosmos of partly stabilized modern principles: his narrative concepts are incompatible with a return to the aesthetics of the sublime. Centring his intentions on scenes dominated by erratic modes of

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power, Hawkes' fiction is persistently striving to expand the range of conceptual patterns focused on subjectivity. In Hawkes' novella The OwllA the medieval hangman II Gufo still represents gothic immersions into a closed cosmos of values and emotions. Here, the split within the concept of subjectivity may still be ignored as one of modern character. But Hawkes' first novel, The Cannibal,15 is far more explicit with regard to these self-dissolving and self-dilating processes. Again, Nazi-Germany is the place, but this time there is no primary Pynchonesque strain for modernity's systemic self-disruption; instead, recurrent fissures and disparities within the subject's own self- and worldmaking fill the narrative tableau. Hawkes describes hunting scenes, dissections, fragmentations and dismembering of subjects and subjects' bodies. He tells about the obsessive hunting of a man for a small boy, whom he finally kills and carves like a piece of game; and about 'new' old Nazis, waylaying an American patrol biker and severing him from his machine in an act of lethal brutality. Hawkes depicts fragments of anthropomorphic entities, which have lost the status of genuine subjectivity while remaining obsessively addicted to functional rites. Driven by a rational perfectionism, his protagonists have transferred their identities into schemata, no longer affiliated with any form of autonomous subjective self-definition. These versions of subjective self-delimitations, sharply and bizarrely contoured in the personal calculus of self-defined rationality, undergo forms of narrative 'dense packing' in his short novel Travesty,16 where Hawkes sketches the monologues of a sports-car pilot driving amok on a French coastal road. Facing death deliberately, he has placed his daughter and her ageing friend in the back of his car, to join him, against their will, on this murderous racing-event. At first glance, the scene resembles - once again - a modernist arrangement, focusing on the psychological analysis of a deranged and jealous father. But in the course of the protagonist's swaggering, then again highly sensitive monologue, the modernist topic becomes blurred, deframed and dilated. The narrating subject is heading towards a condition of self-displacement, where his own identity is merging with the personalities of his involuntary passengers, unveiling the manic structures of his unfixed rationality. Whatever the reasons for the narrator's suicide-trip may be: he remains a construct, a loose bundle of partial reasonings, all hinting at the ultimate finale: the destruction of the madly driving chauffeur, driven mad in his raging and raving imagination.

14 John Hawkes, The Owl (New York: New Directions, 1977); originally published in 1954. 15 John Hawkes, The Cannibal (New York: New Directions, 1949). 16 John Hawkes, Travesty (New York: New Directions, 1976).

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In one of his later novels, Adventures in (he Alaskan Skin Trade,11 Hawkes returns to this theme by making use of a wide topological variety, which eliminates the dense stringency of subjective narrativity from the text and offers a remarkable formal contrast to the structural tightness of Travesty. Taking the perspective of a prostitute, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade tells the story of a coming of age in Alaska. It is a story about the dispelling dimensions of female subjectivity, which is spreading out like a fluctuating tissue within endlessly ramifying reminiscences of her father. This restless man, who always insisted on being called "Uncle Jack", is cut off from his own authentic role from the very beginning. Getting more and more used to his subjective instabilities, he infects his own daughter with the aberrations of his missed approaches to identity. The narrator follows in the tracks of a human being, neither willing nor capable to lay open his plans, which do not consist of anything else but trajectories of an indefatigably moving fatherly body. This 'uncle'-father, a pilot, mountaineer, searcher for totem poles and other scurrilities, becomes her vortex of subjectivity, a strangely attracting, erratically moving centre of subjective preferences and personal needs. Alaska, one of the last American versions of untouched nature and systemic hermeticism, passively remains in flagrant opposition to these divergences. Within this wilderness there is no longer any hoping for systemic asylum, a yearning not to be answered even by the sublime enormity of nature's other. Robert Coover's De-Rationalizing Narrativity While Pynchon and Hawkes undermine the tightly knit paradigmatic triadic union of modern(ist) worldmaking from two different sides, the former working in the field of systemic subversion, the latter in the terrain of subjective dispersion, Robert Coover's writings represent the third tendency of postmodernism, i. e. the parodic de-composition of modernity's rationalistic mania. To achieve his paradigmatically disruptive aims, Coover applies classical narrative techniques as well as experimental procedures, working with a well-selected assortment of technomorphic utensils. Covering a rich variety of different topics, Coover's fictions centre on those segments of rationality, where inter-subjective and communicative aspects become dominant. In The Public Burning,18 Coover blends Nixon-era and American PostWorld War II anti-communism into a precarious fictional dynamism. Merging historical authenticity and fictional imagination into a grid of inseparable components, thus leaving no room for the emergence of any autonomous historical or genuinely political logos, the novel tells the story of the Rosenberg spies, accused of atomic espionage for the Soviets. The political

17 John Hawkes, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). 18 Robert Coover, The Public Burning (London: Penguin, 1978).

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intentions of the fictional Richard Nixon appear deeply entwined with affective modes of manic self-construction, thus producing forms of rationalities and power, which remain incapable of initiating authentic processes of subject-formation or system-building. The world of The Public Burning resides in functional and fictional rationality, presenting an American president in the shape of a modern Nero, whose logophobic reasoning deteriorates his calculus into the ridiculous. The Universal Baseball Association19 encapsulates this strategy in the daily routines of a deranged protagonist who designs and plays whole baseball seasons by throwing dice at his kitchen table. Moving back from the public spaces of The Public Burning into the private spheres of this obsession for aleatory events and their presumed sense for the world's and the subject's selfdevelopments, the reader is confronted with the loss of the hero's personality. This decay of the protagonist's autonomy is concomitant with the construction of a rigid, neither reasonable nor subjective system, created, day after day, by falling dice. In a similar way, though with radical erotic inclinations, Coover's protagonists act out their structural pleasures in Gerald's Party20 and John's Wife.21 Here the evolutionary courses of intersubjective styles of living get subverted by perfidious calculative means which attack the inner spaces and private terrains of a deflating subjectivity. In Spanking the Maid22 Coover advances this strategy into an aestheticphilosophical fiction, based on the procedural dialectics typical of Hegel's philosophy. Describing the daily routines of power and bliss between a master and a maid, Coover's novella illustrates the coercive rigidity connected with any form of repetitively monotonous rationality. Within these networks, the self-development of subjectivity gets paralyzed, involuntarily erecting a system built on irrational schemata. What is being offered in the end, is a sclerotic arrangement, which has evaporated its own authentic rationality and holds sway over anthropomorphic variables, once known as subjects. Again, in Coover's fiction, the paradigmatic triad functions as a background foil, illustrating the extension, deformation, dilatation and re-constellation of these paradigmatic cornerstones in the process of making modernity 'post-modern'.

Conclusions Three authors, treated in a cursory fashion, have been chosen as representatives of narrative strategies and tendencies, virulent in postmodernist 19 Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (New York: Random House, 1968). 20 Robert Coover, Gerald 's Party (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 21 Robert Coover, John 's Wife (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 22 Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid (New York: Grove Press, 1982).

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fictions. Their conceptions of aesthetic composition have been singled out as symptomatic forms of paradigmatic dislocations within the triadic matrix of system, subject, and rationality. Between these tripods postmodernist varieties of aesthetic creation - among them: forms of fictional writing - may be appropriately positioned. As a rule, many of the so called 'idiosyncrasies' of postmodernist world-making may be appropriately located in this paradigmatic pattern, reducing the conceptual meaning of a notion like 'postmodernism' to a minimum, at least in the terrains of 'postmodernist fictions'. Aside from these cases, where writers indulge in paradigmatic rearrangements of basic elements, there are authors who still prefer to write in a classical or modernist style. Looking for 'realism' or 'psychologism' and keeping a clear distance from any intention to dilate the paradigmatic triad of modernity into a risky construction, their ways of writing are not to be identified with any form of paradigmatic instability. This 'compositional conservatism', running parallel to 'postmodernist experimentalism', raises, as has always been adequately pointed out, additional difficulties in all discussions about postmodernist writing. But as has been underlined in the introductory tour de force from antiquity to postmodernism, this essay's intention was not to find any radically new definition of 'post-modernity'. The idea was, to relocate materials, drifting under the rubrics of 'post-modern', within the territory of theoretical and practical familiarity, responsible for European thinking and worldmaking since the beginning of modern times. Thus, the heuristic core of this essay consists of three basic statements: Firstly, all forms of modernity are pre-structured by an underlying paradigmatic matrix made of three (increasingly: oppositional) elements: system, subject, rationality. In the course of modernity's development, they undergo a process of differentiation and contrast. Secondly, within late phases of the development, modern times register a disruption of this rather stable triadic pattern, leading to extreme (often: experimental) forms of re-configuring this triptych under the rubric of 'postmodernism', which is, at last, no 'post'-modern development at all, but a highly symptomatic process within modernity as such. Thirdly, these late-modern processes are no longer unitary. Looking at the whole of contemporary culture and, above all, literature, they appear and reappear at different times, in different places, even affecting some authors only as passing phenomena. Modernity and modernism, therefore, emerge as central fields of occidental worldmaking with persisting relevance, wherein all affiliated 'post-'forms have to be relocated.

PETER PAUL SCHNIERER

Modernist at Best: Poeticity and Tradition in Hyperpoetry

1

There are still some fields of enquiry, even in the humanities, that yield a rather low word count for 'postmodernism'. Aztec studies, to select just one topical example, seem to be able to do without the concept altogether.1 Even within English literary studies, there are still quiet backwaters: research into medieval drama continues in much the same way it has done for decades; changing assumptions about the straightforwardness or otherwise of texts continue to add to the knowledge available to scholars but do not systemically invalidate former findings.2 This is merely anecdotal evidence, but it might be augmented by any number of examples, and it points towards two related observations that are not surprising but not self-evident either: (1) 'Postmodernism' even today is still largely associated with a subject as well as a method: postmodern readings require postmodern texts. No matter what one's definition of 'text' is: there simply was nothing of the sort in fifteenthcentury Tenochtitlan or York - any future attempt to introduce the concept retrospectively will have to rely on strategies of metaphorization. (2) The more contemporary and the less traditional a field of study can claim to be the more 'postmodernist' the discourse we can expect. Thus the contributors to this volume all treat recent cultural phenomena, and thus hypertext research, dealing as it does with a corpus of new texts, a new form of electronic presentation and an uncommon, some even say revolutionary form of textuality, can fairly claim to be the foremost field in literary studies today where anything beyond postmodernism may be located. The purpose of this essay is to adduce further arguments to reinforce that claim, and simultaneously to attempt a refutation. My contention is, to put it

1

2

The source, or rather non-source, for this layman's claim: The articles, monographs, lectures and other scholarly materials generated by or made available through the British Royal Academy's landmark exhibition (Aztecs, Burlington House, London, Spring 2003). Cf. the introduction to and subsequent practice in Simon Trussler, The Cambridge Illustrated History ofBritish Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 22000).

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briefly and proleptically, that hyperpoetry in all its forms, actual as well as potential, human-made, human-assisted or even completely computer-generated, can best be described as a modernist genre. Attempts to use the category of postmodernism are bound to overlook the continuing and necessary dominance of poeticity over the less specific concept of textuality. In other words: beyond postmodernism, in this new, bewildering and fluid field, is before postmodernism.

2 There is a curious discrepancy between the ubiquity of the term and its critical appreciation: an internet search for 'hyperpoetry' yields some 500 results, 'cyberpoetry' another 1,220; a search in some of the most up-to-date critical studies of hypertexts draws a blank.3 Jane Yellowlees Douglas implicitly limits her survey to narrative texts;4 Nina Hautzinger, in an otherwise useful preliminary work, leaves out any discussion of the genre,5 and Marjorie PerlofFs indispensable study of experimental, concrete and even Oulipist writing appeared too early to take any account of computer-enabled poetry.6 One of the consequences of this lacuna can indeed be described as postmodern: since scholars do not (yet) offer a debate, let alone the monoglossic voice of authority, the term 'hyperpoetry' has received various and frequently incompatible explications by the authors themselves. These explications include 'poetry found on the internet', which is probably the most common and at the same time least useful definition since it encompasses traditional poetry stored in electronic repositories and made accessible on-line. Very little is gained from introducing a new term for such texts at all. Seamus Heaney's poems do not acquire a new dimension simply because they can be read on a screen, and even downloadable sound files do not significantly advance on a reading recorded conventionally. (A point might be made about live audio feeds of poets reading their work in a chatroom environment, for such events combine the physical disembodiment of the radio show with the dialogicity of a real world reading; the implications for the relationship between premeditated, improvised, spoken, written, real and virtual texts are attractive.)

3

4 5 6

There is no on-line one-stop site for hyperpoetry; materials are scattered and as ephemeral as the rest of the net. One fairly stable site and at the same time the home of the most reputable hypertext publisher is . "Penetration" by Robert Kendall, available in the Reading Room there, is a fine example of what I am trying to show; it also is a moving poem. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books - Or Books Without End? Reading Interactive Narratives (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000). Nina Hautzinger, Vom Buch zum Internet? Eine Analyse der Auswirkungen hypertextueller Strukturen auf Text und Literatur (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1999). Maijorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991).

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If poetry stored and retrieved electronically marks one end of the definitory spectrum, Eduardo Kac's near-equation of hyperpoetry with unique and tangible artefacts marks the other. Kac's poetological writings mostly deal with his own work as a poet in a form of art he calls holopoetry; poems as physical artefacts that literally need to be seen, even touched, to be understood. Kac writes texts that often are as short as two words, three-dimensionally made to change into each other as the viewer/reader moves the object that renders these 'poems' visible.7 Most writers' definitions, either explicitly or on the evidence of what they choose to call 'hyperpoetry', move well away from both these extremes. Following that broad middle path, I suggest a provisional definition that aims at minimum controversy and begins with the simple: hyperpoetry is poetry that has hypertextual features. Let me take the subdefinition of poetry for granted for a moment and concentrate on hypertexts. Such texts are - initially - best thought of as unsorted repositories: they receive their order, their sequence only in the act of reading, in the "thirdspace" Doris Teske speaks of elsewhere in this volume, and that order is different for each reader. One can do this in tangible media. Those poetry magnets for the fridge can be thought of as crude and unauthored hyperpoems; from a finite number of items 'lexias' is the preferred term among hypertext critics - an infinite number of poems can be assembled. (Another sideline to ignore: how does this differ from the relationship between the lexicon and literature of any other type?) Protohyperpoems with more cachet in literary circles are those generated by Tristan Tzara and later epigones, poems cut up into a collection of snippets which the performer/reader then reassembles into a new text. A better example still is Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes (1961), ten sonnets on ten pages with a cut after each line of each poem so that one can reconfigure the text 10 to the power of fourteen times - if one has a few million years to spare, that is. Queneau's text exhibits a typical hypertext paradox: all of it is incontrovertibly written by him, yet neither he nor anybody else could or can ever read all of it. Of course, 'all of it' is used in two different senses here: 'all of the constituent parts' and 'all of the possible combinations', but the fact remains that almost all Queneau poems read by anybody will never have been read before by anybody, including Queneau himself. Naturally, there is a great deal of randomness involved in such printed approximations; that is why thinking of hypertexts as unsorted repositories is of initial, heuristic value only, and why the real site of hypertextual and hyperpoetical authorship and readership (there is often little difference) is the 7

Eduardo Kac, "Holopoetry, Hypertext, Hyperpoetry", (20.2.2003). Cf. also Eduardo Kac, "Holopoetry and Beyond", (20.2.2003).

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computer, both as internet terminal and as individual reading machine. Literary hypertexts on computers typically are not merely a collection of fragments, but contain authored branchings where readers can choose their reading path. Upon repeated readings, hypertexts may present sequences of different length, composition, and content. They are not completely random even then, however; a poetics of hypertexts with any claim to authoritativeness does not exist yet, but it is possible, and it will include some of the following elements: Hypertexts, including hyperpoems, usually provide a point of beginning. This may sound trivial, but is not a technical requirement: there is no page one, and therefore an identified starting point is already the result of an authorial decision. Hypertexts may be closed (and thus approximate a 'work') or open (and thus contain links to other texts of different provenance). This tendency is most prominent in on-line narratives. Hyperpoetry rarely makes use of such dislimitation. Even a closed hypertext, however, does not have to have limits visible to the reader. Readers new to hypertext are usually disturbed by texts whose size cannot be established. Invisible textual boundaries initially work in much the same way as non-existent ones, even though they do delimit the reading process eventually. Hypertexts may consist exclusively of written material, they may be illustrated, and they may even contain components from other media such as sounds, animations, or film. Hyperpoetry has consistently been less varied and experimental than hyperfiction, but more so than hyperdrama, which is usually confined to convoluted scripts. Hypertexts can be dynamized by their authors: such strategies include conditions ('B can only be read once A has been read'), self-destroying texts ('B cancels itself once A has been read') and authorized or aleatory changes in texts upon a second reading within the same session. For obvious reasons, such dynamics are only relevant for the recipient if he or she notices them, and that limits their use in large, opaque works that may not even be read within an appreciably short time. Since hyperpoetry shares a tendency towards shorter forms with 'normal' poetry, dynamized hyperpoems can more easily be recognized and aesthetically judged as such. Finally, hypertexts easily accommodate multiple authorship and may even invite the reader to add to the text; this is a feature that hyperpoetry rarely exhibits, though. I am aware of the controversy this statement may cause; it rests on a definition of hypertext that extends choices to any reader new to the poem. If one is prepared to grant these choices to the first reader of a newly authored work only, and again to the first reader of work newly so modified, multiple authorships become easily possible. (I cannot put it clearer than that without adding a whole new essay, something hypertext readily allows but print does not. A look at - and collaboration in - Peter Christian's Spoonbill Generator, available at www.spoonbill.org, will clarify matters.)

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What I have said so far applies to literary hypertexts no matter what their genre affiliation can be made out to be. I have written elsewhere about the specificities of both hyperdrama and hyperfiction,8 and there are some equivalent particulars of hyperpoetry that need to be added here. These include a tendency towards the cycle or the collection of poems. One reason for this has to do with the habitat of most hyperpoetry, the internet: poetry sites are more easily accessed than individual poems, and therefore poets tend to cluster shorter texts into larger, more noticeable groups. For the same reason, of course, critics - including myself - may simply notice larger works more readily. The prevalence of poetry collections may also partly be explained by a lack of editorial control; the rigid limitations that often result in the publication of a single poem at a time, in a little magazine or a literary weekly, simply do not exist in the pages of the net. Finally, and most importantly, the very principle of generative openness and multiplicity inherent in hypeipoetiy encourages a resistance to closure, topically and structurally as well as numerically. On-line hyperfictions and collaborative drama scripts exhibit a similar reluctance - a reluctance that sometimes results in growth but more often still merely in etiolation. A second feature of hyperpoetry that serves to distinguish it from other hypertextual genres is its emphasis on typographical design. Narrative hypertexts occasionally use such devices, too; certainly more often than printed narratives do, yet hyperpoetry uses design systematically, thus of course employing strategies established in printed poetry. Such strategies may or may not be semanticized in themselves; they always signal, however, that the text is not to be understood as prose. This is the more important because hyperpoetry tends to consist of unrhymed free verse, presented as collage and composed of fragments rather than being classically symmetrical.

3 One of the standard claims of hypertext criticism is that hypertexts constitute a new type of text: not just a new genre, but actually a radically different type of textuality that requires equally different and unconventional critical approaches approaches, one might add, which are routinely demanded but hardly ever offered. The fact that hypertextual reading strategies are already required to consult a dictionary or that any annotated book can be considered a (para)hypertext receives regular acknowledgment but little serious consideration in a time of technological enthusiasm. 8

Peter Paul Schnierer, "Graphic 'Novels', Cyber 'Fiction', Multiform 'Stories' - Virtual Theatre and the Limits of Genre" in Bernhard Reitz, Sigrid Rieuwerts (eds.), Anglisteniag 1999: Proceedings (Trier: wvt, 2000), 535-547; Peter Paul Schnierer, "Hyperdrama: Prototypes, Current Practice, Problems" in Bernhard Reitz, Heiko Stahl (eds.), What Revels are in Hand? Assessments of Contemporary Drama in English in Honour of Wolfgang Lippke (Trier wvt, 2001), 139-152.

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It is difficult to argue against this optimism, if that is what it is: hypertexts do offer an unaccustomed reading experience, and their reliance on sophisticated machines and programming routines for even a simple, single, private reception can endow that reception with the aura of a cultural epiphany. Typically, readers react to hypertexts, are either delighted or annoyed: both amateurs and professional critics, upon their first exposure to such texts, tend to pass judgment irrespective of the merit of the individual text encountered. Such behaviour would seem puzzling, to say the least, in somebody's first reading of, say, a sestina or an inscription in sandstone. Clearly, there is something excitingly new in hypertexts that goes beyond the form they appear in or the medium they use. On their own, then, hypertexts already invite new theories and new practices. Yet there is an even more tempting reason for critics to use the terminologies of postmodernism: hypertexts can be - and often are designed to be - impalpable, unstable, amorphous, self-perpetuating, self-effacing: Such notions are hardly novel to contemporary literary theory, but here, as in so many other cases, hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal reification or embodiment of a principle that had seemed particularly abstract and difficult when read from the vantage point of print.9

Landow, from a point of view broadly sympathetic to postmodern and particularly Derridean poststructuralist literary theory, approves of this embodiment; much of his excellent book elaborates the point he makes here. But this "convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology", as Landow's subtitle has it, is really only a convergence of metaphors. It is neat, but possesses neither explanatory power nor discriminatory potential. And it fails to address what one might call the sympathetic fallacy: why should one have a theory that rests upon assumptions one equally makes about texts in the first place? Do unstable texts really require a theory that rests upon a notion of ineluctable instability, or is it not rather imperative upon the theorist to use, as far as at all possible, a theory based on an idea of stability? This is not a plea for stability itself, nor for any other of the certainties to which postmodern thinking has said farewell, but rather for a procedure that progresses cautiously. If we are to retain due scholarly process, literary criticism, like any other discipline, needs to define and control its parameters. Changing multiple variables simultaneously is never a good idea. Since the phenomenon we are faced with is new, we must not make the mistake of immediately requiring new or contemporaneous forms of criticism. In fact, we need to test conventional approaches first. Only when these fail can we legitimately empower unconventional ones or develop new theories.

9

George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 21997), 65.

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4 Epiphany subsides once experience sets in. The more hyperpoetry (and indeed hypertexts in general) are perceived as conventional objects of reception and study the more the medium will become transparent. The new or inexperienced readers who react strongly to hypertexts at the same time fail to react adequately to them: the fascination with the medium functions as a powerful Verfremdungseffekt, to the point where intense reading can take place while there is little recall afterwards of what the text was about. This is itself worthy of inclusion in a canon of postmodern reading experiences, but the effect soon wears off. Familiar textual patterns reveal themselves while medial patterns become familiar. This may also account for the new note of sobriety that dominates writing on hypertexts in recent years. It is once again possible to speak of genres. When Alastair Fowler set out to rescue the term for literary criticism, he did so from a sense of belatedness, even quixoteiy.10 Hypertext writers and "wreaders", either secure in the knowledge that they do something new or simply not interested in arguments they did not start, reclaim the broad genre designation as well as those of specific poetic forms, even if their interpretation of these forms is ahistorical. This deserves a separate enquiry; for now, it is enough to state that hyperpoetry, holopoetry, collaborative on-line verse projects and poetry generators all require such explicit genre affiliation to identify themselves. This identification goes well beyond the importation of a mere label. Hyperpoetry is not a new category sui generis, but rather - and merely - a type of poetry. Most of its features can be found in printed poems; even if we ignore the aleatory prototypes referred to earlier, we can identify somewhere in experimental and typographically adventurous twentieth-century writing almost everything that hyperpoetry does. Most of the time, we do not even have to go to sophisticated metapoetry to draw the connections: like 'normal' poetry, hyperpoetry relies strongly on repetition and variation, on additional structures to make itself strange and new. This newness, however, is of a different kind than the one suggested by the new medium: it is the newness that distinguishes poetry from the prosaic, and its foil is the prosaic in the new medium. Hyperpoetry seeks to set itself apart not from 'old' poetry, but from hyperprose. Between these new modes (the popular avoidance term for 'genre' is apposite here, I believe) the dynamics are the same as always. The list of distinguishing features could be expanded: like poetry in print, hyperpoetry puts the emphasis on image rather than plot, accepts absence of linearity readily, exhibits a tendency towards short and therefore memorable texts,

10 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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uses additional structuring devices such as rhyme, metre, heightened rhetoricity, relies on repetition and variation, etc. Such a list does not amount to a precise definition of poetry (which is impossible anyway), but is acceptable, I hope, in view of the larger concerns of this paper. That much seems to be certain, however: hyperpoetry's closest relative in conventional poetry is not Dadaist, oulipistic11 or similarly aleatory work, but oral poetry. Folk songs, ballads, nursery rhymes, dub poetry, rap all create versions that may differ in appearance and yet retain a recognizable similarity, even identity. They combine the fixed with the optional, whether in the differing ballads with the same title or in the improvisational sections of a "hip hop lyrical robot".12 The main achievement of hyperpoetry is the speed with which it generates these new versions. Whereas the evolution of a closely related body of poetical texts took centuries in oral transmission and modification, hyperpoetry yields new versions upon each new reading. But the possibility, even necessity of these versions of a given hyperpoem is the important thing: together they form an evolving textual cluster that is the document of an electronic orality. Therefore, and this is an argument against postmodern requirements on the part of the scholar, the critical tools used in analyzing and evaluating oral forms of poetry can and must be made operational for hyperpoetry. I cannot develop this demand much further here; there will certainly have to be a reappraisal of formalist approaches to 'simple forms' 13 and the relationship between such forms and their concretizations. One must not push this line of enquiry beyond the limits of common sense, though: the homology of hyperpoetry with oral poetry does not imply a similarity in preoccupations, let alone an identity of ideology. The traditional preoccupations of poetry devised by anonymous individuals and refined through successive generations of bards are almost nowhere in evidence. Hyperpoetry, as I said before, does not as a rule exhibit the tendency towards plot that oral forms so frequently show. There is a corresponding lack of endings: for structural as well as ideological reasons, hyperpoetry resists closure. There are few solutions, few redemptions and not many attempts at tragedy either. Ideologically, in other words, there is very little of the 19th century in the bulk of hyperpoems available today, and this undisputed distance towards the conventional Victorian syndrome has played its part in convincing critics that no further analysis is necessary before the comfortable (and mostly, as I indicated, merely implicit) inclusion in the postmodern canon of hypertextual works in toto. But there is a terrain between Victorianism and postmodernism, an area, one might add, that is inhabited by living poets still: modernist poetry, poetry that 11 Warren F. Motte Jr. (tr., ed.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 1986). 12 UB 40, "Hip Hop Lyrical Robot", Baggariddim. 1988. 13 Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen (Tübingen: Niemeyer,61982).

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remains rooted in a sense of palpability, even responsibility, but is aware of the precariousness of its own project and turns this very awareness into poetry. Hyperpoetry, in my reading experience, rarely stresses holistic experience, flow, the glittering simulacrum. It rather emphasizes the fragmentary, the rupture, the occult. Quite unlike the playfulness, joyful or not, that we have come to associate with literary postmodernism, hyperpoetry conveys a seriousness of purpose that is similarly evident in much of hyperfiction, particularly if published commercially, away from the internet. Such seriousness may not be a good thing; apart from making difficult reading experiences even more difficult, it is a reflection of the intellectual agenda of its authors, many of whom are professional literary critics. But whether such a high-brow approach is sensible or not, the fact remains that it still contributes to the line of development I am trying to sketch here: hyperpoetry is an essentially modernist genre. In fact, one might just as easily rephrase Landow's statement in modernist terms, with less recourse to metaphorical sleight of hand: the rupture of sequentiality, the oscillating points of view, the simultaneity of perspectives that are hallmarks of modernist texts and movements had to be achieved in a medium that is inherently inimical to concurrence in any of its forms: Eliot's speaker may claim, towards the end of the Waste Land, that all he had to offer were "these fragments [...] shored against my ruins", but the idea of littoral rubble piled up randomly, "a heap of broken images", is belied by the clean sequence of a poem that has beginning, middle and ending. Such texts ought to have been printed as palimpsests, written as hypertexts, one might feel - but that would not impinge upon their modernity at all, it would not turn them into postmodern poems, let alone into anything beyond that. The more fragmentary the surface, the more necessary the authoritative bedrock. Hypertexts, and hyperpoems in particular, do machinally what modernist poetry failed to achieve: the dissolution of coherence, uniformity and single vision while retaining the author, camouflaged at best, but still in control. In doing so, they destabilize the text and affirm its creator: in other words, they bring about not the death of the author, but his re-definition as master of textual revels. In order to overcome this dilemma, hyperpoetry, fragmentary by medial necessity, would have to do away with an author altogether, and in fact, entirely computergenerated randomizations are perfectly feasible already. But far from bringing forth truly postmodern texts at last, such randomizers merely mechanize Tristan Tzara's hat. Electronic Dadaism has its charms; but it is as trapped in modernist categories as any more structured form from which it might seek to escape.14

14 My thanks are due to Sam Featherston, Svenja Kuhfuß and Andrea Lutz for advice, and to Elke Hiltner for formatting.

DORIS TESKE

Beyond Postmodernist Thirdspace? - The Internet in a Post-Postmodern World 1. Introduction In the discussion about postmodernity and its alleged decline a look at the current situation of the new information and communication technologies seems particularly illuminating. After all, notions of postmodernity have been closely related to perhaps the most important revolution of the twentieth century, the changes in the media and their structures of ownership and participation.1 Especially the Internet with its decentred form and its antihierarchic use in e-mail communication, chat-room communities, Internet Relay Chat Channels (IRCs), Usenet Newsgroups, and the interactive virtual game worlds of the Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs and the MOOs (MUDs object oriented) was perceived as the epitome of postcapitalist reality, creating specifically postmodern versions of identity and community. From the beginning of its non-military history, the Internet has been celebrated as the postmodern realisation of an intelligent grass-roots democracy in a virtual 'Thirdspace' independent of state and market authorities. It remains to be seen whether this evaluation can be upheld in the light of recent developments.

2. Postmodern Spatialities and Cyberspace One of the defining factors of postmodernism and postmodern theory has been a new approach to spatial structures. Parallel to the shedding of the grand narratives, a deconstruction of spatial hierarchies seems to be at the heart of the postmodern revolution. The hierarchies of First and Third world, of metropolis and province, of city centre and suburb, which had defined the 19th and most of the 20th century, have been challenged due to recent developments in industry, economy, and demography. These changes have become all the more apparent, as social and economic theories focused on the

1

Stuart Hall, "The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our Time" in Kenneth Thompson (ed.), Media and Cultural Regulation (London: Sage, 1997), 207-226.

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re-interpretation of formerly fixed concepts such as work, the public space, or the city, discarding essentialist definitions in favour of relational, differential, and contextual ones. Cyberspace can be read as turning these theories into reality, as the created and virtual space has come to materialise the hypothetical constructs of many theories of postmodernity.2 In the space of its virtual communities, location and distance have become irrelevant so that questions of centre and margin seem obsolete.3 In initial idealistic views of the Internet, the public space of the virtual world seemed to be accessible to all, as traditional channels of distribution were circumvented. At the same time, as postmodern theories conflated the distinctions between the real and the imaginary, the real and the represented, or the descriptive and the metaphorical, former notions of space had to be rethought. All spatial concepts were understood to include a relational and metaphoric aspect and to function in a wider political context. Henri Lefebvre promoted a trialectics of space, in which no space exists without its perceptional and conceptual reading, Michel Foucault developed a notion of heterotopia, finding real and metaphorical/imagined space merged in places such as the cinema or the garden.4 The postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha used the term Thirdspace in order to define a discursive position between and beyond the Industrial and the Developing Worlds, which can be rated as at the same time cultural critique and Utopian ideal of full emancipation.5 This idea of the Third has partly replaced binary concepts of Alterity, introducing the notion of a metaphorical space of writing and cultural discourse independent of real-life structures. While concepts of 'the Other' and Othering' in spite of their criticism tend to reinforce binary oppositions, 'the Third' and 'Thirding' try to overcome this dualism. As a Utopian concept, Thirdspace always interacts with a primary and a secondary space, a space which is conceived as the real, unaltered or 'natural' one and the space which is constructed as an alternative to the first, often reduced by the first place into a negative construction, a place without original features. Primary space could perhaps be defined by the political powers that be, while secondary spaces are the established spaces of protest and counterculture. Thirdspace should then at the same time resist this binary division into two opposing spaces and at the same time accommodate it. Especially the cultural critic bell hooks emphasises the importance of the margin as a space in which binary notions of ruler and ruled, or normal and

2 3 4 5

See Douglas Kellner (1988), "Postmodernism as social theory", in: Theory, Culture, and Society 5: 239-269. See Rob Shields (ed.), Cultures of the Internet. Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, (London: Sage, 1996) Michel Foucault, "Andere Räume" in Karlheinz Barck et al., Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer neuen Ästhetik (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 34-46. Homi Bhabha, The Locaction of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

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exotic can be exploded. The central notion for hooks is the community of diverse members and the identification with the other and its many forms.6 The social geographer Edward Soja draws on these concepts of 'spaces beyond' or Thirdspaces, reading this notion in the material reality and imaginary concept of Los Angeles.7 Just as these spaces incorporate their own narration, Thirdspace would be described as at the same time material and metaphorical. In his interpretation of urban space, physical space draws on and redefines spatial and cultural notions. In the urban context of Los Angeles, Soja sees Thirdspace in the presentation of the city in its centre, in the new buildings and their own interpretation of urban community, and also in the neither urban nor rural 'exopolis', e. g. the area of Orange County which functions as cityspace without possessing its basic infrastructure. Edward Soja furthermore shows Thirdspace to function in the virtual space of an exhibition on urbanity and its follow-up, an urban computer network exchange, in which various participants create a mutual vision of a certain city area. They are in a way creating a new 'agora', a public space in which the members of society define and redefine themselves as an independent political body. This is all the more clear when looking at other Internet examples, which as virtual places define a new reality. The cyberspace created shows itself to be a mirror of perceived reality, but it also develops its own identity. Thus, Thirdspace and cyberspace can be perceived as being genuinely interrelated. a. Between Real and Thirdspace A preliminary, material definition of postmodernity is most often based on the emergence of a post-industrial economy and society. From relocating in greenfield sites outside the major cities, the new information and high-tech industries have moved on towards outsourcing and teleworking, making the choice between the inner-city site and the purpose-built plant rather less important. The most impressive example for these changes is the demise of the City of London's Fleet Street. This traditional centre of journalism and the print trade has virtually disappeared in favour of automated production in the London Docklands and outside London. Instead of large offices at the centre of the city, virtual work sites have come into existence, in which teleworkers or workers in small dispersed back-offices can function in a closely-knit virtual work context without commuting to the centre of London. Parallel to the changes in the economic system, the demographic structure has changed dramatically. While city centres and rural areas have become largely depopulated spaces of entertainment and tourism, the majority of people live in a peripheral interzone neither urban nor rural. Most writers focus

6 7

bell hooks, Yearning. Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990). Edward Soja, Thirdspace (London: Blackwell, 1996).

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on the development of the cities in order to describe these changes. Manuel Castells 8 among others isolates several trends: •

The rise of global cities, of a global system of these and of minor city networks. This new global structure tends to distance the major market forces within the individual cities (be they London or Mexico City), from their immediate hinterland. As the focus within the city is on keeping pace with its global competitors, certain functions the city centre fulfilled for the hinterland are neglected and have to be provided by an interzone between the urban and the rural.

•

Globalisation is related to the loss of clear boundaries between the urban and the non-urban (the rural or suburban). In contrast to the traditional intra-urban network (and hierarchy) of trade, transport, and communication, the urban and metropolitan functions tend to become fragmented, diffused and multi-centred in conglomerations which are dispersed over a wider region.

•

The concept of the inner city as performing local identity, however, is often maintained for the city centres, as globalisation and mobility also results in a competition of locations. Minor advantages can be achieved by marketing a distinctive local identity.9 This identity incites elites to settle in highly symbolic pockets of the inner cities (the so-called gentrification is a feature connected with this activity) and makes certain city areas especially interesting for the increasing city tourism.

These trends all support Soja's reading of Thirdspace into urban material space. Thirdspace still remains a metaphorical concept, which however converges on the material when concerned with the spatial, social and economic reality taking shape on the Internet. b. Cyberspace as Thirdspace The historiography of the private, non-military use of the Internet has for long developed its fixed formulas. One can distinguish canonical structures of narrative or narrative myths shaping a straight line of development from the first non-military use of ARPAnet communication channels for electronic distribution lists, via the Bulletin Boards, Intranets, and Internet to the World Wide Web (or the 'Web'). Another line of narration leads from the idea of the binary code and the bit to the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol (1978), and html hyper-language (1989/1992). A third and fourth line trace the history from the first computational inventions to the personal computer (around 1982), or from computing languages such as FORTRAN and BASIC to LINUX. 10 In all these narratives, individual inventors, scientists, and visionaries are celebrated for pushing the frontiers of human possibilities

8 9

Manuel Castells, The Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 10 See Mike Featherstone, Roger Burrows (eds.), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk. Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 1995).

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further. Exemplary for this idea of the free genius is Microsoft's founder Bill Gates, who after being celebrated as one of the demigods of the new media now is denounced as the fiend of a free community. The most important matrix of describing the new technologies, however, is Utopian: the interactive spaces of Bulletin Boards, Chat Areas, MUDs and MOOs, Internet, and World Wide Web are described as alternative spaces in which the individual participants can develop a community which is not defined by market laws, rugged individualism and hierarchical structures. This euphoria has found its most prominent expression in Howard Rheingold's description of the "WELL", a virtual community which - growing out of the California experience of communal alternatives and progressive neighbourhoods as well as radical thinking - centred on the ideals of individual freedom and grass-roots democracy." As late as in 2000, Rheingold stressed this ideal of a civic space in which important questions concerning family life, individual development, the community, its meaning, its values and its position in the context of global and national developments could be discussed - disregarding questions of proximity or distance. Rheingold defines virtual communities as centring around affinities or shared values, as inviting many-to-many, text-based communication and connecting people generally unknown to each other in the physical world. He sees the strength of virtual communities in their ability to organise themselves, as people with shared concerns adhere to self-created rules forming a new social infrastructure. Similar to Rheingold, but starting from a very different point of departure, Sherry Turkle developed ideas of new forms of identity and civic membership in relation to the MUDs (which can be described as mainly text-based computer versions of interactive role games coming into existence from 1991 onwards) and MOOs (later forms of MUDs which focus less on the storyline of an adventure game and more on the communicative interaction between the players).12 In Turkle's view, these virtual spaces add new possibilities to existing forms of identity and interaction. In the new media the individual user can develop many diverse aspects of his or her personality in different writing contexts, ascribing to him- or herself a different gender, race, age, or other central aspect of character. Thus, the multiplicity and fragmentation of the decentred self a.k.a. postmodern subject can be explored by being performed in the new medium. Turkle lists cases in which a first-year student reduced to campus life, a handicapped person unable to leave home, or a housewife or a

11 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World (London: Minerva, 1993). See also Manfred Faßler, Wulf R. Halbach (eds.), Cyberspace. Gemeinschaften, Virtuelle Kolonien, Öffentlichkeiten (München: Fink, 1994). 12 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995).

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person suffering from agoraphobia can overcome their real-life problems by sharing a new, if virtual common space of freedom. Both Rheingold and Turkle perceive the new spaces of computer-related interaction as forms of Thirdspace, as places where alternative forms of society and social interaction can be developed and tried. In their virtual reality, they can ignore some of the divisive factors of real life, discarding ideas of class and power and featuring communitarian forms of life. They are also doing away with reductions leading to cultural binaries. In contrast to real life hierarchies, centred discourses, and a bias towards positions placed at the centre of identity, the virtual Thirdspace is levelled out, polycentric, multilingual, fragmented, and dispersed. Belonging to one community does not imply the rejection of other aspects of the self which can be explored and lived out in other places within the Internet.13 c. The Utopianism of an Alternative Thirdspace In both Turkle's and Rheingold's views, the Internet Thirdspace could be said to be a reincarnation of the ideal of agora, as it shows the Utopian notion of free citizenship. However, agora also means the central market place, and current manifestations of Thirdspace show this to be emerging.14 Telepolis, a net magazine with Heise Verlag which is at the same time an information sphere open to everyone, shows this double-sidedness of agora on the literary market.15 Turkle and Rheingold celebrate a development which never turned into the full and only reality of Internet and cyberspace. Rheingold partly admits to being rather unconcerned about the commercial side of the Internet, e. g. ignoring the commercial background related with the WELL. Turkle has focused on the negative side-effects of cyberspace such as unqualified psychological advice in the Web having disastrous effects on the real patients behind the virtual personas, but she is not concerned with the commercial use of these practices. What is left out of their accounts and of many other histories of the New Media is the close connection of the commercial (and military) sector with the research necessary for the development of the Internet. This cooperation was fundamental for the creation and the improvement of the material basis (the hardware as well as the software) behind the computer screen, but it also brought basic problems to the Internet. Market considerations play an important role in the definition of the information highway and its users, the

13 See Steven G. Jones (ed.), Cybersociety. Computer-mediated Communication and Community (London: Sage, 1995). 14 Michael Ostwald, "Virtual Urban Futures" in David Bell, Barbara M. Kennedy (eds.), The Cyberculture Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 658-675, 664ff. 15 Telepolis: Magazin der Netzkultur, (20.5.2003).

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commercial competition around the choice of programming languages or Internet protocol languages or the implication of property rules in cyberspace. In its recent changes, the computer-mediated communication seems to show just another trait typical of postmodern culture - commercial considerations and values are accepted or even embraced. After sponsorship logos have been in existence for some time, websites and chat portals now regularly feature ads in their set-up, in banners or in pop-up menus. Popular and commercial features and aggressive marketing techniques are becoming more and more accepted by an ever growing percentage of users who themselves consume via and on the Internet. 16 In contrast to its self-description as a community defined by an exclusive scientific and technical elite with its emphasis of sharing knowledge, its concern with Netiquette and its welldefined codes of scientific genres, of parody and banter, and of personal interaction, computer-mediated communication today shows itself as a commercial space. It is defined by the ownership of domains, pages, their content, and their software, it is compartmentalised by portals which sometimes reduce users to the web pages of one provider, and it cannot exclude inherent screening of net activities of potential customers. For reasons of copyright, more and more parts of the formerly common ground of the net are being closed off for and from the uninitiated. Ownership translates into power, as the competition over domain names shows. Power surely has always been existent in cyberspace, as e. g. the wizards and gods of the MUDs and MOOs as well as the administrators of chat groups wield real power in defining participation. However, these mechanisms of power worked in a self-defined non-commercial context with the direct approval of all the users. Today, with the Web users amounting to a considerable percentage of the populations of the rich industrial nations, many firms find it profitable to consider the Web as a market, in which they therefore stake a claim. In this situation, even the wizards' standards imposed on the use of various parts of the Internet translate into power and eventually into market shares. One of the growing areas on the Internet are Cybermarkets and Cybermalls, offering online auctions as well as traditional catalogue shopping. The growth of the Internet into the World Wide Web has alerted various mechanisms of control. These are economically motivated, such as AOL-Time Warner's copyright actions against private Harry Potter web-pages. Even more influential are the mechanisms by national governments to influence the Web. In the time after the WTC-shock, the use of the Internet as a public space, e. g. for demonstrations against globalisation, or against America's warfare on Arab

16 See Michael Barry, "Virtual Geography", Futures 29 (1997), 337-352 and Robert M. Kitchin, "Towards geographies of cyberspace", Progress in Human Geography 22 (1998), 385-406.

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states, have been closely monitored, with the fear of computer viruses threatening national security coming close to the real life virus and bacteria scares. National administrations are screening the Web for criminal offences, whether they are preparing cases against paedophilia or introducing censorship against outspoken criticism of the political leadership or the religious fundaments of the respective societies. Other governments have even closed the Internet for private users, only allowing access via a national proxy to institutions which are screened.17 At the beginning of the new Millennium, the Internet thus looks more divided than ever. Its anarcho-libertarian myth being shattered, the impact of commercialisation and state control is making itself felt.

3. Writings on the NET - Postmodern Form, Shareware, and Market Concerns If we rate the Internet as the embodiment of postmodernity, then the different forms of writing about the Internet, their use of the Internet as their topic, and their use of the Internet as the medium of literature should tell us something about postmodernity, just as much as their recent development and changes hint at a time after and beyond the postmodern. As the examples of Rheingold and Turkle illustrate, the Internet has always been described and translated into texts in order to analyse its meaning for and impact on society. Internet fiction continues this tradition, but it has slightly different objectives. Writing on a postmodern theme can be expected not only to include questions of postmodernity, but also to incorporate certain issues rampant in the wider field of postmodernist fiction.18 Although there is no conclusive definition of a universal postmodernist poetics capable of synthesising the many different strands of postmodernist theory and writing, several features can be isolated as repeating throughout the many forms of writing. Peter Zima, who himself sees postmodernism and postmodernity as multi-faceted and plurivocal and rejects simplifying formulas such as Hassan's famous list of modern and postmodern binaries, still renders a few collective features.19 As the basis of most postmodernist writing, he identifies an indifference to and equivalency of various contradicting positions. The ideas of ultimate truths or of a final objective in actions and works are rejected in favour of the ludic, 17 Florian Rötzer, Megamaschine Wissen. Vision: Überleben im Netz (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1999). 18 In the following, I will distinguish between 'postmodern' and 'postmodernity' as relating to the social developments, while 'postmodernist' and 'postmodernism' refer to the artistic reaction to modernist art and the condition of postmodernity. 19 Peter Zima, Moderne/Postmoderne: Gesellschaft, Philosophie, Literatur (Tübingen, Basel: Francke, 1997).

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which includes a focus on artistry in production and on fun and desire as the main attitudes of reader and writer towards literature. The constructedness of the piece of fiction is laid open, as the various tiers of production are levelled out and as the writer makes conscious use of popular and conventional forms of narrative. The illusion of the text is broken, as the narrator indulges in basic self-reflexivity, or as various narrative stances compete within the one text. In the resulting polyphony, which often relies on intertextuality or pastiche, all contributing discourses are shown to be relative. It remains with the reader to choose and evaluate the individual parts of the text. Internet fiction can be supposed to turn to some of these ideas of a new kind of writing when trying to answer the question whether we have arrived at a new phase of or beyond postmodernity. a. Cyberpunk The combination of fictional writing and cyberspace is often equated with the literary genre of cyberpunk novels. These novels and stories which focused on the technological revolution and its social and psychological implications were not planned for online publication and did not take into account the possibilities of hypertext. Formally, they often stood in the tradition of realist fiction, focusing on plot, protagonist, and a realistic description of a Utopian world. Cyberpunk proliferated after 1984, the year of publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer,20 also called the "quintessential Cyberpunk novel", to the beginning of the 1990s. After that, this genre largely disappeared from critical consciousness. Bonner gives a definition of cyberpunk by listing common features of content (computers, corporations, crime, corporality) as well as formal aspects which hint at the subcultural and underground origin of this literary genre (the frenetic pace, excess of information, and inverted millenarianism).21 The group of writers who were the first to define cyberpunk (Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner) were given the nickname 'The Movement', with all its elitist and counter-cultural connotations.22 Having their background in SF writing, in rock music (one major influence quoted time and again are "The Grateful Dead" with their lyrics), and in a Californian counterculture, the first cyberpunk novels talked about the new medium, its implications in an evolving world of corporate power and the role of the individual in both. Csicsery-Ronay describes the basic attitude in

20 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 21 Frances Bonner, "Separate Development: Cyberpunk in Film and TV" in George Slusser, Tom Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000. Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (Athens/Ga. & London: U of Georgia P, 1992), 191-207,206. 22 Cf. Slusser, Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000, e. g. Lewis Shiner, "Inside the Movement: Past, Present, and Future" in Slusser, Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000, 17-25.

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Neuromancer as "the whole of society is at the Edge; there are no solid citizens, no traditional codes".23 In cyberpunk descriptions of cyberspace, commerce plays a major role, as cyberspace is a counterpart and a continuation of the corporate structures defining the everyday of this future five minutes ahead of us. Commerce, though, is reduced to the form of industrial espionage in a Darwinian world of corporate structures. While cyberspace is seen mainly as a space which is in the process of creation, it is the role of the individual user which is often shown at the centre of fictional production. Although he (!) is especially vulnerable to attacks from corporate reality because of his implant and his addictedness to 'jacking in', i. e. the immersion into virtual reality, the cyberspace hacker is shown as jockey, console cowboy or surfer, the heroic loner who has to come to terms with his role as creator/destroyer/God, but who just as often turns out to be deceived about his own power and freedom. This loner as the fictional hero in a hostile world shows the indebtedness of cyberpunk to formula fiction such as the Western, hard-boiled detective novels, and formulaic SF writing. In contrast, the new technology remains - at least in most of the better-known examples of cyberpunk fiction - rather vague.24 In Neuromancer, Gibson explains cyberspace in such vague terms as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" and describes the "jacking in" as a hallucinatory experience.25 He neither explains the relationship between cyberspace and the urban sprawl nor does he focus on the social implications of cyberspace. Whereas some cyberpunk novels, such as texts by Swanwick or Quick, closely follow certain writing formulas (by some writers this branch is called SciFiberpunk), writers of 'the Movement' are seen to play with the popular formulas in order to come to an understanding of the postmodern condition, the individual being left with no answers and perhaps even no questions to ask. Being C/connected, and the feeling of home this entails, stands against the need for independent action. Later cyberpunk novels have preferably focused on other topics, e. g. the presentation and variation of Gender, formula fiction often reducing the topic to the sex-and-crime novel level. In his recent novels such as Idoru,26 which was published after the cyberpunk wave had passed, Gibson turns more and more to the question how commercialisation and web communities are intertwined (discussed by Gibson under the rather vague term "ecology of celebrity").

23 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, "Futuristic Flu, or, The Revenge of the Future" in Slusser, Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000,26-45,41. 24 John Huntington, "Newness, Neuromancer, and the End of Narrative" in Slusser, Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000,133-141, 133. 25 Gibson, Neuromancer, 51. 26 William Gibson, Idoru (London: Viking, 1996).

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George Slusser sees the achievement of cyberpunk as "fiction's entry into [...] the world of information [...] taking leave of two thousand years of mimetic tradition". 27 The boundaries between reality and fiction, source and image or between fictional structure/form and symbolised reality seem to have disappeared. In accordance with this evaluation, cyberpunk as an early form of cyberfiction shows several features of an early and moderate postmodernism. It focuses on the interface, the surface of the connection between Internet and real life and oscillates between the various interpretations on this surface. Promises of a deeper interaction and a deeper understanding of this interaction, however, are not kept, and the cyberspace world remains basically opaque. Formally, Neuromancer only partly confirms postmodern poetics, as the complexity of the cyberspace story is not mirrored in the rather straightforward plot and story personnel and the uniform, if trendy language. Cyberpunk novels play with a kind of multiplicity of character, but these sudden changes of perception rather copy other forms of counter-cultural writing such as the Illuminatus-trtiogy2* or Pynchon's California novels. 29 However, as the reader by following the desk cowboy into the cyberworld sometimes is lost without orientation, cyberpunk fiction draws on a new form of the sublime which Jameson described as the sublime of vertigo, of losing one's ground in a world without clear formats or frames. 30 Most importantly, however, cyberpunk double-features as a commodity and as a counter-cultural expression become cult. Especially its rewriting of popular forms shows this double bend. This embracing of formula fiction and the acceptance of the work as commodity have made it a popular meetingground for SF fans, members of the Internet community, and readers of underground fiction. Webzines around cyberpunk SF have developed into a new agora, in which fictional and factual information is exchanged, the gap sometimes closing between the two. As many changes in the Internet echo predictions of cyberpunk writing, or are even shaped on these predictions, 31 this new Thirdspace stands between the real and the virtual, conflating both. Its impact, however, still remains unclear, as it can lead to political activation within the sphere of the Internet, but also to consumerist passivity.

27 George Slusser, "Introduction: Fiction as Information" in Slusser, Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000, 1-16, 1. 28 Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson, The llluminatus Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple & Leviathan (Hazard/Ky.: Sphere, 1987). 29 Such as Vineland (Boston: Little/Brown, 1990) or Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973). 30 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 31 Michael Benedikt, "Cyberspace: Some Proposals" in Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (London: MIT, 1991).

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b. Hypertext Fiction From the late 1980s onwards, literary concerns with cyberspace have taken another inroad, using the hypertext with its new possibilities as a literary medium. Michael Joyce's text Afternoon from 1987 (created with the help of his and Jay David Bolter's programme "Storyspace" and marketed by Eastgate systems)32 is seen as the earliest example of this new development of hyperfiction, while many of the later open-access works rely on the basic htmlcode, which was developed at CERN from 1989 onwards. The basic idea of hypertext is to connect various text, image, and sound files via the use of links. With these links, various non-sequential pieces of writing can be connected, extending from the one link per page to a multitude of possible connections. In hypertext fiction, the links connect two or more pages, mostly opening various possibilities for the further development of the text. The reading process can result in loops which lead back to central pages, it can focus on certain parts of the text in which the text bifurcates and which have to be covered several times in order to explore the text, or it can be rather straightforward, all depending on the hidden structure of the links. Storyspace as well as html and other text tools allow for a definition of the links, e. g. requiring the visit to one text part before opening a new link. In all cases, the realisation of the text by the reader becomes a unique event, his or her movement being defined by decisions taken and options given. Hyperfiction can be listed according to the complexity of the linking process. Basic stories such as Martha Conway's "8 Minutes" repeat the linear form of a conventional print-based short-story.33 The reader is not allowed to break out of the succession of the single texts making up the complete story, although some of the texts are rather dissimilar. In further developments of hypertext fiction, the text links would feature a yes/no distinction, making the story branch out in various directions. These links can be defined thematically, their being placed at the bottom of the page focusing on their importance for the plot. Other links dispersed over the text focus on an associative connection between various pages. In Mark Veal's story "A Major Hangover", every page ends with a list of various links.34 This list of links changes, as options have already been taken, showing that all the pages are interrelated. Veal uses a programming tool called "Story Builder" with the help of which the interaction between story

32 Michael Joyce, "Afternoon" (Eastgate Systems CD 1987); Storyspace, (20.5.2003). 33 Martha Conway, (1996), "8 Minutes", Enterzone 7; (20.5.2003). 34 Mark Veal, "A Major Hangover", (20.5.2003).

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fragments and reader are systematised.35 The individual parts are connected according to what possibilities of context are fixed by the writer (especially according to the development of the plot, and to the setting of the story). The reader cannot return to read the alternatives initially given, and the further texts are influenced by the choices already made by the reader. In "A Major Hangover", the reader follows the protagonist on his way through the rooms of the house, as he clears up the mess left after a party the preceding night, which the protagonist wants to hide from his girlfriend. Depending on the choices taken, certain pages are blocked, as they refer to possible earlier events. On the time of the girlfriend's arrival, which can be changed by letting the doorbell ring earlier or later, the girlfriend's reaction varies from anger to happy surprise. Reading a piece of hyperfiction seems to put the reader in a position of power. The individual reading can result in loops, in which the reader by chance or by choice returns to certain text parts; in other readings major parts of the textual basis offered can be left out. Every reading is at the same time a creation of the text, which gives the reader agency. On the other hand, the given reality of the links and the changeable text pieces defines the choices the reader has. As these links create a tight structure of what can be read and how it can be perceived, the special agency of the reader of hypertext remains doubtful. Anja Rau writes in the Journal of Digital information: A lot has been written about agency, but texts that give the reader room for cocreativity, that turn him or her into their de facto author have not yet appeared. ... Many of the second generation hypertext-critics even claim that hypertext imposes far more restrictions on the text and the reader than good, old linear story-writing.36

Rau illustrates her criticism with John McDaid's "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" from 1992.37 Although this rather complex text gives the reader the freedom to retrace the story of Uncle Buddy, meta-textual lines like "Read me first" or "Copyright Conventions" show the author to be ultimately in command. The text closes with the author exerting this power rather brutally, as the reader is cut off or deleted against his or her wish. However, in "Uncle Buddy's Funhouse" another level of narrative is added, an alternative strand of reading, a research project defined by the reader's movement through a haunt house. Again, the reader is thwarted in his/her attempts to achieve an integrated view of the text, a result which makes the concept of agency questionable. A third layer which the reader explores (necropolis) once more leads to his/her inevitable death.

35 Story Builder, (20.5.2003). 36 Anja Rau, "Wreader's Digest - How To Appreciate Hyperfiction", Journal of Digital information, 1.7.2000, (20.5.2003). 37 John McDaid, "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" (Eastgate Systems CD, 1992).

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Sarah Smith's "King of Space" from 1991 (like "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" originally written in the hypercard format) features some clearly marked points forking out into further options which develop into longer paths of alternative plots.38 In "King of Space", the reader is able to retrace his/her steps and to find orientation by navigation aids. These aids, however, change the effect of the story. The plot and the process of reading/creating the story run increasingly parallel, as the protagonist of the story as well as the reader try to maintain their physical and mental autonomy and identity in a predefined environment. Hypertext fiction focuses on the relation between reader and writer or reader and text (or reader and machine), creating a space of interface where various forms of interaction can happen. In this space, the text of the reader and the text of the writer can remain distinct, only connected via the multitude of different textual performances which answer the individual needs of the readers, but they also connect via the reader's reconstruction of the possibilities of the text. In many of the recent stories, however, the links have either been reduced to their formal aspect, the list of links including structural words like prepositions and conjunctions, or they have developed into associative chains. Many texts turn into fictional monologues, often with an autobiographical focus, thus partly alienating the reader who will not always follow the same associative patterns. With this notion of the biographical, subjectivity is introduced into a sphere which earlier on discarded the idea of the subject. Most of the hyperfiction based on the html-code is closely related to a webzine or a network in which various authors convene in order to publish their works. With their publications and with the readers' recreations of their texts, a meeting space or new agora for writers and readers is created which is mainly independent of market influences. However, many of these open meeting places remain semi-private, as they function as newsletters and discussion forums with limited access. However, hyperfiction has also become a commodity, as the vital influence of Eastgate Systems illustrates. Eastgate still uses the Internet in order to advertise new publications, but the common visitor has to pay a considerable fee in order to receive the published fiction on CD. Similarly, the production of hyperfiction has been commercialised, as the format of linking, of changing links and texts, which is not available to all writers, can be bought in the form of software. Instead of being an intrinsic part of the text and its drive, the form of hypertext fiction tends to become an additional gadget to rather bland texts which are created for quick consumption. Thus, the Thirdspace envisaged here remains a Utopian vision.

38 Sarah Smith, "King of Space" (Eastgate Systems CD, 1991).

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Hypertext fiction seemingly follows the rationale of postmodernist writing to a high degree. However, a second look discovers the fundamental power of the writer over the text working against the agency of the reader. Behind the surface of the text, a potentially complex deep structure is hidden. Alternating or dialogic text structures are surprisingly rare, given the basic fragmentation of the text. The idea of competing discourses is seldom tackled, "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse" being a notable exception. Instead of confirming the notion of the end of narration and the discarding of traditional plot, some examples of hyperfiction even highlight their indebtedness to traditional structures. c. Internet Collaboration A special form of hyperfiction are those Internet projects in which several writers or readers/writers collaborate in the process of writing a 'texture'. While many of the other hypertexts could stand as individual productions and sometimes become commercial fare, the collaborations are exclusively integral parts of webzines or literary meeting-places (e. g. mailing-list communities) and together with these create a literary community. However, the texture created and community developing out of the growing interaction of formerly separate networks form another example of Thirdspace. Collaborative writing obviously can be done without the use of links and hypertext. In the hypertextual "Five Standing", which started out as more collateral than collaborative work by five authors, the hyperlinks now intertwine the stories to such a degree that finding out whose story actually is told becomes problematic.39 With these links, the main theme of one story, taking decisions in life which will result in loss, becomes the topic of the stories of all five characters, while the photographs which tell only one story seem to put this unity into question. The private website Storysprawl has a whole list of stories under construction.40 Here, scriptlines are provided, sometimes adhering closely to writing formulas (SF and mystery are the typical ones) and giving exact information concerning the development the story should take. The structure of the story is shown in a story map, which, however, is not accessible while reading. In other cases they are rather open as to the content and form of the contributions or the choice of the contributors, some of the results being rather experimental. Some editors and contributors appear repeatedly in several contributions, but the list is not exclusive. Most of the stories are under creation, but you also can find finished and edited or varnished stories here. In

39 Stephanie Armstrong et al., "Five Standing" (1999), (20.5.2003). 40 "Storysprawl", (20.5.2003).

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all stories at Storysprawl, the collaboration is quite open, as the visitors of the website are invited to participate in the writing of a story/novella at certain points while moving through the texture. Thus, the reader and the writer are one person, moving in and out of these positions. Repeatedly, contributors add text pieces at several points of the story, showing their own movement through the texture. The editor of the story can exude a major influence on the submitted pieces, but reworkings can also be done by the original writers so as to make the story more straightforward. As several submitters can add to the same part of the story, alternative strands may be developing which stand beside each other during the collective writing process, are re-edited, sometimes left out completely in the final version of the story, or put into a hierarchy with the help of the narrative form. Other collaborations start with a multiple approach, such as "Die Säulen von Llacaan" by Roger Nelke, which introduces three alternative stories to start with, and which can be extended by the contributors, linking their own pieces to already existing others.41 In "Spielzeugland", several strands of the narrative exist, being defined by their main contributors.42 The hypertext links within the text, which relate to pages in the narrative, but also to additional quotations and reflections, are complemented with several additional links, leading back and forth, to a panorama page (a map) and to a basic summary of the story's many threads. In order to highlight the polyphony of the texture, various backgrounds, formats and script sizes are used. The collaborative fiction using hypertext format shows itself to be closest to the idea of postmodernist fiction. Although certain requirements, storylines and suggestions as to the development of the narrative are given, these textures do not result in ultimate ends and closures, but very often feature cyclic structures or end in aporia. As reader and writer merge in one person, the text becomes truly interactive. Participating in the texture creates a high degree of self-awareness in both writers and readers, and leads to much fun in the production and the choice of reading. Especially "Spielzeugland" shows the central importance of intertextuality, which already marks the individual contributions which sometimes read like intertwined discourses. Projects such as "Wolf Slater ... Spy" at Storysprawl actively engage with formula fiction, parody and pastiche.43 The Thirdspace created here is between the collaborators on the work who at the same time are their readers. The work itself becomes a Thirdspace, where the differing outlooks on the world, the different approaches to writing, 41 Roger Nelke, "Die Säulen von Llacaan", (20.5.2003). 42 Andreas Weiss, "Spielzeugland", (20.5.2003). 43 Curt Siffert (moderator), "Wolf Slater... Spy", (20.5.2003).

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the different interpretation of literary formulas are encompassed in a fluid inbetween. However, in order to find this form of fiction, one has to find certain pockets of the World Wide Web, mainly the sites of literary webzines - a marginal place, which does not show any tendency to recreate and reshape more central areas of the Internet. And here we return to the reality of the net, which eventually will also reduce and economically redefine the free space of this collaboration, e. g. under the heading of publishing houses.

Conclusion If the Internet and its text production can be taken to epitomise the states of postmoderaity and postmodernism, they present a rather ambivalent picture. Internet fiction surely answers certain ideas of postmodernity, such as the loss of the grand narratives and fixed identities. It is also repeating certain aspects of postmodern economy and society, by existing in a widely anti-hierarchical surrounding and echoing the myth of a free Internet. However, the commercial side of postmodernity is just as obvious in the virtual reality of the Internet Thirdspace, as market forces and state intervention reduce the freedom of virtual movement and information exchange. In its textual set-up, Internet fiction largely draws on traditional forms of narrative fiction rather than on postmodernist experiment. The influence of formula fiction is particularly strong, with SF being the natural preference. However, more recent collaborative forms of writing stress more experimental aspects. Here, visual and acoustic forms are included, using the many possibilities of hypertext. With communal hypertext projects, the commercialisation is least pronounced, as the creation of a community, an open Thirdspace, remains an important part of the project. In its present form, however, the writing project continues to remain at the margins of the Internet, and by being widely ignored, cannot develop its emancipatory concept of Thirdspace.

Re-Reading Postmodernism

CHRISTOPHE DEN TANDT

Pragmatic Commitments: Postmodern Realism in Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ellroy Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977) revolves around the figure of the author's mother, Brave Orchid. Throughout her life, this resourceful woman had to adapt to successive cultural changes. The Chinese society of her youth experienced the fall of the imperial system and the emergence of Sun Yat Sen's republic. Chinese families had to cope with the emigration of men to the country they called the Gold Mountain - the United States. Once in America, Brave Orchid finds her new surroundings unreal. To Chinese immigrants, the country of white people is "the land of ghosts".1 Its culture appears alien and inferior. Brave Orchid finds her bearings in these unstable worlds thanks to her dedication to work. Before her husband can afford to transplant his family to the United States, Brave Orchid, already in her forties, obtains a medical degree. She works as a doctor, a midwife and, as Kingston puts it, a "[sjhaman", battling diseases, spirits and ghosts (WW, 65). In New York and California she assists her husband in back-breaking laundry work. Still, Brave Orchid's pragmatic temperament has an ambiguous edge. She sometimes devotes her aweinspiring energy to quixotic pursuits. Also, her obsession with work keeps her from understanding her children's needs. Similarly, characters in Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) struggle against existential malaise and social injustice by committing themselves to improving the conditions of their surroundings. The intertwined narratives of DeLillo's sprawling novel depict a (post-)Cold-war universe that is spiritually thin and economically iniquitous. After the threat of nuclear annihilation, the U. S. face ecological disaster and AIDS. Yet DeLillo's world is peopled with such courageous figures as Sister Grace Fahey, Sister Alma Edgar and graffiti writer Ismael Munoz. Against extraordinary odds of poverty, racism and medical plagues, these characters attempt to maintain a livable space in South 1

Maxine Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Random House and Vintage Books, 1977), 178. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'WW').

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Bronx neighborhoods whose very dereliction has become a tourist attraction. Likewise, DeLillo portrays artists - sculptor Klara Sax, comedian Lenny Bruce, painter Acey Greene, graffiteros like Ismael himself - as workers seeking to alleviate trauma and to weave together new communities. While Lenny Bruce gives voice to the angst of the Cuban missile crisis, Klara, thirty years later, refits B-52 bombers into painted sculptures, transmuting fear into art. Acey Greene's paintings turn Chicago gang members into figures of glamorous menace, reminiscent of Renaissance art. Ismael's graffiti create a space of aesthetic adventure within the field of urban devastation. However, as in Kingston, DeLillo's representation of pragmatic commitment is not wholeheartedly optimistic. Sister Edgar, even as she helps Gracie tend to AIDS patients, clings to an orthodox Christianity fueled by loathing of the world. Nick Shay, the novel's central figure, pursues a pragmatic enterprise of a dubious nature - shipping hazardous waste around the world. Dedication, DeLillo suggests, is defeated by the complex context in which it exerts itself. In James Ellroy's My Dark Places (1996) too, pragmatic commitment is the chosen strategy for the healing of trauma. Before publishing this autobiographical memoir, Ellroy had written crime novels centering on violence against women. My Dark Places revisits this issue from a nonfiction perspective: The author reveals that his obsession with violence originates in the unsolved murder of his own mother. The book charts his efforts to reopen the case and his unsuccessful search for the killer. Ellroy's search for truth and psychological closure is entangled in the discourse of masculinity that informs his previous fiction. In post-existentialist fashion, he seeks to define masculine code heroes. This profile is, in his view, embodied in the conscientious police officers who investigate the evil wrought by masculine violence. The nobility of their endeavor is based on the understanding that it knows no end.

Realism under Postmodernity By discussing these three texts, the present paper aims to show that pragmatic dedication constitutes one of the core constituents of a contemporary realist outlook. This argument fits in a broader investigation of the modes of existence of realism under postmodernity. Like other contributors to the present volume (Ihab Hassan; Vera Nünning; Dietmar Böhnke), I believe that referential discourse in literature or other media has managed to perpetuate itself even as postmodernist / poststructuralist theorists radically questioned the validity of its groundings. Realist practices have developed during the last twenty years, feeding both on previous traditions and on the presumably antireferential aesthetic of postmodern culture itself. The growing awareness of the survival of realism testifies, I think, to a metamorphosis of the postmodern structure of sensibility, if not to an attempt to outgrow it.

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Jose David Saldivar has provided one of the earliest discussions of the paradoxical coexistence of postmodernism and referential discourse. Saldivar all but identifies postmodern realism with magic realism, the form of writing that most famously hybridizes the referential discourse of fiction. For Saldivar, postmodern realism is embodied in the idiom of Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong Kingston. In his view, novels that, as Angel Flores puts it, transform "the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal" are realistic precisely insofar as they make visible the problems raised by realism under postmodernity.2 Magic realism challenges the nineteenth-century belief according to which novels can develop an objective voice of cognitive authority. As such, it performs the othering of the real: it registers the experience of a pluralist culture - an environment in which the ideological world view of Eurocentric modernity may no longer be cloaked as real or cognitively neutral. Saldivar does, however, not provide a paradigm inclusive enough to accommodate all varieties of postmodern realism. In particular, his model is not meant to cover practices outside of literature. We must indeed acknowledge that literature - especially the academic canon - is not the idiom in which postmodern realism has developed most prominently. Painting has had a pioneering role. Pop Art (Andy Warhol; Roy Lichtenstein) is a postmodern equivalent of previous realist schools, as is the subsequent photorealism of Richard Estes and Charles Bell. Today, postmodern realism flourishes in non-literary or mass-culture idioms. It has been a significant component of alternative film-making in the 1980s and 1990s (David Lynch; Lisa Cholodenko; Susan Seidelman; Spike Lee) as well as of cyber-oriented science fiction (William Gibson; Neal Stephenson; Dark Horse Comics such as Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons's Martha Washington series). I believe that tackling this broader corpus requires taking four dimensions of the texts into account: reference, dialogism, contract and pragmatism. By foregrounding reference, I mean to point out that no realist art form, however postmodern, can elude the issue of the relation of discourse to the real. This need not imply a blind belief in what Richard Rorty calls the correspondence between "pieces of thought (and language) and pieces of the world". 3 Yet it signifies that referentiality should at least be an object of literary scrutiny. Dialogism (or polyphony), as defined by Mikhail Bakthin, designates the condition of texts composed of heterogeneous discourses, each linked to

2 3

Quoted in Jose David Saldivar, "Postmodern Realism" in Emory Elliott, Cathy Davidson et al. (eds.), The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 524. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 131.

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specific world views and social affiliations.4 In the present volume, Vera Nünning and Dietmar Böhnke show that the texts contributing to today's realist revival display such heterogeneity: The new corpus plays off the discourse of classical realism against postmodern devices - metafiction, particularly. Writers who produce dialogized realist texts acknowledge the impossibility of developing a voice of cognitive authority designating the real in monological fashion. One might add that, in the history of literary realism, referential monologism has more often been a norm than an actual practice. Numerous nineteenth-century realist works - naturalist novels, particularly are remarkably heterogeneous in their use of literary discourse.5 Contract is a defining parameter for realism because texts do not acquire a referential status on the basis of intrinsic discursive features alone. The voice claiming to designate the real is empowered by a social pact. The realist reading contract is established through writers' discussions of their own practice, critical arguments, reviews, readers' feedback or any statement informing the appraisal of the text's truth value. Instances of realist contracts are Daniel Defoe's framing remarks on the reliability of Robinson Crusoe's narrative; the classical realists' flaunting of their positivistic investigation methods; D-Day survivors' praises of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan·, or, in the present corpus, the implicit "autobiographical pact" that links Kingston and Ellroy to their readers, certifying that the memoirs' contents match the authors' life experience.6 Pragmatism constitutes the activist, socially committed axis of realist fiction. It informs both Dickens's attacks on dehumanizing industry and Emile Zola's desire to turn the novel into a laboratory of social experimentation. Under postmodernity, pragmatism becomes less confidently propagandistic and more closely entangled with existential and referential aporias. It constitutes a fallback solution available to writers who acknowledge the impossibility of an unmediated grasp of the real. Pragmatic commitment - the urge to bring about workable change in the writer's world - displaces cognitive mapping. This shift in focus is implicit in the everyday meaning of 'realism' itself: The phrase 'be realistic' connotes the ability to conform to the constraints of a given context. The postmodern pragmatism thus defined ranges from the reluctant reconciliation with a world of inauthentic bargaining to the Utopian prospect of an endlessly fashionable reality. As Ihab Hassan indicates in the present volume, such realist pragmatism might form the basis of a postmodern outlook oriented no longer toward skepticism but toward trust.

4 5 6

See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Μ. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 271-73; 324-31. See Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana, Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998), 12-20. Phillipe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (1976) (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 13.

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On the basis of this four-term model, it is possible to specify how the texts analyzed in the present pages - a corpus I henceforth designate as pragmatic realism - position themselves with regard to classical and magic realism. Latin American magic realism is intensely dialogized (its gamut runs from classical realism to the supernatural) yet only moderately involved in reflections on reference. Contract, on the other hand, is essential to this corpus. In their comments on their own practice, Latin American writers challenge received (European) literary wisdom by claiming that "lo real maravilloso" 7 is no romance fantasy but constitutes indeed the reality of the multiethnic "New World landscape." 8 The pragmatic dimension of magic realist texts - Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1966), for instance - is discernible in these novels' portrayal of tireless epic characters, starkly contrasting with the languid, alienated figures of high modernism. By comparison, pragmatic realism depicts a significantly less disjointed world - a realm less exposed to magical metamorphoses of the real. Instead of stringing out ceaselessly defamiliarizing catastrophes, pragmatic realism cautiously appraises the extent to which the real can be "othered": It interrogates the ways in which the unfamiliar is discreetly dialogized with the everyday - how the characters' round of life resists change or surrenders to it, or, conversely, how their environment may be amended. In the present volume, Klaus Stierstorfer and Peter Mortensen argue that recent postmodern fiction depicts subjects seeking to adapt to - even to make peace with - the instabilities of postmodemity. Similarly, pragmatic realism examines the paradoxical resilience of commonplace everydayness in a context that is otherwise unpredictable. The universe it portrays, though unstable and fragmented, still manifests itself as a seemingly homogeneous plane of perception. The characters' praxis aims to maintain or enhance this stability an effort that forms the basis of a pragmatic contract: The text pledges to help its readers alter their world for the better. Brian McHale's typology of postmodern fiction may help us circumscribe the pattern of dialogization implied in this vision of a marginally destabilized everydayness. McHale argues that the evolution from modernist to postmodernist fiction corresponds to a shift from an epistemological to an ontological thematics. Modernist novels raise questions about the possibility of knowledge - about the multiple perspectives through which the world is perceived (What is there to know? How can I know it?). Postmodernist works raise doubts about the very nature of the world(s) that can be perceived or evoked in language. Their hallmark queries are postcognitive questions such as "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do

7 8

Alejo Carpentier quoted in Saldivar, "Postmodern Realism", 526. Saldivar, "Postmodern Realism", 526.

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it?"9 Postmodern fiction is therefore pluralist by nature, or rather "heterotopian" - a term McHale borrows from Michel Foucault.10 Its texts magic realist novels, typically - juxtapose incompatible planes of being. They resemble the "transhistorical party" of Carlos Fuentes's fiction, where characters of separate historical periods interact.11 In light of McHale's argument, DeLillo's, Ellroy's and even Kingston's pragmatic realism is poised between the homotopianism of classical realism (there is only one world, albeit accessed through divergent perspectives) and heterotopian postmodernity. Pragmatic realist texts raise the following questions: How can the world be one and simultaneously plural? How can the seemingly homogeneous world that I perceive (the world of my everyday field of interaction) also be composed of ill-fitting fragments? How could life, as Klara Sax puts it in DeLillo's Underworld, ever take "an unreal turn at some point", thus creating a world that seems "fictitious?"12 How can DeLillo's South Bronx be "real" to the social activists who work within it and "surreal" to tourists visiting it in chartered buses (U, 247)? Conversely, how can conspicuously heterotopian universes still be perceived by the same subjects, within a pseudo-homogeneous phenomenal continuum? The hidden plurality of social experience is central to DeLillo's Underworld. The novel makes visible a seemingly homogeneous environment - a country concerned with the practicalities of postmodern capitalism. Yet this human constellation is haunted by underworlds of fear, violence or Utopian hope. Nick Shay is obsessed with "Dietrologia" - the "science of dark forces" (U, 280) - and with mystical treatises such as "The Cloud of Unknowing" (U, 295), which represent God as a receding presence. Conversely, Kingston's Woman Warrior foregrounds the paradoxical oneness of heterotopias. As a child, Kingston communicated through the front-door mailbox slot with a creature she had been taught to view as a "The Garbage Ghost" - in fact a white American dustman (WW, 115). Yet unlike ghosts, the latter displayed such reassuring features as the ability to "cop[y] human language" - that is, to mimic the children's Chinese (WW, 115). The enigmatic pseudo-unity of dislocated worlds is also central to cyberpunk science fiction. Characters in these texts access distinct planes of reality (phenomenal space, virtual consciousness, holographic projection, etc.). Yet they retain a minimal sense of a homogeneous subjectivity, however metamorphosed through transits from layer to layer of virtuality.

9

Dick Higgins quoted in Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1987), 10. 10 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 18. 11 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 17. 12 Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997) (London: Picador-Macmillan, 1999), 73. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'U').

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Epiphanies of the Real: Pragmatic Realism and Poststructuralist Theories of Reference In their approach to reference, one might expect contemporary realist writers to break with the anti-mimetic tenor of post-structuralism/modernism and thus to seal a new allegiance with classical realism. Joseph Dewey, in a study of American fiction in the 1980s, makes the rejection of postmodernist antimimesis a key element of the late-twentieth-century realist revival. Under the label "spectacle realism",13 he describes a corpus (Joyce Carol Oates; Anne Tyler; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Richard Powers) in which realism acts as an antidote to the infosociety's semiotics of consumption, which Dewey identifies with postmodernism at large. However, Dewey's argument dichotomizes realism and postmodernism in a way that does not fit the present corpus. In DeLillo, Kingston and Ellroy, reality is not something that can be retrieved by a transparent realist aesthetic. It is no background one can confidently point at by means of what John Searle calls "ostensive or indexical" speech acts.14 We have seen above that pragmatic realism differs from postmodernist textuality and Latin American fiction's polyphony only by what one may metaphorically call a change of lighting: It acknowledges the difficulties in assessing the contours of the real, yet performs the epistemological equivalent of a salvage operation: It explores how far referentiality stretches in a field of discourse that otherwise does not lend itself to totalizing documentary representation. Above all, sharply demarcating a pragmatic realist from a postmodernist view of referentiality implies an overly rigid reading of poststructuralism/ modernism itself. Poststructuralism is often invoked (sometimes by its own proponents) to support the claim that reference is a mere impossibility, unworthy of any investigation. This counterintuitive argument implies that the extra-linguistic real is never perceived as an unmediated presence. Nonsemiotic stimuli acquire meaning only through language - a medium that deprives them of presence, stability or authenticity. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe summarize this view as follows: "[P]hysical objects do exist, but they [...] only take on meaning and become objects of knowledge within discourse."15 However, Laclau and Mouffe's blatantly paradoxical statement shows that reference is bound to remain an open-ended, anxiety-ridden question. 13 Joseph Dewey, Novels from Reagan's America: A New Realism (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1999), 28. 14 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge UP, 1969), 80. 15 Laclau and Mouffe quoted in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 45.

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Poststructuralists do not deny the existence of an extra-linguistic field of reference.16 Yet, to borrow Derrida's words, they ascribe to it a "spectral" status.17 In their view, the extra-linguistic is a haunting presence, never quite grasped yet never entirely forgotten. When it has to be characterized at all, it is portrayed through two metaphorical representations. On the one hand (in Lacan; Derrida; Jameson; Baudrillard), it is a lost, abyssal background. It is the emptiness that replaces the ground to which, in realist epistemologies, language used to be anchored. On the other hand (in Deleuze; Lyotard; Kristeva), the extra-linguistic is viewed as a force. It is the energy beyond or within language that keeps the chain of discourse going. Understandably, a spectral referent inspires in its observers a response different from the matter-of-fact objectivity of classical realism. The discourse of reference in poststructuralist theory and postmodernist fiction fosters indeed a quasi-mystical structure of feeling, harking back to literary modernism's obsession with epiphanic moments. This transpositivistic stance is illustrated in the postmodern variety of the sublime and in discourses focusing on what we might call the epiphany of the real.18 Lyotard acknowledges the possibility of sublime epiphanies when he mentions the rare appearance of what he calls "the occurrence, the event, the marvel [I'occurrence, I'evenement, la merveille]"}9 In this formula, the 'event' is an unexpected emergence issuing from the unrepresentable field beyond or in between semiotic processes. Such an "event" momentarily shatters the linguistic grid. In Lacanian terms, it is a liberating intrusion of the real into the symbolic. Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic and the symbolic describes referential epiphanies in similar terms: The semiotic - i. e. the pre-oedipal, semi-articulated idiom of unconscious drives - is a disruptive force that occasionally breaks through the symbolic network of articulated language.20 In both authors, any contact with the extralinguistic (or with the mode of discourse closest to it) is a quasi-religious intuition: it is impressive yet fleeting, no sooner expressed than betrayed. Admittedly, it is odd to suggest that realistically-oriented postmodernist art shares with contemporary theory the belief that world and text interface through mystical revelations. Still, this non-positivistic approach marks the specificity of pragmatic realism with regard to earlier referential texts. Realism in the present corpus does not merely scan appearances. It describes how per16 Jean-Franfois Lyotard, Le differend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 56-57. 17 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 22,28. 18 See Jean-Franfois Lyotard, Le postmodernisme explique aux enfants: Correspondances 19821985 (Paris: Galitee, 1988), 23-27. See also Christophe Den Tandt, "Invoking the Abyss: The Ideologies of the Postmodern Sublime" in Jean-Pierre Van Noppen, R. Tuffs (eds.), La dimension ideologique du texte. Revue Beige de Philologie etd'Histoire 73,3 (1995), 803-804. 19 Lyotard, Le differend, 255. 20 Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage poetique: I'avant garde ά la fin du XIXe siecle: Lautreamont et Mallarme (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 77-79.

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ceptions and meaning are constructed (and deconstructed) in a social environment that does not lend itself to totalizing mappings. In this context, elements connoting the spectrality of the real (magic; the gothic), though alien to classical realism, act as guarantors of referentiality. They signal the limits of documentary perception. Secondly, highlighting these texts' epiphanic moments leads us to nuance the authors' presumed dedication to praxis. We will indeed see below that pragmatism in the present case does not boil down to a calculus of efficient gestures. It remains troubled by questions about totalizing meanings and goals - issues that are the objects of the mysterious revelations. In his discussion of postmodernism Fredric Jameson shows how documentary discourse and residues of mysticism may indeed paradoxically coexist within contemporary referential art. He argues that photorealist paintings - art works obsessively concerned with reproducing the phenomenal world - are imbued with a contemplative atmosphere which he calls the postmodern sublime. As fragmentary snapshots of (post)industrialism, these paintings manifest their inability to make present what Jameson, in a Marxist perspective, regards as the underlying referential ground of their world - the "impossible totality" of its social relations.21 This fascinating entity is only glimpsed spectrally: it shines through the cracks of the dysfunctional cityscape. Jameson regards photorealism's epiphanies as manifestations of a romantic structure of feelings: In photorealist works, the postindustrial city supersedes romantic nature as the object of sublime fascination. Yet if we focus on fiction, epiphanies pointing to an underlying real suggest instead a modernist filiation. Proust, Joyce or Woolfs characters await revelations that might redeem the dreariness of the everyday. Pragmatic realism appropriates this modernist topos, yet re-enacts it at a different level on a scale of transcendence and immanence. Ihab Hassan has made transcendence and immanence defining features respectively of modernism and early postmodernism. His argument can, I think, be extended to include contemporary referential fiction. In Hassan's logic, modernist epiphanies aim for objects beyond the world.22 Proustian involuntary memory, as Samuel Beckett describes it, offers glimpses of "an extratemporal essence",23 allowing its recipient to become an "extratemporal being".24 Likewise, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus imagines a telephone network putting him through to God himself - to "Edenville. Aleph

21 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 38. 22 See Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987), 46-83,93-95. 23 Samuel Beckett, "Proust" in id., Protist and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1931) (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), 75. 24 Beckett, "Proust", 75.

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alpha: nought nought, one".25 On the contrary, high postmodernism - John Cage's musical happenings, for instance - abolishes the modernist romancing of a Platonic afterworld. Its ethos is what Hassan calls "indetermanence" - the playful enjoyment of immanent, indeterminate experience.26 Pragmatic realism, on the other hand, pursues neither transcendent absolutes nor the ecstasy of indetermanence. Its object is the ghostly presence of an immanent totality - the spectral presence of the extra-linguistic real. Its full revelation is not to be hoped for, particularly in a culture that, as Jameson points out, makes the deliquescence of meaning an aesthetic thrill.27 Yet characters in pragmatic realism feel vindicated at least to raise questions about the survival of immanent values. Their concern with meaning manifests itself in a thematic of temporary revelations and nostalgia. Revelation and the receding therefrom is the keynote of DeLillo's narrative of the 1951 play-off game in which the Giants defeated the Dodgers. This historical match culminated with a miraculous referential event: the Thomson-Branca homerun - a gesture that federated the whole country. The positive import of the event is anticipated early on in the depiction of young Cotter Martin's gatecrashing run toward the Polo Grounds' bleachers. The young man's flight is a perfectly meaningful event in itself: It "reveals some clue to being" and allows the young runner "to open to the world" (U, 13). The remainder of the novel shows characters attempting to recapture this privileged moment, for instance by appropriating the baseball that scored the home-run and was presumed lost. Nick Shay, who has bought what he thinks is the prized item, clutches it in his fist during sleepless nights. This materially embodied nostalgia is typical of pragmatic realism: Aspirations focus not on transcendent values but on items or persons that symbolize the reconstitution of the immanent totality. Characters attempt to retrieve people or things forgotten or lost. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston collects memories of her aunt, who became pregnant out of wedlock and was driven to suicide by patriarchal Chinese village society. Ellroy seeks the figure of his dead mother. The desire for a reconstituted life world is the more moving as it is inevitably frustrated. The promise of immanent closure recedes into ghostliness and loss.

The Dialogization of Reference The previous discussion has highlighted the non-positivistic, even magicrealist dimension of reference in pragmatic realism. However, we must bear in

25 James Joyce, Ulysses, with an introduction by Richard Ellmann (1922) (London: Penguin Books, The Bodley Head, I960), 43. 26 Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 92. 27 Jameson, Postmodernism, 10.

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mind that the texts discussed in the present pages resort for the most part to discourses - documentary description, local-color realism, social history - that perpetuate the referential ambitions of classical realism. In most cases, they endorse the realist reading contract of these constituent idioms. Thus, they differ less than might be expected from the kind of minimally dialogized postmodern realist writing embodied in Raymond Carver's stories, for instance. Even Kingston's text, in spite of its magic-realist affiliation, is for the most part a documentary memoir. On the other hand, the very concept of spectral reference implies that the texts cannot limit themselves to homogeneous realism. The ambition to grasp the real as an immanent totality compels them to swerve from realist verisimilitude. The objects the writers attempt to represent "out-imagin[e] the mind", as Klara Sax puts it in Underworld, referring to mass nuclear destruction (U, 76). They exceed the horizon of perception and language and thus force the texts to switch toward discourses (the gothic, the sublime) that aim beyond the imitation of the phenomenal world. In DeLillo, the dialectic opposing realist everydayness to unrepresentable underworlds shapes the lives of the novel's referential questers - Nick Shay, Klara Sax, Lenny Bruce. Nick likes to introduce himself by means of a formula of carefully measured ambiguity: He lives "a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix", like "someone in the Witness Protection Program" (U, 66). To most observers, his goal is to "liv[e] responsibly in the real" (U, 82). Yet the second half of his introductory formula hints at the disquieting memories of his past murder conviction. As a teenager, he served a prison sentence for helping a heroin addict kill himself. His brother Andy compares Nick's mind to a "black box", a "flight recorder" that "metaphysicians of the future" will only be able to interpret after his death (U, 447). To his wife Marian, he is a "demon husband" - a gothic figure (U, 261). Likewise, DeLillo presents Klara Sax and Lenny Bruce within a finely textured realist background. Klara's development is charted through historically specific scenes spanning four decades. Lenny appears in chapters offering a scrupulous reconstruction of the early 1960s. Yet both of them are obsessed with the sublimity of nuclear annihilation, which risks wiping out everydayness forever. In his stage act, Lenny constantly repeats the phrase "[w]e are all gonna die\" - giving voice to a boundless terror, both devastating and fascinating (U, 506-07; emphasis in original). Klara's art displays a more serene form of the sublime. By painting over the bodies of hundreds of decommissioned B-52 bombers, she creates a spectacle in which both grandeur and everyday details have their place. On the one hand, she showcases the killing machines in an aesthetically sublimated landscape. On the other, the labor invested into this work of art revives the "element of felt life" - the small narratives - behind the weapons systems (U, 77). This healing

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gesture matches the sculptor's romanticized view of the Cold War. To Klara, the airplanes evoke a time of paradoxical security, when stratospheric custodians roamed the skies, exerting a "meaningful power" (U, 77). DeLillo's characterization strategy embodies dialogism at the psychological level: It presupposes that there will always be a plurality of subject positions toward the horizon of the real - fear and morbid pruriency in Lenny's case, romance in Klara's, wide-eyed false consciousness in Nick's. Thus, as Bakhtin would put it, the universe of Underworld cannot be phrased "monologically", through one single character's voice and world view.28 Each of the world's fragments is dialogically related to a remainder of the real that has to be uttered in other idioms, in an unresolved dialogue.29 One might on first inspection believe that Underworld crudely contrasts the voices of authentic referential questers - Klara, Lenny, Nick, Acey Greene, Ismael, Sister Grace - with the lies and paranoia of Cold-War strategists such as J. Edgar Hoover. Yet dialogization requires that even Hoover's world view carry its modicum of wisdom. The FBI chiefs doom-laden musings - his fascination for paintings such as Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death make visible an otherness without which the novel would recede into the triviality of the everyday (U, 50). Hoover's obsessions are noxious not in themselves but in so far as the FBI chief fashions them into a body of monological knowledge. Dialogical otherness - the Bakhtinian equivalent of Derrida's spectrality - is the root of the atmosphere of incompleteness and mystery that suffuses realist descriptions in DeLillo, Kingston and Ellroy. On first inspection, this polyphony differs little from modernist multifocalization or postmodernist heterotopia. In Bakhtinian terms, one might argue that texts straying from monovocalism may not legitimately be called realistic.30 I believe on the contrary that the present corpus illustrates the workings of a genuinely realist polyphony. One dialogic pattern it resorts to might be called interstitial referentiality. Unlike in classical documentary films or naturalist fiction, referential data is not forced on the reader by an authoritative narrator. It appears in the margins of a main narrative that may not itself lay claim to realist verisimilitude. Kingston's Chinese fables, though steeped in the supernatural, reveal the inequalities of traditional Chinese society. Ellroy's narrative abides by the genre cliches of the police procedural. Yet it also casually documents the social discontents of 1940s' and 50s' L. Α., thus painting for its readers the real-life backdrop of noir narratives. DeLillo's novel achieves a similar effect by its very bulk. On the one hand, its DosPassos-style interweaving of multiple narratives constitutes a deliberately 28 Mikhail Bakhtine, La poetique de Dostoi'evski, tr. Isabelle Kolitcheff, preface by Julia Kristeva (Paris: Seuil, 1970). 29 See Bakhtin, Dialogic, 411; Poetique, 35-36, 51. 30 See Bakhtine, Poetique, 47.

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artificial, defamiliarizing device. On the other, its mapping of postmodern everydayness is carried out on such a scale that numerous flickers of referential disclosure appear in between the meshes of the textual skeleton. Overall, the dialogization of reference in pragmatic realism obeys what we may call a centripetal logic, distinct from the centrifugal movement of magic realism. Bakhtin uses these two terms in order to describe competing dynamics within texts. Unifying norms - the "centripetal forces of language"31 - vie against the "centrifugal" action of dialogism, polyphony or heteroglossia.32 Though the Russian critic favors polyphony, he depicts centripetal forces as useful regulatory mechanisms.33 In this light, pragmatic realist texts, instead of embracing open-ended polyphony, display voices that circle around an elusive point of reference. On the one hand, the texts' voice of authority is internally dialogized. Its components, to use Lyotard's terminology, are involved in a "differend" - a conflict of jurisdiction within discourse preventing them from fully making present their object of enquiry.34 On the other, the texts' splintered voices are expected to converge toward the horizon of the real toward the same receding object (the unity of American experience in DeLillo; the empowerment of Chinese-American women in Kingston; the murdered mother in Ellroy). The centripetal dialogization of reference is the more noticeable in Ellroy's My Dark Places and in Kingston's Woman Warrior as these nonfiction texts rely on discourses endowed with strongly referential reading contracts - police reports in Ellroy, social history in Kingston, autobiography in both authors. In Ellroy, neither factually based police investigations nor the author's recollections bring back the figure of Jean Ellroy. The police language screens out the author's affects toward his mother. The autobiographical account is steeped in the author's ambivalent feelings towards her, and inflected by the lies spread by his father. In Kingston, patriarchy impedes the reconstruction of Chinese women's history. The narrator realizes that the witnesses of her aunt's suicide - both men and women - have interiorized patriarchal prohibitions so thoroughly that they censor their own memories. The victim remains the "NoName Woman" - the voiceless subject whose fate had long been a family secret, and whose life can only be reconstructed through hypotheses or fantasies (WW, 1). Conversely, as an autobiographical narrator, Kingston achieves considerable insight into Chinese-American family life. Yet her perspective is restricted by the fact that the young Kingston lived in a sheltered environment and that she was made to perceive the exterior world as ghostly and alien.

31 32 33 34

Bakhtin, Bakhtin, Bakhtin, Lyotard,

Dialogic, 270. Dialogic, 272. Dialogic, 270. Le differend, 9.

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Centripetal polyphony is a fitting dialogic pattern for works that waver between heterotopian and homotopian ontologies - between the view of the world as multi-layered or unified. It need, however, not be construed as an epistemological deadlock. Pragmatic realist texts are based on an optimistic betting on time. Their narratives unfold according to an open cycle of approach and retreat. Characters yearn for an epiphany of the real that might be communicated with the immediacy of Searle's "ostensive" demonstration.35 Yet they resign themselves at least provisionally to seeing referential strategies reabsorbed into the realm of the everyday. In My Dark Places, Ellroy, instead of reclaiming his mother's presence, ends up writing a paean to the police investigators whose lives he can actually document. Similarly, Kingston starts writing about her aunt - a ghostly figure - but ends up depicting icons of feminine empowerment within her reach - her mother Brave Orchid, and, at the fantasy level, Mulan, the Amazon warrior of Chinese folk tales or the warrior poetess Ts'ai Yen. DeLillo's Underworld mobilizes this dialectic of (non)-revelation in less optimistic terms. The gestures of renunciation that follow the impetus toward disclosure are tainted with existential inauthenticity. Klara wishes to keep the memories of the Cold War alive, yet her art is a commodified aestheticization of war. Lenny struggles against political doublespeak yet surrenders to selfindulgent despair. Nick explores psychological evil yet treasures the comforts of his upper-middle-class round of life. The ending of the novel indicates, however, that referential epiphanies that have outspent themselves may still be rekindled. The last chapter describes a would-be miracle: the ghost of Esmeralda, a young vagrant raped and murdered in the South Bronx tenements, flashes on a neighborhood billboard as subway trains go by. The miracle is most likely a fabrication - a game of smoke and mirrors engineered by Ismael Munoz's distraught graffiteros. In this guise, the pseudo-epiphany offers a sentimental compensation to a disenfranchised crowd. Yet the skeptical Sister Edgar endorses the miracle. Its ontological status is left in doubt, and the hope for immanent revelation is not extinguished.

Trauma, Loss, and Authenticity What is at stake in the thwarted momentum of centripetal dialogization - in the approach to and recoil from referential epiphanies - is the existential authenticity of pragmatic commitment. Ellroy's and Kingston's works suggest that pragmatic texts bestow legitimacy on an act of renunciation - the gesture by which characters settle down to values that fall short of the promise implied in the short-lived epiphanies. This narrative dynamic fits what Georg Lukäcs 35 Searle, Speech Acts, 80.

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calls the novel of education.36 For Lukäcs, novels display protagonists committed to a search for authenticity within a degraded life world. Their quest is "demonic": It is unfulfilled and brings about the protagonists' alienation. 37 Characters in Bildungromane eventually give up their quest and resign themselves to living according to the code of their environment. They thereby achieve a paradoxical form of maturity - both a token of wisdom and an acknowledgment of failure. 38 Lukäcs implies that protagonists may too easily forfeit their "problematic" status - their existential dissatisfaction with the world. 39 They easily surrender to inauthenticity 40 - to what Jean-Paul Sartre would call "bad faith". 41 In this light, the compromise with the world staged in Bildungsromane can be premature and unearned. Pragmatic realist texts fend off such a lapse into inauthenticity by their obsessive emphasis on loss and trauma - respectively the acknowledgment of a vanished plenitude and the memory of actual suffering. Kingston's characters struggle both with the loss of their homeland and with patriarchal repression. Ellroy's autobiographical persona, as he revisits the L. A. settings of his childhood, remembers not only the death of his mother but also a life of alienation under the aegis of a manipulative father. DeLillo's Nick Shay is haunted by the unexplained disappearance of his own father - an event he interprets as a mob killing. Nick's mother lives as an exile in her son's and her daughter-in-law's Phoenix house, uprooted from a Bronx neighborhood now devastated by poverty. Ismael Munoz struggles against this devastation on a daily basis as he sells scrap metal or paints graffiti angels on tenement walls as mementos for dead neighborhood children. Loss and trauma are, again, elements that pragmatic realism borrows from modernism. Managing historical trauma - the shock of the First World War, for instance - was a key concern for Anglo-American writers of the 1920s. Likewise, mid-twentieth-century writers and philosophers lamented the disappearance of a presumably organic past and its supersession by the very industrial society that precipitated world conflicts. Pragmatic realism differs from these earlier sources by representing trauma and loss through a logic of spectrality and, to borrow a fashionable term from chaos theory, fractality. By spectrality, I mean that anxiety in pragmatic realism issues as much from loss and trauma themselves as from the prospect of seeing these elements fade into a ghostly background. Hemingway's Nick Adams, a modernist protagonist,

36 Georg Lukäcs, La theorie du roman, tr. Jean Clairevoye, with an introduction by Lucien Goldmann (1920) (Paris: Denoiil, 1968), 134. 37 Lukäcs, La theorie du roman, 98. 38 Lukäcs, La theorie du roman, 131-33. 39 Lukäcs, La theorie du roman, 73. 40 Lukäcs, La theorie du roman, 143. 41 Jean-Paul Sartre, L 'existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 81.

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has to struggle to "choke" his own mind in order to silence the memories of WW I battlefields. 42 DeLillo's characters, on the contrary, struggle to retrieve, not forget, increasingly elusive objects and experiences. Marvin Lundy, a baseball fanatic, has traced the Thomson / Branca baseball by means of film footage that he "rephotographed [...] enlarged, repositioned, analyzed [...] stepframed" (U, 177). Yet he could only locate the approximate area in the bleachers where the ball vanished from view. Ironically, the person to whom he reports his efforts - Brian Glassic, Nick Shay's friend - is concerned neither with baseball nor with the pathos of recollection. Similarly, Kingston's The Woman Warrior raises the question whether the tragedies of the past - the death of the author's aunt - are bound to re-emerge as comedy in the contemporary U. S. Whereas the text opened with the death of "No-Name Woman", it closes with the bittersweet story of Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid's sister, who tries to recover the husband of her youth, a man much younger than herself who has become an Americanized doctor. To the younger generation Moon Orchid's request - and Brave Orchid's relentless pursuit of the case - are pointless and embarrassing. Fractality designates the process by which the texts refract and disseminate loss and trauma and by which these elements reappear seemingly at random like the motif of a Mandelbrot set. In Underworld, each allusion to loss, however discreet, evokes other types of loss, making up long chains of halfremembered suffering. For Nick Shay, the desire to own the Thomson/Branca baseball connects to the loss of his father, to the decline of the Bronx's white ethnic community, to the traumas of today's South Bronx ("TB, AIDS, beatings, drive-by shootings, measles, asthma, abandonment at birth"; U, 239) and, ironically, to his present job as a waste manager, engineering the stashing away of obsolete commodities. Similarly, in Ellroy, the string of scattered clues, false leads and local-color details creates a structure in which the mother's murder, committed by a nameless killer, resonates with other types of loss - the receding L. A. past and the writer's sense of having been cheated of proper paternal mentoring.

The Pragmatic Turn Maturity is achieved in pragmatic realism when the confrontation with trauma and loss empowers characters or narrators to make peace with or to reform their environment. At that point, Kingston's, Ellroy's and DeLillo's protagonists reverse Lukäcs's Bildungsroman pattern: Compromise is not an end point but the beginning of a course of action. The pragmatic commitment issuing therefrom unfolds along three axes: social (acting upon one's 42 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925) (New York: Collier Books-Macmillan, 1986), 142.

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environment); biographical (working to reform one's life) and writerly (handling discourse as a pragmatic tool). Social activism in Underworld is embodied in the community work of South Bronx residents. In Kingston, the social activist is the writer's mother - the middle-aged medical graduate who earns the respect of a patriarchal community. Biographical activism informs Ellroy's and Kingston's handling of their family legacy: their exploration of past traumas is an act of psychological exorcism meant to bring about changes in their own personalities. Writerly pragmatism is the strategy that allows authors to pursue their activist agenda through several literary discourses, obeying seemingly incompatible generic conventions. Ellroy, Kingston and DeLillo's works foster what Kenneth Burke calls "symbolic action"43 - the use of discourse as gesture or act. Such symbolic acts can be performed in idioms beyond realist representation. Ellroy's writings, for instance, re-enact one resonant symbolic gesture through discourses endorsing dissimilar reading contracts. When the autobiographical My Dark Places was published in 1997, it revealed that Geneva Hilliker Ellroy's death had long been a recurrent concern in Ellroy's previous fictions. Ellroy's novels represent gender-based violence through a mixture of hard-boiled realism and baroque tableaux. These traumatic scenes are linked from novel to novel by thematic echoes, as if the writer were circling around a personal obsession. In light of My Dark Places readers realize that the murder narrated in the earlier novel Clandestine is an autobiographical projection of Ellroy's childhood. Characters in Clandestine match Ellroy's family configuration. In an Oedipal gesture, the author makes the father the central suspect - an element that speaks volumes about the writer's imaginary but that the autobiography must invalidate. Thus, an autobiographical trauma is explored in turn through fiction and nonfiction. DeLillo and Kingston make pragmatic empowerment through art a topic of metafictional reflection. Underworld describes art - Ismael's graffiti, Klara's sculptures, Lenny's monologues, Acey Greene's paintings - as political praxis. There is only a slight shift in emphasis between Ismael's adventurous years as a graffitero in the New York subway and his present efforts as a social activist. Graffiti writing is carefully planned, illegal and glamorous. It allows urban dwellers to reshape the city in their own image. Ismael's later commitments prolong this effort, albeit with a clearer awareness of the community's needs. As the Esmeralda miracle reveals, this activism still includes graffiti among its tactics. In The Woman Warrior, writerly empowerment is dealt with in passages depicting the shaping of the writer's voice. In childhood recollections, Kingston explains that her mother cut the frenum of her daughter's tongue, 43 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 8.

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hoping that the latter might not be "tongue-tied" (WW, 190). Ironically, in kindergarten, the young Kingston retreated into silence for several years. Later, she could only express herself in the voice of "a crippled animal running on broken legs" (WW, 196). Psychologically, the discordant voice expresses the young woman's difficulties in finding room for self-expression in a household dominated by her mother's more resonant accents. Politically, the thwarted voice embodies the medium of a writer working at the crossroads of several traditions. Kingston makes this clear in the metafictional allegory that closes the novel - the story of poetess Ts'ai Yen, the author of "Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe"(WW, 243). At twenty, Ts'ai Yen is captured by a Barbarian chieftain. She becomes pregnant by him, bears him two children and fights with the Barbarian army. Among the tribe, ambiguity reigns about what may pass as self-expression. Ts'ai Yen's children use their mother's Chinese only as "senseless singsong words" (WW, 242). Ts'ai Yen herself initially believes that the Barbarian's only music is the whistling of reed arrows. After she discovers the tribe's actual flute melodies - beautiful, though still retaining the sharp reed accents - she fashions for herself a hybrid singing voice that merges the Chinese language and the Barbarian flutes. The anecdote reflects on the polyphony of Kingston's text - its use of legends, biography, autobiography - yet it does so in a pragmatic framework. We understand that the memoir's components are a set of heterogeneous gestures, each endowed with specific effectiveness. The very publication of Kingston's memoir testifies to the success of the emancipation strategy the text enacts. The three writers' discursive pragmatism resonates with the Anglo-Saxon theoretical writings that have developed after poststructuralism. In the late 1970s, Cornel West predicted a revival of pragmatist philosophy in AngloAmerican thought.44 Fulfilling West's diagnosis, theoreticians in Britain and the United States - neo-Marxists, feminists and theoreticians of ethnicity have used French poststructuralist theories as tools enabling them to describe power relations. Some of the philosophical concerns of the French corpus the Lacanian obsession with lack, the phenomenological reflections on being and language - have thereby been de-emphasized. The author most AngloSaxon theorists enthusiastically emulated was Michel Foucault, who developed a pragmatist paradigm of the workings of discourse in social formations.45 Discourse for Foucault is a socially situated set of practices. Its meaning resides not in propositional content or in the adequation to truth but

44 See Hilary W. Putnam, "Pragmatism Resurgent: A Reading of The American Evasion of Philosophy" in George Yanci (ed.), Cornel West: A Critical Reader, with an afterword by Cornel West (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), 22-23. 45 See Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 11.

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in power effects and tactics.46 The theoreticians loosely labeled as New Historicists relied on Foucault's model in order to elaborate a vision of society that might be called the pragmatic apparatus: The social world is a lattice of speech acts, generating power relations whenever such practices are mobilized.47 It seems, however, awkward to describe Kingston, Ellroy, and DeLillo both as literary offshoots of the neo-pragmatist revival and as realist writers. For philosophers, pragmatism's speech-acts-based paradigm of language entails the rejection of the realist belief that discourse reflects an extralinguistic ground.48 I have suggested above that this dichotomy may be negotiated by arguing that the texts described here shift from a realism of truthful cognition to one of pragmatic expectation. The pursuit of the spectral real gives way to the evaluation of a workable course of action. Ironically, the neo-historicist view of social processes fulfills this pragmatic definition of realism. If a society's culture consists in the enactment of power negotiations, efficiency becomes a criterion of realness. The pragmatic apparatus regulates itself by a calculus of realpolitik and a politics of what William James called "assertibility".49 I use the derogatory term realpolitik on purpose in order to point out that, for DeLillo, Kingston and Ellroy, the realism of pragmatic expectations is no full-fledged Utopia. Pragmatism is existentially limiting in that it can only evaluate the power effects of social interactions. It can not validate the legitimacy of what passes for "expedient" or felicitous.50 Only a totalizing discourse has this prerogative. The texts analysed here acknowledge these limitations in that they present commitment as a policy by default. An aura of dissatisfaction or nostalgia clings to the depiction of praxis. In Kingston, Brave Orchid's achievements as a doctor occur only during a transitory period of emancipation. The job is meant to provide for Brave Orchid's income as she waits to join her husband in the United States. There, she devotes herself to patriarchally sanctioned laundry work. Brave Orchid's empowerment, which seemed symbolically to counterbalance the death of Kingston's aunt, is therefore relegated to a nostalgic past. Her daughter catches glimpses of her mother's moment of autonomy only when Brave Orchid, "[o]nce in a long while" takes out her medical diploma from its protective casing (WW, 67).

46 See Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power", in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 58-60. 47 See Claire Colebrook, New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997), 26-27. 48 See Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 126-29. 49 Quoted in Rorty, Objectivity, 126. 50 Rorty, Objectivity, 127.

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Similarly, in Underworld, pragmatic work occurs in an atmosphere of urban doom or, conversely, inchoate utopianism. On first inspection, De Lillo's South Bronx activists embody the ideals of Foucault's pragmatist micropolitics. They are engaged in self-organised community efforts - raising funds by recycling waste and keeping track of the neighborhood's derelict. Yet there is powerlessness behind the good will. This imbalance manifests itself at the pragmatic level by the magnitude of the task at hand and at the existential level by the fact that the nuns who contribute to the charity work have a problematic relation to faith. Grace Fahey is all dedication yet her generosity lacks spiritual insight. Sister Edgar, on the contrary has a vivid metaphysical conscience yet her meditations focus on evil itself. Pragmatic commitment, for her, stems from the fascination of exploring a world she views as an emanation of Satan. While DeLillo's, Kingston's and Ellroy's texts cannot overcome the limitations of pragmatic commitment, they do deploy strategies that smooth over the absence of Utopian fulfillment. This work of containment is effected by the pattern of dialogization most central to these works - that which opposes the realism of pragmatic expectations to the phenomenological contemplation of the spectral real. By this, I mean that praxis and the contemplation of referential epiphanies function as dialogized voices, each compensating for the other's lack of closure. In this way, the texts avoid drifting either into a Jeremiad of the lost totality or into an ethos of blind expediency that fails to do justice to what Richard Rorty dismissively calls the "sense of strangeness of the world"51 - the speciality of the real. The three texts' open endings illustrate this interplay of utopianism and praxis. They are phrased in the optative mode, holding in precarious balance the call to action and the awareness of unrealized hope. The last pages of Kingston's memoir are, among the three, the most serene. Ts'ai Yen, the poetess, has heard the Barbarian flutes "yearning for a high note, which they found at last and held" (WW, 243). This epiphanic moment empowers Ts'ai Yen's own poetic gift. In turn, the narrative of the genesis of the "Barbarian" songs serves as a practical model for further artistic vocations (the reader's, possibly). However, no poetic epiphany seems able single-handedly to ground a final course of praxis: the flutes' high note, though inspiring, is "an icicle in the desert" - distanced into a chilling sublimity (WW, 243). It offers no objectifiable fulfillment. Likewise, Ellroy's autobiography states the necessity to pursue the pragmatic quest. At the end of a failed investigation, and still struggling with an incomplete process of self-examination, the writer states: "I will not let this end."52 The epilogue of Underworld spectacularly voices this 51 Rorty, Objectivity, 129. 52 James Ellroy, My Dark Places: An L. A. Crime Memoir (1996) (London: Airow BooksRandom House, 1997), 353.

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yearning for significant closure, along with the awareness of its impossibility. Sister Edgar visits a web site that displays footage of nuclear explosions. The serial images of mass death slowly gives way to the word "Peace" (U, 827). The passage fulfills a wish expressed earlier in the novel: seeing the complex human world subsumed under "a single word" (U, 295). The epilogue surprises its readers, however, by settling for peace - as opposed to death - for its final pronouncement. Yet 'peace' is evidently not a statement of fact: it is a motto for action. Thus, the last sentence obeys the logic of pragmatic commitment, which requires making a wager on time: it voices the hope that a chain of felicitous gestures may one day bring about a state of the world endowed with immanent meaning.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

Why Derrida Is Not a Postmodernist The question posed in my title is one that cannot easily be answered within the space of a single short essay. After all, 'postmodernism' is a notoriously vague and ill-defined term, while Derrida is a thinker of extraordinary subtlety and range whose work puts up maximal resistance to any kind of summary exposition. Still the effort is worth making, if only to warn readers against some of the false ideas about Derrida that have long been doing the rounds among journalists, cultural pundits, and - sad to say - academic philosophers who seem very often to rely on such dubious sources rather than a first-hand knowledge of Derrida's texts. At any rate I hope it will be useful for anyone wishing to approach Derrida with a mind uncluttered by the detritus of handme-down opinion. A good deal of this prejudice results from a fixed idea mainly on the part of analytic philosophers - that deconstruction fails to meet the most basic standards of 'serious', professionally competent debate. His critics are no doubt right in thinking that Derrida's work constitutes a sizeable challenge to certain dominant preconceptions that have characterised the discourse of Western philosophy right down from its ancient Greek origins. However they are wrong to treat this as a handy excuse for dismissing that challenge tout court and refusing his texts the kind of detailed, attentive scrutiny which ought to be prerequisite for anyone who claims to offer an opinion concerning them. The most important point to make - so I shall make it straight off - is that deconstruction is not just a sub-branch or a vaguely 'philosophical' offshoot of whatever it is that cultural theorists have in mind when they talk about 'postmodernism'. At first approximation: Derrida's deconstructive readings of texts from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Saussure, J. L. Austin and others are among the most acute, analytically perceptive, and historically informed readings that have yet been produced by any commentator, despite what is often described as his maverick or perversely heterodox way with those same texts. Where Derrida breaches the norms of conventional philosophic discourse - or the taken-for-granted standards of 'serious', 'responsible' commentary - this is not by evincing a wilful disregard for their manifest (intentional) purport nor yet for what his critics, John Searle most stridently, are apt to regard as their plain, self-evident

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sense.1 Rather it is by paying such careful attention to problematical or complicating details of the text in hand that more orthodox treatments - like Searle's exposition of Austinian speech-act theory - must themselves appear less than adequate in straightforward critical-expository terms. In other words Derrida is challenging philosophers to read the classic texts of their tradition with the kind of minute, close-focused exegetical care that has up to now been practised more by literary critics than by those whose primary (philosophical) concern is with issues of truth, logical form, conceptual validity, assertoric warrant, and so forth. So one can see what opponents like Searle and Jürgen Habermas have in mind when they accuse Derrida of wilfully collapsing the 'genre-distinction' (Habermas's term) between reason and rhetoric, or philosophy and literary criticism.2 However the charge cannot hold up if one then goes back to Derrida's texts - or reads them for the first time - and notes the degree of conceptual precision, the depth of analytical engagement, and (above all) the sustained logical rigour that typifies his deconstructive readings. Later on I shall offer some specific examples, so as not to leave these claims suspiciously devoid of substantive or detailed support. Meanwhile I can perhaps best broach the other main topic of this essay by remarking that postmodernists - or most of them - would think it absurdly beside the point to invoke such nowadays obsolete values as 'truth', 'conceptual precision', or 'logical rigour'. Indeed they would make a point of placing them within quotemarks, as I have here, but with the quite different purpose of putting their case that those values no longer possess any currency except as a kind of nostalgic throwback to bygone, 'modernist' habits of thought. (This way of scattering quotation-marks around as a hedge against saying anything in particular about anything in particular is a hallmark of postmodernist discourse so I shall henceforth try to avoid it as far as possible). The term 'postmodernism' is hard to define since it covers such a diverse range of movements, ideas, social trends, artistic styles, or cultural forms of life. In the arts alone one would have to distinguish between the different ways that it has been applied to literature, music, film, architecture, painting, and so forth.3 Still, there is an even more basic distinction which may provide a useful starting-point here. On the one hand you can think of postmodernism as a broad cultural phenomenon, as a worldview, an ethos, a life-style or something like that which eludes precise definition but perhaps can be characterised simply by pointing to its various

1 2 3

John R. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Glyph 1 (1977), 198-208; Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context", Glyph 1 (1977), 172-97. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: twelve lectures, tr. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (London: Athlone, 2000).

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manifestations in 'the way we live now'. 4 On the other there is postmodernism as a movement of thought which issues in certain statements, propositions, or theories concerning the so-called postmodern 'condition' and how we arrived at it. This movement of thought raises many questions that are basically philosophical in character, among them questions of epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and historical understanding. Very often it works out as a highly sceptical approach such as one finds in Jean Baudrillard's notion of postmodern 'hyperreality' - where the 'real' is just a figment of mass-induced media simulation - or in Jean-Francois Lyotard's text-book definition of postmodernism as an 'incredulity toward meta-narratives', that is, toward the philosophic discourse of modernity along with all its erstwhile progressive, enlightened, or critical-emancipatory values.5 So this is the kind of postmodernism under consideration here, in the hope of making the case that Derrida is no part of it, or at least that he stands squarely opposed to some of its more extreme and doctrinaire claims. Thus, for instance, there is a certain postmodernist way of thinking about history which goes roughly as follows. History is a fictive construct, a selective, partial, ideologically inflected view of the past. There is no historical truth, so postmodernists would say, but always a variety of different, competing, and strictly incommensurable claims about every significant historical event. This is the approach that Lyotard adopts, along with postmodern sceptical historiographers like Hayden White.6 It also takes rise from a certain, very partial and in fact (I think) thoroughly mistaken reading of Derrida, that is, the idea that all putative 'truths', including those with regard to historical events, are constructed in or through various modes of textual or discursive representation. Of those aspects of postmodernism I should want to resist, this is the one that most urgently needs resisting for the obvious reason that it opens the way to all manner of 'revisionist' distortions or suppressions of historical fact. The worst example, of course, is the revisionist approach that seeks to play down or to relativize what happened in Nazi Germany during the years of the Holocaust. But there are many other aspects and periods of history that are fiercely contested at the moment, and where the issue of truth - of getting things right in the face of competing ideological or politicallymotivated claims - is a matter of the utmost importance.

4 5

6

See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) for a sweeping and seductively argued treatment from this point of view. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); JeanFranfois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, tr. G. Bennington, B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984). Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984); also Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997).

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In this context postmodernism often goes along with a fashionable discourse on the 'end of history', that is to say, the idea that 'globalisation' has resulted in the triumph of liberal democracy, US-style, along with the emergence of free-market capitalism as the only economic system capable of promoting and sustaining such values. So history has come to an end not in the sense that future historians will have no further events to record but in the sense that there are no longer any great ideological conflicts - such as that, most recently, between Western capitalism and Eastern-bloc communism or state socialism - which provided the 'grand narrative' structure for philosopher-historians to date. Such is at any rate the argument advanced by the U. S. guru Francis Fukuyama in his much-hyped book The End of History and the Last Man. I mention it here partly because it picks up on a range of postmodernist idees regues, and partly because Derrida - in Spectres of Marx brings a whole battery of arguments to bear against it. Thus he makes short work of Fukuyama's philosophical confusions, his cavalier treatment of history, and (most of all) his moral obtuseness in casually dismissing the plentiful evidence that this 'New World Order', so far from marking an end to ideological conflict, has in fact given rise to massive inequalities of global wealth distribution and hence to wars, resurgent ethnic conflicts, economically-induced famines and droughts, massive population displacements, and human misery on a scale hitherto unknown.7 Indeed the sheer moral passion of Derrida's response to Fukuyama - as well as his insistence on getting things right, whether with respect to philosophical ideas or to matters of factual-historical record - is sufficient to mark his distance from the facile rhetoric of postmodern gurus and 'end-of-ideology' ideologues. He is likewise opposed to fashionable notions of the 'end of philosophy', put about by assorted Nietzscheans, Heideggerians, and (again) postmodernists such as Lyotard. For some, among them admirers of Derrida like Richard Rorty, what this means is the end of a certain way of doing (or professing) philosophy, one that was premised on a whole motley range of delusory 'foundationalist' notions such as truth, method, clear and distinct ideas, a priori concepts, transcendental arguments, primordial intuitions, sense-data, and so forth.8 Rather we should see that philosophy does best when it renounces these chronic delusions of epistemological grandeur and re-enters the 'cultural conversation of mankind' along with sociologists, anthropologists, art-historians, literary critics, and any others (free-thinking scientists included) who might care to join in. What is more, Derrida can help us here since he has shown that philosophy is just a 'kind of writing' that possesses no privileged access to truth but can always switch vocabularies 7 8

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, tr. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" in id., Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester 1982), 89-109.

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from time to time so as to open up new opportunities for creative selfdescription. Best of all, Rorty thinks, if it gives up the tired old concept/ metaphor distinction - a fetish among philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the present - and tries to enliven the cultural conversation with as many freshminted metaphors as come to hand. But this is not at all what Derrida is saying, any more than he wants - like Rorty - to do away with the distinctions between philosophy and literature, or reason and rhetoric, or truth and fiction. Hence Derrida's statement that any claim to simply 'turn the page' on philosophy most often just amounts to 'philosophising badly', or failing to read philosophical texts with adequate care and attention. After all, the same people who constantly announce the end of philosophy are still doing philosophy, whatever their desire to pretend or persuade us otherwise. Thus Rorty still writes about the great philosophers of the Western tradition, as well as about technical issues in recent philosophical semantics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. So for Rorty to say that philosophy has come to an end is just a bit premature even on the showing of his own avowedly 'postphilosophical' texts. And his attempt to recruit Derrida in the same cause is even less plausible given the evidence of Derrida's close and continuing engagement with specifically philosophical concerns. This is not to deny that there are passages in his writing - early and late which problematize the distinction between 'philosophy' and 'literature' in a way that lends some credence to Rorty's approving (postmodernist) gloss and also to the charge routinely brought against him by critics like Habermas.9 Still such claims are wide of the mark not only in the sense that Derrida's work has been focused very largely on philosophical texts but also in the sense that his reading of those texts is one that draws its logical and conceptual resources from a certain, distinctively philosophic mode of thought. It is a form of transcendental argument, of argument from the a priori conditions of possibility for various kinds of knowledge or experience. Thus Derrida typically asks questions like: 'What is the condition of possibility for distinguishing speech from writing, or concept from metaphor, or expressive from indicative signs (in his reading of Husserl), or nature from culture in the texts of Rousseau?' These are specifically philosophical questions about truth, logic, language, and representation. It is a heterodox approach, to be sure, one that discovers all kinds of hitherto unnoticed textual or logico-semantic complication, but still very much a philosophical approach with its source in thinkers like Plato and (especially) Kant. That the upshot is very often to reveal the condition of /«possibility for holding such distinctions in place thus a kind of negative transcendental argument - is a point I shall return to later on. All the same this result is arrived at through a practice of textual

9

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

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close-reading or conceptual exegesis that Derrida's detractors rarely see fit to apply. Indeed, it seems to me that Derrida is a very good analytic philosopher, not (of course) in the narrow or proprietary sense of 'analytic' which means (roughly speaking) the sort of approach that typifies post-1920 Anglophone philosophy of language and logic, but 'analytic' in the sense that he is a careful, perceptive, rigorous, and highly intelligent reader of texts. Take for instance the 'logic of supplementarity' which, for Derrida, denotes a certain form of deviant, anomalous or paradoxical reasoning to be found in various texts, especially those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.10 One example is Rousseau's theory of the origins of language and of the relation between speech and writing. Thus Rousseau quite explicitly "declares what he wishes to say", that is, that "articulation and writing are a post-originary malady of language", a supplementary resource that should arrive late on the scene and therefore pose no threat - no essential threat - to the ideal selfpresence of natural speech. However, Rousseau also "says or describes that which he does not wish to say: articulation and therefore the space of writing operates at the origin of language".11 Likewise with music: melody should be conceived as prior to harmony both in terms of historical development and as regards its intrinsically superior qualities of naturalness, spontaneity, and closeness to the origins of passionate speech-song. However, Rousseau is more than once constrained to say just the opposite of this, namely, that there cannot be - and historically never was - a melody so pure as to admit no taint of 'supplementary' harmonic structure. For melody (in Rousseau's own words) "has its principle in harmony, since it is harmonic analysis which gives the degrees of the scale, the chords of the mode, and the laws of the modulation, the only elements of singing".12 With music as with language there is no escaping the perverse supplementary logic that somehow requires a supposedly derivative, even parasitical feature to function as the basis - the very condition of possibility - for that which ought to come first and be wholly self-sufficient. For if song is 'essentially a kind of modification of the human voice', then there can be no appeal to anything like that idealised originary condition of music when melody and language were perfectly united in the moment of pure, self-present, natural expression. And if 'the interval is part of the definition of song', that is, if harmonic (intervallic) structures are prerequisite to any conception of melodic form, then it follows that harmony must somehow be thought of as a kind of 'originary accessory and essential accident', one that confounds not only Rousseau's express argument but also the dictates of a classical logic grounded in the principle of non-contradiction.

10 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 11 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 229. 12 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 212.

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Then again, Rousseau declares: one should be able to think the origins of civil society in terms of an original close-knit organic community which only later became subject to all the bad effects of social division, property laws, delegated authority, specialised skills (such as writing), etc. Yet this is an argument that Rousseau cannot sustain without running up against the sheer impossibility of describing a state of social existence that would not already have suffered the transition to those kinds of differential structure which contravene his own prescription. Just as 'language is born out of the process of its own degeneration', so society is born out of those same 'civilised' (i. e., decadent and corrupting) factors which should belong to a late stage in its development yet which must be conceived as having existed from the outset. So likewise with the Rousseauist opposition between 'nature' and 'culture', the one bearing all his positive values of innocence, spontaneity, passion, organic communal life, etc., while the other connotes all the bad ('supplementary') effects of civilised artifice and social decadence. Yet clearly there can be no idea or definition of 'nature' - even the kinds of primitivist definition favoured by Rousseau and his Romantic disciples - that does not partake of certain cultural values, in this case values having their origin in Rousseau's revolt against the 'civilised' conventions of his time. More than that: such a logic of supplementarity will turn out to affect any theory of language, culture, or civil society based (like Rousseau's) on the prescriptive appeal to a state of nature conceived as prior to the advent of cultural institutions. Quite simply, this would not yet have been a society - in even the most primitive sense of that term - just as language would not yet have been language in the absence of just those constitutive features (articulation, syntax, lexical distinctions, tense-structure and so forth) which for Rousseau mark the beginning of its decline into 'civilised' decadence and artifice. What Rousseau undoubtedly wishes to think is that a firm categorical distinction can be drawn between nature and culture, speech and writing, melody and harmony, that which is natural or 'proper' to humankind and that which in each case comes as a corrupting influence from outside. Thus the supplement would always - by very definition - be a late arrival and something decidedly extraneous, i. e., a mere supplement whose presence is by no means required (and whose absence is indeed desirable) in order that nature should take its proper course. However there is a different sense of the word whereby 'supplement' is defined as that which completes - or makes whole what would otherwise be lacking or deficient in some crucial respect. Rousseau insists that the various supplements of culture, writing, harmony, etc., be confined to that first meaning of the term and thus preserve a due respect for the 'natural' order of priority in each case. Yet he is often compelled by the logic of his own argument to admit just the kinds of telling counter-evidence which effectively invert that order.

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So it is wrong - a mistake commonly made by Derrida's postmodernist admirers and 'analytic' detractors alike - to think of the 'logic of supplementarity' as a pseudo-logic or a textualist excuse for wilfully subverting all reputable standards of logical argument. Rather, what emerges from his reading of Rousseau is a specific kind of non-classical or 'deviant' logic that involves certain complex modal constructions (having to with matters of necessity or possibility) and certain equally complicated orders of temporal or tense-related priority. These are topics that have lately received a good deal of attention from philosophers of logic, some of whom (Graham Priest among them) are now taking a lively interest in Derrida's work.13 A similar point can be made with regard to his famous neologism differance, taken by some as a mere piece of wordplay that exemplifies Derrida's lack of concern with 'serious' philosophical argument.14 The deviant 'a' in the word's last syllable, as Derrida pointedly spells it, is intended as a kind of graphic pun which conjoins the nominalized form of the two French verbs meaning respectively 'to differ' and 'to defer'. His purpose in deploying this portmanteau term is to indicate the process of constant 'differing-deferral' that marks every instance of language, thought, and perception. Thus language is conceived (following Saussure) as a structure of purely differential contrasts and oppositions 'without positive terms', a bipolar system of phonetic and semantic relationships that allows of no direct, one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, or word and concept. However, Saussure failed to carry this programme through to its ultimate conclusion since he continued to think of spoken language as somehow more natural or proper than writing in virtue of its greater communicative power, its proximity to the sources of authentic meaning or self-present utterer's intent. What emerges from a deconstructive reading of Saussure's text is the fact that his structuralist theory of language cannot do without the appeal to writing - to 'graphematic' images, metaphors, heuristic devices, and so forth - in order to make good its cardinal claims about the differential character of all language, spoken and written alike. Thus Saussure stands out as a striking example of the deep-laid logocentric prejudice that has typified the mainstream Western philosophical tradition from Plato to the present day. Differance as 'deferral' has to do with time and with the notion of temporal experience as focused on the 'now' or the self-present moment of awareness in relation to which - on the classical account - we distinguish both past memories and future anticipations. What Derrida brings out, most specifically in his reading of Husserl, is the absolute and principled impossibility of drawing any clear-cut, punctual distinction between these temporal aspects. 13 Graham Priest, The Limits of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). 14 Jacques Derrida, "Differance", in id., Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 3-27.

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For the 'now' can only be defined by contrast with whatever precedes or whatever lies ahead of its supposedly privileged status as the source of our most basic intuitions concerning the various modalities of time-consciousness. Differance thus functions - with respect to both Saussure and Husserl - as a point of deconstructive leverage whereby to question such grounds of intuitive self-evidence. It is also very useful for Derrida's purpose in so far as the anomalous 'a' is a feature that registers only 'as read', i. e. at the level of graphic inscription, and which fails to register as difference in oral (spoken) pronunciation. This helps to reinforce his point that language - like timeconsciousness - involves certain differential features that cannot be fully grasped or conceptualised on the basis of a dominant 'metaphysics of presence' which assumes the natural priority of speech over writing. The word 'grammatology', standardly defined as 'the study or science of writing systems', is thus redeployed by Derrida in a far wider, philosophically more ambitious sense: 'the critique of logocentric values and priorities through a deconstructive reading of texts'. Hence, Derrida argues, the idea to be found in philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Husserl, and Austin: namely, that speech (not writing) is the paradigm case of what language ought to be - or what all communication should properly aspire to - when concerned with issues of meaning and truth. For in the act of speech, so this tradition maintains, there is a privileged access to expressive intentions or ideas-in-the-mind which helps to ensure that we attain genuine self-knowledge, that we communicate this knowledge effectively, and that others are able to interpret our words with least risk of misunderstanding. S'entendre-parler - 'hearing/understanding-oneself-speak' - is the phrase by which Derrida punningly captures this implicit equation between spoken language and the idea of a truth vouchsafed to the mind in a state of self-communing inwardness or rapport-a-soi. In the case of writing, conversely, we have to do with what Plato denounced in his dialogue the Phaedrus as a bad mnemotechnic device; what Aristotle defined as merely 'the sign of a sign', that is, graphic symbols for spoken sounds, themselves symbols of pre-existing concepts or ideas; and what Rousseau thought of as a 'bad supplement', one that inherently corrupted the character of authentic, selfpresent speech. Derrida's point, in brief, is that all these texts 'selfdeconstruct', or undermine their own major premise, by appealing to certain attributes of writing (such as its capacity to signify or communicate meaning in the absence of any appeal to self-present utterer's intent) which necessarily apply to language in general, i. e., both written and spoken language. Wittgenstein made a similar point about the impossibility of conceiving a

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'private language' that would make sense only to its solitary user / inventor quite apart from shared or communal codes and conventions.15 These summaries of a few key topics in Derrida's work do nothing like justice to its range, depth, and extraordinary power to challenge existing habits of thought. That he is also a writer of great stylistic resource is perhaps one reason why many analytic philosophers - Searle among them - have been apt to treat him as a literary gadfly undeserving of serious attention. Yet one only need cite the examples of Plato, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein in order to expose the fallacy of thinking that all philosophy should properly aspire to the genre of the academic journal-article or the kind of first-person authorised discourse that eschews modes of oblique, ironic, dialogical, or otherwise 'literary' presentation. Yet it is just as wrong to suppose - in company with postmodern textualists like Rorty - that Derrida's writings are chiefly of value for opening up fresh creative possibilities (or new 'metaphors we can live by') and thus discrediting that old conception of philosophy as a serious, constructive, logically disciplined, and truth-oriented mode of enquiry. A crucial text here is his essay "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy".16 Let me say straight off - for those who haven't read it - that this is a subtle, immensely well-informed, and conceptually rigorous account of the role that metaphor has played in the thinking of philosophers, literary theorists, rhetoricians, and (not least) natural scientists. One point it makes with considerable emphasis is that all these thinkers have been working within a certain inherited tradition whose sources are primarily philosophical and which has thus provided the very terms and distinctions - such as that between 'concept' and 'metaphor' - that make such a discourse possible. Yet Derrida is often interpreted as saying: 'all concepts are metaphors', 'philosophy is just a kind of writing', 'logic is a fictive or rhetorical construct', 'truth is just a product of suasive definition', and other crudely simplified (postmodernist) slogans of that sort. In which case, of course, there could be no possibility of theorising or explicating metaphor, of accounting for its well-known heuristic role in the development of scientific theories. But if you read "White Mythology" with a bit more care then you will see that this is not at all what Derrida is saying. On the contrary, he engages closely with a whole range of texts - from Aristotle to Gaston Bachelard - which have sought to account for specific advances in knowledge through the progressive elaboration and critique of scientific metaphor. To be sure, there is a sense in which science and philosophy cannot do without certain basic, constitutive, grounding, or 'fundamental' metaphors, figures of thought which are so pervasive that they 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. Ε. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 16 Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy" in id., Margins of Philosophy.

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resist any attempt to explicate their meaning in 'purely' conceptual or nonmetaphorical terms. Yet he is still very far from rejecting the idea that certain metaphors (not others) are capable of producing genuine advances in scientific knowledge, and moreover, that it is possible to offer some account of just what is involved in this process. Thus Bachelard characterises the role of metaphor, image, and analogy in scientific discourse as offering a vital creative-exploratory resource but also when such figures are accepted uncritically or too much at face value - as posing a retrograde "obstacle to thought".17 Hence the process of "rectification and critique" whereby some metaphors can be shown to have yielded adequate (scientifically operative) concepts while others can be shown to have met their limit at a stage of intuitive, pre-theoretical grasp. Hence also his resistance to any account of paradigm-change - like that proposed by Thomas Kuhn - that would treat such episodes as affording no purchase for normative (transparadigm) standards of validity and truth.18 It seems to me that Derrida's work has much in common with Bachelard's critical-rationalist approach to issues in philosophy of science. Readers who have yet to be convinced - since this goes clean against so many prevalent ideas - may wish to check my claim against the detailed evidence of Derrida's early writings on Husserl, especially the texts devoted to Husserl's philosophy of mathematics, logic, and the formal sciences.19 Nothing could be further from the postmodern notion - as Lyotard blithely expresses it - that science has now given up its attachment to such antiquated values as objectivity or truth and come around to the view that everything is a matter of chaos, uncertainty, undecidability, paradox, multiple 'heterogeneous' language-games, and so forth. To be sure, Derrida has much to say about the limits of classical logic when applied to texts (like those of Husserl) which press that logic to the point of revealing its constitutive blind-spots or aporias. This latter term ('aporia') is the Greek for 'obstacle', 'blocked passage', or 'unpassable path'. It was used mainly by classical logicians and rhetoricians to signify some paradox, contradiction, or insoluble problem encountered in the course of reasoning on various topics. This usage had its origin in the thinking of the pre-Socratic philosophers - among them Zeno, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras who raised far-reaching speculative questions and found themselves regularly driven to paradoxical (aporetic) conclusions. Such questions had to do with time, space, cosmology, motion, mathematics, and the ultimate constituents of 17 Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: a philosophy of the new philosophic mind (New York: Orion Press, 1968). 18 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1970). 19 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry': an introduction, tr. Edward P. Leavey (Stony Brook: Hays, 1978); id., Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1973).

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matter. In each case they produced a contradictory outcome, a pair of incompatible or mutually exclusive verdicts, both of which appeared to follow from first principles by the strictest logical necessity. Thus time must be conceived both as a succession of present instants and as an objective coordinate system where past, present and future have no essential or necessary reference to human temporal experience. So likewise with space, which must and yet cannot be thought of infinitely extended, or as capable of endless subdivision into ever-smaller regions. The aporias of motion were most graphically expressed in Zeno's famous series of paradoxes, including those of the arrow that would never reach its target and Achilles who would never overtake the tortoise. And in the case of matter it seemed both necessary and impossible that there should exist certain elementary particles (atoms) which could not be further decomposed into yet more basic constituent parts. Later philosophers sought to avert these aporias by various stipulative means. Thus, according to Kant, they resulted from the tendency of pure reason to overreach the limits of human understanding - where phenomenal intuitions must be 'brought under' adequate concepts - and hence to produce all manner of speculative puzzles and paradoxes. This tendency could best be held in check by doing what the pre-Socratics so conspicuously failed to do, that is, by drawing a clear distinction between epistemological and ontological issues, or those that fell within the bounds of humanly attainable knowledge and those that lay beyond its utmost cognitive grasp. Nevertheless, such aporias have continued to arise and create periodic bouts of vexation despite the best efforts of philosophers to legislate them out of existence. Bertrand Russell turned up one such example which struck at the heart of his own previous attempt to derive the whole of mathematics from a few self-evident logical axioms. This was the famous set-theoretical paradox: 'that set whose members include all sets that are not members of themselves'. (In a similar, if somewhat more homely vein: if there is a barber in town who shaves every man who does not shave himself, then who shaves the barber?) Russell decided that the best way to avoid these mind-bogglers was to rule them out as a matter of stipulative warrant, that is, by drawing a firm, categorical line between first-order (object-language) and higher-level (meta-linguistic) statements. Only thus, he thought, could one hope to avoid such self-referential paradoxes. Still it is hard to resist the conclusion that this amounts to little more than a face-saving gambit or an exercise in adhoc damage-limitation. Derrida's approach is not so much to bootstrap his way out of these logical dilemmas as to pinpoint the kinds of problem they create for any straightforward, logically consistent reading of the text in hand. It involves locating certain deep-laid binary oppositions - such as those between nature and culture, reason and rhetoric, concept and metaphor, philosophy and literature, speech and writing - where the first term in each pair has been

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accorded a privileged status and the second treated as derivative or merely supplementary. At which point Derrida goes on to show that these binaries are highly unstable, with the second - supposedly derivative - term very often turning out to be logically prior to (or a condition of possibility for) the first. That is to say, their order of priority is reversed through the presence of a counter-logic - a 'logic of supplementarity' - which is demonstrably there in the text and which itself requires a reading of the utmost rigour and precision.20 As I have said, this is the feature of his work that has lately drawn the attention of philosophers interested in various sorts of 'deviant', manyvalued, or paraconsistent logic.21 For postmodernists like Lyotard, conversely, there is just no point in pursuing such analysis beyond the stage where it acknowledges the open-ended plurality of narratives, language-games, or discourses. And then it is no great distance to the kind of ultra-relativist outlook that typifies a good deal of present-day cultural and literary theory. So it is worth hanging on to the distinction between postmodernism and deconstruction, even if it is one that involves - as here - a fair amount of detailed unpacking. At any rate I hope to have made the case that Derrida is not a postmodernist in so far as that term has any valid application to developments in recent philosophical (or 'post-philosophical') debate.

20 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 21 Priest, The Limits of Thought.

HELGA THALHOFER

Paradox vs. Analogy: De Man and Foucault On Meeting Again A man who had not seen Mr Κ for a long time greeted him with the words: 'You haven't changed at all.' O h ! ' said Mr Κ and turned pale. 1

The uneasiness which Mr Κ feels in view of the man's attempt to classify him and not to allow him to undergo change in the course of time astutely illustrates the objections of poststructuralist critics to structuralist systematization. For the structuralist, plurality in interpretation and the disparate singular element is "disquieting",2 since novelty disrupts and endangers the rules on which the system is grounded. This article demonstrates that Paul de Man's and Michel Foucault's critique of structuralism and New Criticism can be pinpointed in the rejection of thinking in analogies3 within literary analysis and subject politics, respectively. The contrast of the two critics with structuralism elucidates in what way their observations contribute to literary and subject theory nowadays. De Man shows that the apparent equivalences "discovered" in texts by structuralism (between literal and figurative meaning, between text and reality, between the singular element and the overall structure) actually miss the text's ambiguous meaning. Similarly, Foucault rejects practices which liken human beings on the grounds of what seems to be authentic human essence, arguing that the individual rather resists its subsumption under an encompassing system. By revealing that the text's and the subject's apparent unity is in fact constructed, both de Man and Foucault urge developing a thinking in dynamic differences that replaces the 1

2 3

Bertolt Brecht, Tales from the Calendar, tr. Yvonne Kapp, Michael Hamburger (London: Methuen, 1961), 124: "Das Wiedersehen. / Ein Mann, der Herrn Κ. lange nicht gesehen hatte, begrüßte ihn mit den Worten: 'Sie haben sich gar nicht verändert.' / „Oh!" sagte Herr K. und erbleichte." Bertolt Brecht, "Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner" in id., Gesammelte Werke. Prosa 2, 20 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967), XII, 383. Interestingly, Linda Hutcheon sees Brecht as a pioneer of postmodern thought. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (New York, London: Routledge, 1996 [1988]), 218ff. Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, "Les categories du ricit litteraire", Communications 8 (1969), 125-151, 132. De Man points to the affinity between structuralism and New Criticism in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 2728,32. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as ΉΓ).

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belief in entities and static structures. This approach implies a turning away from theory that is detached from its (textual) application towards the actual subject and the performative event of reading. The misunderstanding that postmodernist criticism does away with meaning in favour of a non-referential 'play' of signs definitely does not apply to de Man's and Foucault's analyses. This fallacy had arisen out of the assumption that in the wake of structuralism all theory replaces the meaning of words with intratextual cross-references. Quite the contrary, by considering the reference of language, de Man is in search of meaning, Foucault in search of extra-linguistic reality and ethics, whereby both regain what appear to be more moderate aspects of theory.

De Man's Unreadability-Reference and Meaning De Man's relationship to structuralism and New Criticism has been lucidly elaborated by various critics,4 but has not yet succinctly been considered as a dismissal of literary analysis based on constructing analogies in texts. It is indispensable to present de Man's method as the critique of interpretative networks that subsume incompatible elements under a unifying structure, since this practice falls short of accounting for a text's specific meaning. De Man's theory of unreadability sets out with Friedrich Nietzsche's claim that not only the trope is figurative, but also language as such. As Nietzsche expands in his essay "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense", each sign translates another sign without indicating that it switches between two semiotic systems: First, he [the creator of language] translates a nerve stimulus into an image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a sound! The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of spheres - from one sphere to the center of a totally different, new one. 5

4

5

See Rodolphe Gasche, The Wild Card of Reading (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard UP, 1998); Bettina Stix, Rhetorische Aufmerksamkeit. Formalistische und strukturalistische Vorgaben in Paul de Mans Methode der Literaturwissenschaft (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1997) and Michael Cebulla, Wahrheit und Authentizität. Zur Entwicklung der Literaturtheorie Paul de Mans (Stuttgart: Μ und Ρ Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992). Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense" in Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP: 1989), 246-257, 248-49. "Ein Nervenreiz zuerst übertragen [ist] ein Bild! Erste Metapher. Das Bild wieder nachgeformt in einem Laut! Zweite Metapher. Und jedesmal vollständiges Überspringen der Sphäre, mitten hinein in eine ganz andere und neue." Friedrich Nietzsche, "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn" in Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), I, 875-890, 879.

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De Man takes the negative view of metaphor as being "a lie superimposed upon an error" from Nietzsche. 6 As an original referent, which is not itself a "wild, spontaneous metaphor", does not exist (AR, 153), the text as a semiotic system disappoints all hopes of serving as a useful epistemological medium and thwarts the cognitive conclusion which it promises. 7 In his earlier poststructuralist argumentation, de Man claims that one cannot know whether the signifier points to an extra-textual referent or not. It is "not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language" (RT, 11). Far from denying the existence of the referent (the extralinguistic object), poststructuralist theorists hold that it only appears in texts as a spectre or force, as Christophe Den Tandt rightly points out.8 Language can exclusively speak about itself. Yet de Man retains the referential function of language. Not to be conflated with the extra-textual referent, de Man understands "reference" as the sign's signified meaning, thus as part of the sign itself.9 The sign's referential function is a "vector" indicating its direction towards a referent, a "motion that is manifest only as a turn, since the target toward which it turns remains unknown": 10 [T]he referential function of language is not being denied - far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition. (RT, 11)

For de Man, the question about the potential of language for gaining "natural or phenomenal cognition" loses its importance, as a text's meaning is more crucial than its capacity for imitating reality. De Man goes beyond the postmodern question how reality can be represented in texts, as he does not content himself with stating the cognitive failure of language to reach reality." De Man's insistence on the text's meaning replaces the quest for the relationship between language and referent and makes any doubts about the epistemological potential of language superfluous.

6

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1979), 155. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'AR'). 7 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 10. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as "RT'). 8 Den Tandt lucidly explains the status of the referent for postmodern theorists in his essay included in this volume (cf. above, 128). 9 "There can be [...] no sign without a referent" (AR, 12), and: "[A] language entirely freed of referential constraints is properly inconceivable" (AR, 49). 10 Paul de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuation" in id., Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, Theory and History of Literature, 65 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 5169, 56. 11 Cf. Michel Foucault's essay "Le langage ä Pinfini" in id., Dits et tcrits, 4 vols (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994), I, 250-61, in which Foucault speaks of the abyss and silence which language encounters when it tries to reach reality.

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De Man's Allegories of Reading mark his turn from the first cognitive paradox, i. e. the incompatibility between signifier (word) and referent (object), to the second paradox between a text's figurative and literal meaning. As the reader oscillates between two mutually exclusive readings, without being able to prioritize one reading over the other, he cannot fix any meaning at all. The text's own rhetoric, i. e. the tension between literal and figurative meaning, eventually turns the text against itself so that it becomes unreadable. The text allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding. (AR, 131)

This never-ending process becomes clear in the closing line of W. B. Yeats's poem "Among School Children": Ο body swayed to music, Ο brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (quoted from AR, 11)

De Man, in turn, asks: how can we tell whether this is a rhetorical or a literal question (AR, 11)? If understood in the former sense, it would emphatically affirm that body and spirit merge, and the poem would end with the resignation of the speaker over being faced with the task of keeping two disparate concepts apart. If read literally, "dancer" and "dance" can be taken as the signifier and signified of the structuralist sign, whose difference the literal question endorses. The literal reading, i. e. the impossibility of disentangling the structuralist sign, affects the figurative reading in that it claims it is necessary to tell the two contradictory notions of dancer and dance apart, and not to affirm their unity, since they are not identical. Neither reading can be conceived without the other.12 If the unity of two concepts is affirmed, the awareness nevertheless prevails that there are two different notions of which the unity is stated. Yet in turn, once the reader accepts that they are disparate and asks the literal question: how can one separate them and avoid "the error of identifying what cannot be identified?" (AR, 11), he realizes that he is unable to tell them apart: The two readings have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it. (AR, 12)

Since each reading potentially contains in itself the other reading, the reader cannot fix the meaning of Yeats's line, and, as a consequence, the message of 12 "It is not so that there are simply two meanings, one literal and the other figural, and that we have to decide which one of these meanings is the right one in this particular situation" (AR, 10). Another passage in AR reads: "[We cannot] make a valid decision as to which of the readings can be given priority over the other; none can exist in the other's absence" (AR, 12).

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the whole poem. Even the context, i. e. the rest of the poem, cannot give any hint which reading should be preferred over the other. To be sure, the preceding lines in Yeats's poem rather suggest the figurative reading (AR, 11), but paradox sets forth a self-sufficient oscillation which makes the question about the context superfluous.13 There is no third point outside which could disrupt the self-reflection of one part of the paradox referring to the other. Yet paradox influences the overall meaning of the poem to such an extent that the reader is unable to tell which pole is decisive. De Man exemplifies how the undecidability between literal and figurative sense suspends the whole text's meaning by the opening of another poem by W. B. Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole": The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans ...M

Is this a real or a spiritually transfigured landscape? The word "swan" might stand for the animal swan, or, as de Man suggests, as figurative of the "'loveliness' and 'purity'" of the soul (RR, 136).15 Yet "swan" simultaneously carries with it its literal meaning. The reader is thus unable to answer the question which the poem raises: can knowledge be obtained by adhering to the "transient world of matter" (by literal reading) or by "divine revelation" (by figurative reading; RR, 202)?16 The poem does not allow the reader to draw the cognitive conclusion which it promises, as the reader cannot tell whether the glimpses of unity which we perceive at times can be made more permanent by natural ways or by the ascesis of renunciation, by [natural] images or by [spiritual] emblem. (RR, 202) 13 De Man rejects the context as useless for the decision between two meanings: "Both readings are grammatically correct, but it is impossible to decide from the context (the ensuing narrative) which version is the right one. The narrative context suits neither and both at the same time" (RT, 16). As de Man points out, the figurative reading appears as more apparent at first sight, which leads Karl-Heinz Bohrer to call de Man's readings "anti-intuitive". Yet there are no grounds on which an anti-intuitive reading that makes sense might be refuted, as Bohrer implies in his editorial introduction to Ästhetik und Rhetorik. Lektüren zu Paul de Man (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 7. 14 Quoted from Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 204. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'RR'). 15 Having traced the conflict "natural-spiritual" in Yeats's entire work, de Man transfers it to this poem as well. Yet the apposition "nine-and-fifty" makes work-immanent examination superfluous, since this estranging element, unlikely to occur in a usually vague description of a natural scene, already points to a figurative reading. 16 Here, de Man refers to the question "How can we know the dancer from the dance?", but the problem "worldly-spiritual" that recurs repeatedly in Yeats's work also applies to this passage.

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As the reader is unable to fix one single meaning, he is thrown back to the text's materiality and fictional nature. A third paradox arises: the sublation of the text's meaning causes the reader to oscillate between thematic17 and metatextual reading, i. e. between incompatible statements and the awareness that they are only fictional. The text as sign foregrounds its own materiality, as it "knows and names itself as fiction" (BI, 17-18). As de Man slightly awkwardly puts it: "the phenomenal substance of the sign [...] is enhanced".18 The fact that the reader needs the thematic reading before switching to the metatextual level makes evident that de Man does not merely adopt the poststructuralist theory of language's self-reference. His close examination of the text's meaning refutes any objections that his method deals with the tautologous argumentative loop that language points exclusively to itself.19 A further paradox between metatextual and thematic reading arises when the latter turns into a prescription of how to read the text metapoetically. This process becomes obvious in de Man's observations on Nietzsche's theory of language and the self,20 as the latter develops it in "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense". Nietzsche reveals the self to be a mere linguistic construct which serves as a metaphysical centre, though it lacks any empirical essence. Simultaneously, Nietzsche knows that when deconstructing the subject by exposing it as being a metaphor without ground, he nevertheless reasserts its "existence" (if only a linguistic existence) ex negative by speaking about it, simply by using the word "self'. He is still mired in grammar, as de Man shows: Making the language that denies the self into a center rescues the self linguistically at the same time that it asserts [...] its emptiness as a mere figure of speech. It can only persist as self if it is displaced into the text that denies it. The self which was at first the center of the language as its empirical referent now becomes the language of the center as [...] metaphor of the self. (AR, 111-12)

The signified meaning of "self' - i. e. its function as a centre - is applied to language itself, so that language becomes the new centre. The word "self' is therefore, metaphorically speaking, the "language of language", one word in the language of language. Only a reversal of properties, a shift of emphasis, has taken place, not the abolition of the concept "self' altogether,21 since by 17 Using Gasche's terminology, "thematic" designates both the literal and figurative meaning of a word. Cf. Gasche, The Wild Card of Reading, 24. Gasch6 is probably the best critic of de Man's work, especially with regard to philosophical issues. 18 Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription" in id., The Resistance to Theory, 27-53, 34. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'HI'). 19 Jürgen Fohrmann voices this reproach in "Misreadings revisited. Eine Kritik des Konzepts von Paul de Man" in Bohrer (ed.), Ästhetik und Rhetorik, 79-97; 94. 20 Cf. Paul de Man, "Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche)" in AR, 103-118. 21 De Man shows that Nietzsche himself is aware of the self-unravelling effect of language in Nietzsche's own comments on The Birth of Tragedy (cf. AR, 117-18).

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deconstructing the self, Nietzsche nevertheless evokes it. De Man points out that Nietzsche's theory is subject to its own implications since it cannot escape the pitfalls of rhetoric. Although revealing the underlying structure of a totality, Nietzsche nevertheless adheres to its terminology. A negative insight is still an insight. Deconstruction can never folly abolish a linguistic concept, but merely expose its "figural and epistemologically unreliable structure" (AR, 187).22 In order to avoid positing a new totality, it triggers an infinite process of ever new deconstructions, which cannot be stopped by any fixed point outside. Since all that the text weaves unravels at the very moment of weaving, there could be no text any more: The wisdom of the text is self-destructive (art is true but truth kills itself), but this self-destruction is infinitely displaced in a series of successive rhetorical reversals which, by the endless repetition of the same figure, keep it suspended between truth and the death of this truth. (AR, 115)

And even this observation is not the ultimate conclusion the reader has to draw. The insight that the text's claim (the self exists) is contradicted by the text's performance (the self is only linguistic) is not highly astute in itself and would end in an impasse if it were considered as a final result. De Man is eager to question the new position that only language is able to account for language immediately, by transferring the third paradox between thematic and self-reflective meaning to "Reading" itself. The reader cannot step out of his own reading any more than he is able to look at his own eyes without the help of a mirror. Like language that cannot account for itself by its own means, i. e. by language, the reader is unable to observe his own reading and to grasp "what [..] subverts understanding": [The impossibility o f reading] extends to the word "reading" which is thus deprived of any referential meaning whatsoever. [...] [T]his word bars access [...] to a meaning that yet can never cease to call out for its understanding. (AR, 77)

"Reading" is no longer understood literally, but becomes a trope itself, i. e. an allegory of Reading. It is, as Gasche comments, "a 'statement' about the structural obstacles that a text mounts against all attempts to comprehend it as a whole".23 The text is "the allegorical narrative of its own deconstruction" (AR, 72):24 The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure [...] and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstructive narratives centered on

22 "The convincing power of the identity principle ["the subject"] is due to an analogical, metaphorical substitution of the sensation of things for the knowledge of entities" (AR, 122). 23 Gasche, The Wild Card of Reading, 32. 24 For an analysis of this process see Gasche, The Wild Card of Reading, 34.

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figures and ultimately always on metaphor, we can call such narratives to the second (or the third) degree allegories. (AR, 205) Enacting the failure of reading, de Man's method ends in aporia. The critic who traces the text's contradictions is bound to realize that his own interpretation fails. In the very moment when he gains insight into the text's paradoxical meaning, he "has to break off his understanding" (RT, 16), since he cannot get out of the process which de Man compares with being caught in a revolving door. De Man criticizes Gerard Genette for "remaining within [this] undecidable situation" 25 without foregrounding the deconstructive chain that is triggered. In short, Paul de Man develops an infinite project: he stretches the concept of allegory from our sensuous perception of the world (Nietzsche), the thematic paradox (Yeats) and the paradox between thematic and metatextual reading (Nietzsche's self) to the impossibility of understanding "reading". Reading is therefore a series of allegories that are in fact one single allegory manifesting itself on different levels.

Allegory vs. Metaphor What leads de Man to define the correlation between those four paradoxes as allegorical? He argues that it is not analogous or metaphorical, since the signified cannot be made similar to signifier or referent by coercion. De Man rejects metaphor as exemplary of all tropes based on similarity, since it conveys the illusion of a natural link between its literal and figurative meaning that actually does not exist. Being in fact an arbitrary juxtaposition of two disparate concepts (AR, 71), metaphor obscures the lack of resemblance between its two meanings and takes on a totalizing claim.26 For de Man, allegory is a better model for the relationship between the paradoxes, as allegory makes clear that the link between its two meanings is based on convention. Since its two poles are not exchangeable as in metaphor, allegory forecloses their unity. The allegory's "temporal predicament", i. e. the fact that

25 Genette outlines the impossiblity deciding whether Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu is autobiography or fiction. See Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), 67-81, 70. In similar argumentation, de Man criticizes Meyer H. Abrams for not fully elaborating the paradox between Romantic projection of the subject's consciousness onto nature, and the object that provides the screen for this projection. Cf. Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Charles S. Singleton, Interpretation. Theory and Practice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1969), 173-209, 182. 26 Characteristic of this fallacy is the "exchange of properties made possible by a proximity or an analogy so close [...] that it allows the one to substitute for the other without revealing the difference necessarily introduced by the substitution" (AR, 62).

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the reader switches between the two meanings without being able to perceive them simultaneously, prevents closure.27 Metaphor is the model par excellence for structuralist thinking in analogies. In de Man's account, the aim of finding similarities is the reason why formalist surface analysis cannot account for a text's contradictions. The structuralist sees the oppositions commonly appearing in his analyses merely as a concept and its counterpart, thus as nevertheless fitting into the overall structure. He would not turn this opposition into a method of reading. And the structuralist establishes a further analogy: since he regards stylistic figures as being mere linguistic ornaments that can be translated into "plain, normal" language, he falsely sees the text's figurative meaning as interchangeable with its literal reading. In de Man's words: Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Greimas [...] simplify [...] in letting grammar and rhetoric function in perfect continuity, and in passing from grammatical to rhetorical structures without difficulty or interruption. [...] [T]he study of tropes and of figures [...] becomes a mere extension of grammatical models, a particular subset of syntactical relations. (AR, 6)

"Passing" between structures and "continuity" means that in the structuralist's eyes, grammar and rhetoric never contradict each other. As a consequence, the structuralist ignores the fact that the text figuratively affirms something different - the unity of dancer and dance - , from what it literally says - the necessity of telling the two concepts 'dancer' and 'dance' apart. In the same sense, the structuralist ignores that the metatextual reading contradicts the thematic reading, since he merely presents the self-reflective reading as one possibility running parallel to the thematic reading. If he noted that Nietzsche's "self' is revealed as being created by language, he would not apply the meaning of "self' to language itself and recognize that language turns into the new centre. De Man criticizes Genette for mistranslating rhetorical figures into syntactical structures, "without considering the possibility of logical tensions" between rhetoric and grammar (AR, 7). He questions the validity of Genette's attempt to define non-logical figures of speech by a "taxonomy" of grammatical rules (AR, 7), i. e. "to speak of hypotaxis, for instance, to designate anamorphic or metonymic tropes" (RT, 15). Following Jakobson, Genette describes metonymy and metaphor by syntagma and paradigma, thus transferring linguistic terms to poetical devices,28 instead of defining metaphor and metonymy via the lack of similitude. De Man objects to referring a word's various connotations back to its denotation (AR, 7). He refutes such

27 Paul de Man, "New criticism et nouvelle critique", Preuves 188 (October 1966), 29-37, 35. 28 Cf. Gerard Genette, Figures III (Paris: ßditions du Seuil, 1972), 54.

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"grammatical decoding, however refined" as reductionist (RT, 15), since it misses the text's contradictions: The question remains whether the logical difficulties inherent in the act of interpretation can be avoided by thus moving from an actual, particular text to an ideal one (BI, 107).

Tzvetan Todorov and Oswald Ducrot establish an ideal text as well when regarding the singular work as a mere illustration of "categories that allow us to grasp simultaneously the unity and the variety of literary works".29 In de Man's eyes, the "grammatical structures singled out by Jakobson und LeviStrauss are irrelevant" since they miss meaning (HI, 32). All attempts to apply Chomsky's transformational grammar to structuralist literary theory, thus to create an all-encompassing explicatory matrix for literary texts, are "highly effective as a descriptive discipline, but at the cost of understanding" (HI, 30).30

This lack of understanding arises out of the structuralist reduction of specific signified meaning to a mere signifying potential of language. By declaring that "the object of [structuralist] poetics is constituted more by potential works than by existing ones",31 Todorov and Ducrot reduce the text to being one possible realization of literariness. The text is regarded as an example of theory (AR, 270). Yet the contradiction between two signified meanings of one signifier only becomes manifest when the text is read as performative narration, and when the words' reference is considered - "the application of an undetermined, general potential for meaning to a specific unit" (AR, 268), as de Man defines reference.32

Close Reading without Closure De Man assigns the task of tracing the never-ending oscillation to the reader. Only the reader, "[f]aced with the ineluctable necessity to come to a decision" (RT, 16), is able to weigh various meanings against each other and recognize 29 Tzvetan Todorov, Oswald Ducrot, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, tr. Catherine Porter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 79. 30 See also RT, 14; BI, 32. Formalism gives away the "phenomenal and cognitive experience of reading" (HI, 35), i. e. the insight into the text's materiality. It is bound to fall short of grasping the text's "residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means" (RT, 15). "Residue" does not mean an unresolvable quality of the text, since the whole text cannot be resolved. Far from relapsing into mystifying a text, de Man locates the "residue of indetermination" in the reader's oscillation. 31 Todorov, Ducrot, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 79. 32 J. Hillis Miller, too, locates the difference between de Man and semiotics in de Man's insistence on the referential function of language. Cf. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), 41-59,44.

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that the text's thematic and the self-reflective dimensions are not structurally analogous to each other, but that the latter follows asymmetrically out of the former. For de Man, the text's rupture only becomes obvious in the dynamic analysis during which reading is a "structural [and not contingent] part of the form" (HI, 31): It is not enough for the textual significance to be actualized in the language (for example in grammatical or lexical structures); for the significance to be poetic it has to be actualized in the process that takes place between text and reader. (HI, 32)

Structuralism may well pin down the structure of possible texts; for de Man, in contrast, the specific rhetoric of a text only develops itself in the performative act of reading, during which the "latent tension between rhetoric and grammar precipitates out" (RT, 15). For the structuralist, the only purpose of reading is "a clearing away of the referential and ideological rubble, prior to the undertaking of the descriptive analysis" (HI, 31). As formalism underrates the role of the reader, it can only produce a stylistics (or a poetics) and not a hermeneutics of literature, and it remains deficient in trying to account for the relationship between these two approaches. (HI, 30-31.)

What de Man defines here as Riffaterre's attempt is actually his own: to combine formalist technique with hermeneutics. Structuralism and hermeneutics have to be transformed into a theory that considers ruptures and inconsistencies of structuring as well as of understanding. To be sure, de Man's theory is only hermeneutical in the sense that the reader remains pivotal.33 All hermeneutical closure based on the analogy of the overall meaning and the text's single parts must be avoided. De Man takes this issue as the point of departure for his objections to New Criticism. He holds that New Critics close the text upon itself by seeing it as analogous to a living organism34 whose parts harmoniously relate to a whole. 'Closing the text' means to find an overall interpretation of the text to which its single elements contribute. To be sure, hermeneutics according to Wilhelm Dilthey contains a deconstructive aspect itself in that it presupposes that the critic can never arrive at entire understanding, as each approach to a text is necessarily incomplete.35 De Man does not misread hermeneutics in a reductive way for his own purposes, but reacts to hermeneutical closure which he sees performed

33 Since New Criticism retains the reader's role in interpretation, it is already a step beyond structuralism and closer to adequate interpretation. 34 De Man argues that for the New Critic, "the literary entity is of the same order as the [...] natural object." - Translation H.°Th. of: "l'entite litteraire est du meme ordre que [...] l'objet naturel." De Man, "New criticism et nouvelle critique", 31. 35 Cf. Harro Müller, "Hermeneutik oder Dekonstruktion? Zum Widerstreit zweier Interpretationsweisen" in Bohrer (ed.), Ästhetik und Rhetorik, 98-116, 111-12.

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by New Critical practice, e. g. in Cleanth Brooks's readings. The New Critic could not admit that two meanings are incompatible as this would contradict his wish for closed-off interpretation. All meaningful analysis reduces the poetic text, as it ignores its self-contradictions. De Man reveals that the apparent "organic unity"36 of the text is not something inherent in the text itself which the critic discovers. Rather, unity is formed by the undisturbed hermeneutic circle (BI, 29) between New Critic and text, in which reader and text are inextricably intertwined. They form the dialectic interplay between the prefigurative structure of the foreknowledge and the intent at totality of the interpretative process. (BI, 31)

De Man's reading disrupts the hermeneutical process of finding one meaning, a "linguistic entity" (RT, 19). With hermeneutical closure goes the tenet of Chomsky's transformational grammar that the structure of language mirrors the structure of the (critic's) mind (BI, 32).37 To be sure, New Criticism does not find one meaning of a text, but foregrounds ambiguity, irony and paradox. Yet rather than being performative acts of reading, New Critics regard those notions as closed concepts of interpretation;38 as "structures of literary language" (BI, 32; 103). As soon as the New Critic and structuralist subsume the rhetorical discrepancy under the notion 'paradox' or 'opposition', they see the text as an interpretable object and manageable unity, and devalue 'paradox' as being an element of the text, which only makes sense when it fits in an overall interpretative structure. For the structuralist Todorov, too, [t]he signification of each possible element consists in its possibility to integrate in the work as system.39

"To integrate" means "to correlate with other elements of this work, or with the work as a whole".40 Just to state that a certain passage in a text is para36 Cf. BI, 27-28; 32-33. New Criticism owes the notion of "organic unity" to Coleridge, who in turn adapts Kant's "Zweckmäßigkeit", which signifies the harmonious relationship of various minor parts to an encompassing whole. William K. Wimsatt develops the view of a literary text being a sacrosanct "verbal icon" with formal and thematic unity in his programmatic essay "The Intentional Fallacy" in id., The Verbal Icon (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954). For the structuralist notion that all elements of a text are functional towards a whole see Roland Barthes, L'aventure semiologique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), 176; and Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack, Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 40. 37 Cf. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1965), 47ff. 38 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Um (London: Dennis Dobson, 1960), esp. "The Language of Paradox", 3-20, 19. 39 "[L]e sens de chaque element reside dans sa possibility de s'integrer dans un systeme qui est l'oeuvre." Todorov, "Les categories du ricit litteraire", 126 (translation H.°Th.). 40 Translation H.°Th. of: "entrer en correlation avec d'autres 616ments de cette ceuvre et avec l'oeuvre entiere". Todorov, "Les categories du r6cit litteraire", 125.

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doxical (or, in structuralist mode, oppositional41) is not enough in de Man's eyes. Rather, the singular paradoxical element takes on importance for the overall meaning in that it makes any theory which is based on the analogy between singular element and all-encompassing structure impossible. De Man transforms the New Critical concept 'paradox' into the temporal sequence of deconstructive reading, so that paradox (or allegory) turns from being an integrative part of the text into a reading instruction. Owing to their emphasis on the specific text's meaning, de Man's analyses are equal to the critic's task beyond postmodernism. They mirror the return in literary criticism to a more moderate and more "tactful" reading42 that does not replace literature with theory, but considers its meaning through close examination. Theory allows for reading again. Instead of expecting that the text forms a unity or that it is structured by codes, the reader is able to account for its deconstruction. The insight that genuine understanding of a text implies the impossibility of true understanding (BI, 32) so that the search for meaning runs into aporia, reconstitutes meaning. Gasche has this new definition of meaning in mind when saying that "[m]eaning [...] then spring[s] forth from the self-cancelling of the text's constituting oppositions".43 De Man's close reading proves adequate for the search for meaning, since it reconciles readerbased hermeneutics with structuralism without falling back into hermeneutic closure nor into a rigid theoretical reduction of texts.44

De Man's Blind Spots Several objections to de Man's readings arise. Although he argues that language is itself highly unstable so that each literary text resists its subsumption under a structure, the question remains whether his 'reading' is not a theory after all which can be substracted from the unique text, and which refers all texts back to an unreliable structure. De Man himself sees that a rhetorical analysis is predictable, and one may argue that he runs the risk of 41 Todorov sees "antithesis" as being built upon an identical ground: "The opposite which, in order to be recognized, presupposes in both poles an identical part. [...] Based on the identical elements the differences are emphasized." Translation H.°Th. of: "[C]ontraste qui presuppose, pour etre perfu, une partie identique dans chacun des deux termes [...] Grace aux eliments identiques, les dissemblances se trouvent accentuees". Todorov, "Les categories du recit litteraire", 128. 42 See e. g. Valentine Cunningham's manifesto Reading After Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002). 43 Rodolphe Gaschi, "Deconstruction as Criticism", Glyph 6 (1979), 177-215,181. 44 Theory itself should not be dismissed in de Man's eyes, since this "would be like rejecting anatomy because it has failed to cure mortality" (RT, 12). Here, he probably refers to Wimsatt's comparison of the technique of close reading with the "general anatomy of literature" (Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, xiv).

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doing what he actually dismisses, i. e. pressing texts into a theoretical straitjacket.45 His observation that the reader is unable to draw a final conclusion may trouble one and leads one to suspect that de Man's theory is as self-sufficient as structuralism. Like every deconstructive critic, de Man is subject to the same dilemma: is not his negative knowledge a knowledge after all, as became clear through the example of Nietzsche's "self'? De Man does not deny having this blind spot himself - the very gist of his "impossible theory". He expresses this awareness by introducing the temporal dimension of reading, which the New Critic neglects. As de Man's reading in fact begins where structuralist or New Critical analysis ends, it is a method, not a theory. It does not assume a timeless langue from the beginning, but only comes into being during the reading process. Like the referential function, reading is a vector rather than a point of closure, indicating that it never stops. De Man carries the text's inherent logic to the very end. Bettina Stix holds that de Man foregrounds the unique text by showing that the effect of rhetoric is not predictable, but "unfolds its mechanism ever anew with regard to the specific textual situation",46 as she puts it. Yet if all texts are found to develop their peculiar paradoxes, the single work cannot stand out again! In my view, Stix praises de Man too much for considering the specific text. It is true that he fixes literariness in the concrete work, instead of structuralistically seeing it as an abstract possibility. His insistence on practical close reading moves him deeper into textual analysis than the structuralist. One may nevertheless object that de Man handles all texts alike by developing their paradoxes and referring them back to an unreliable rhetorical structure. Yet de Man does not unify as completely as it may appear. He is not to be praised for saving the single text, but rather for doing justice to the specific paradox within the text, which cannot be subsumed under a text's alleged unity. If oppositions and paradoxes are a structuring code in structuralist and New Critical analysis, de Man's paradox stands on its own.47 From this single paradox, the reader starts the oscillating process of reading, instead of

45 Various critics of de Man have pointed to this problem. Cf. Geoffrey Bennington, "Aberrations: de Man (and) the Machine" in Lindsay Waters, Wlad Godzich (eds.), Reading de Man Reading, Theory and History of Literature 59 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 209-221, esp. 215; and Stix, Rhetorische Aufmerksamkeit, 10. 46 "[D]ie Rhetorik [...] entfaltet ihren Mechanismus immer wieder neu aufgrund der jeweiligen Textsituation." Stix, Rhetorische Aufmerksamkeit, 142 (translation H.°Th.). 47 A text is not just the sum of the signs it uses, as becomes clear in Roland Barthes's later poststructuralist position: "[EJach text is in some sort its own model. [...] [T]he text is ceaselessly and through and through traversed by codes, but it is not the accomplishment of a code [...], it is not the parole of a narrative langue." Roland Barthes, "A Conversation with Roland Barthes", quoted from Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 242.

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collecting oppositions and equivalences which can remain simultaneously next to each other, and which organize the text like a central thread. Since allegory shows that no synthesis between its two meanings is possible, it takes on an ethical and anti-ideological dimension. The "reader" of discourses becomes aware of the existence of different epistemological and cultural standpoints, which give rise to the "structural interference of two distinct value systems", as de Man defines 'ethical' (AR, 206). But de Man's method is not only ethical in the sense that it makes tolerance a reading experience. In de Man's account, the conflation of "linguistic with natural reality" (RT, 11), i. e. the assumption that language represents truth and the world, leads to ideology and dogmatic statements about the way things 'are'. Thwarting traditional, metaphysical reading expectations, de Man's antitotalitarian reading is more than any other mode of inquiry, [...] a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations. [...] It upsets rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings. (RT, 11)

To be sure, one would misread de Man if one took literary language as a metacritical tool, capable of exposing the ideologies of other discourses. Rather the opposite is the case: literature can never lay open its own ideology, since this unmasking would presuppose that it could observe itself from a vantage point outside the system. All that literary language can do is to reveal the impossibility of unmasking its own language, since it cannot describe itself by its own medium. Literature cannot expose aberrations, but only teach an awareness of one's own blind spot in interpretation as well as in ideological discourse. This self-deconstruction is political in that it exemplifies the inevitable blindness of all discourses towards their own mechanics. 49

The Failure of Langue During his earlier phase of writing, Michel Foucault, too, believed that literature could act as a metadiscourse. He finally came to reject the view of literature as being a 'box' that contains or mirrors the other systems on the same grounds as de Man. Literature cannot observe society from outside any more than readers are able to reflect on their own reading. It is itself part of its surroundings and cannot stand as a symbol of what Foucault calls the episteme

48 Richard Rorty reproaches de Man for sacralizing literary language because of its rhetorical richness and capacity for self-reflection. Literature is not the only tool to criticize politics. Cf. Richard Rorty, "De Man and the American Cultural Left" in id., Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), II, 134-35. 49 Miller even emphatically affirms that "the millenium would come if all men and women became good readers in de Man's sense". Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 58.

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of a period: the way of thinking that characterizes the reciprocal interaction between discourses like science, politics and art. Rather, literature takes part in constituting this episteme itself. Literature (or reading, as de Man would say) is not based on a timeless language whose never-changing structure is endlessly repeatable.50 If one claims that literature is autonomous, one runs the risk of resacralizing writing as absolute "Writing" as, in Foucault's opinion, the structuralist Roland Barthes and he himself in his earlier works had done.51 Language (understood as structuralist, timeless langue) has a coercive effect when applying inadequate, dated commonplace assumptions to new ethical issues and subjects (the acts ofparole), since it describes them with the same vocabulary which it had used for earlier cases. No moral question has a precedent that would exactly correspond to it any more than the subject always stays the same. It therefore has to be circumscribed ever anew. In de Man's words, "no law is a law unless it also applies to particular individuals. It cannot be left hanging in the air, in the abstraction of its generality", but has to be referentially verified (AR, 269) and applied to the specific issue. Structuralist thinking in analogies is unable to grasp such singular cases, since it imputes underlying schemata to them, thus falsely calling disparate parts of discourse by a single name.52 Foucault points out: [Discourse is] made up not of available elements, but of real, successive events, [and] cannot be analysed outside the time in which it occurred.53

Like de Man's paradox in the structure of the text, "successive events" like the formation of the subject happen through time. Structuralist language is inadequate for describing the subject, as it establishes a cognitive chain of analogical replacements that, in de Man's words, "extends from grammar to 50 Since Foucault stresses that the text is also formed by non-linguistic practices instead of referring to itself, one might suppose that he might also reject de Man's theory that apparently deals exclusively with language. Yet by the conventional connotations of signified meanings, de Man considers cultural contexts, too. As an adequate form of literary criticism, I propose with Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, what one might call an 'enlightened' close reading (in Gotthold Ε. Lessing's understanding) that avoids positing entities. It would focus on one aspect of the text - philosophical, aesthetical, ethical - , whilst simultaneously being "magnanimous in [the] inclusion of other disciplines and epistemologies". Cf. Davis, Womack, Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory, 37-38. 51 Cf. Michel Foucault, "Le langage ä l'infmi" and "Dire et voir chez Raymond Roussel" in Dits et Ecrits, 4 vols (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994), 1,250-261 and 205-215. 52 Cf. Hayden White, "Michel Foucault" in John StuiTock (ed.), Structuralism and Since (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1979), 81-115,94. 53 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, New York: Routledge, 1972), 220. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'AK'). "[Le discours n'est pas] constitue d'elements disponibles, mais d'evenements reels et successifs qu'on ne peut pas Panalyser hors du temps oü il s'est deployi." Michel Foucault, L'archeologie du savoir (Paris: I^ditions Gallimard, 1969), 260. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'AS').

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logic to a general science of man and of the phenomenal world" (RT, 17). It fixes the person that is spoken about and does not acknowledge its transformations, whereby it aims to let this fixation appear natural. The detrimental effect that is created when the timeless structure of static language is conflated with the structure of the altering mind 54 reminds one of Bertolt Brecht's story On Meeting Again quoted at the beginning. The man in Brecht's anecdote tries to classify his counterpart in the same way as the "Autodidacte" in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La nausee labels the narrator "antihumanist", since unlike the former, the narrator does not believe in abstract human dignity. The Autodidact would not listen to what people really say, but falsifies and outpaces them 55 by subsuming them under apparently eternal concepts, like the Youth, the Mature Man etc. Even a concept like "misanthropy", which the Autodidact imputes to the narrator, does not disturb the humanist's thinking, since it "has its place within this concert" of humanism; as a counterpoint, it is merely the "dissonance necessary for the overall harmony". 56 Lending meaning to each element, the Autodidact embodies the structuralist tenet formulated by Barthes: [E]ven when a detail [of discourse] seems irreducibly insignificant, refractory to any function, it will nonetheless ultimately have the very meaning of absurdity or uselessness: everything has a meaning or nothing has. 57

In the narrator's eyes, the Autodidact proves actually to represent the opposite of humanism, since real humanism, rather, consists in acknowledging the subject's steady changes. For Foucault, too, liberal humanism is not the belief in timeless human essence, but a "risk", 58 as no answer to what the subject really is can be considered absolute. In his essay "Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres?", Foucault proposes to oppose humanist concepts by a more dynamic "critique and [...] permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy". 59 Such humanism without metaphysics, understood rather as

54 See Chomsky's analogy between language and mind in id., Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 47ff. 55 The narrator feels "toume, ressaisi, depasse" by the Autodidact. Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausee (Paris: fiditions Gallimard, 1972), 167. 56 "La misanthropie aussi tient sa place dans ce concert: eile n'est qu'une dissonance nicessaire ä l'harmonie du tout." Sartre, La nausee, 167 (translation H.°Th.). 57 Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, tr. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 104. "[Q]uand bien meme un detail [dans l'ordre du discours] paraitrait irreductiblement insignifiant, rebelle a toute fonction, il n'en aurait pas moins pour finir le sens meme de l'absurde ou de l'inutile: tout a un sens ou rien n'en a." Barthes, L 'aventure semiologique, 176. 58 John Rajchman, Michel Foucault. The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 123. 59 Translation H.°Th. of: "une critique et [...] une cr6ation permanente de nous-memes dans notre autonomie." Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres?" [1984] in id., Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994), IV, 562-578; here 573.

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Aufklärung,steadily questions the role of the self, as it defines the subject ever anew. Ethics, as a consequence, is a choice rather than an abstract obligation. Freedom "cannot [be turned] into law".61 By postulating a care for the self (le souci de soi),62 Foucault revives the Enlightenment idea of the independently thinking human being that, following the Kantian formula sapere aude, dares to use its own reason. Self-invention can only happen after the individual has first analyzed the structural circumstances which have led to its formation. Such an autobiography, as Foucault calls his own theoretical work, is rather the opposite of self-expression,63 since the subject does not confess itself, but describes the practices that have shaped it. In Foucault's words, such genealogy is a "historical inquiry into the events that have caused us to recognize us as subjects of what we do, think, say", rather than a search for the formal structures of possible moral actions.64 Foucault's postmodernism gives individuality a new chance since, as Hayden White puts it, Foucault lets subjects and things "exist in their irreducible Difference, resisting every impulse to find a Sameness uniting them all in any order whatsoever".65 The care for the self that replaces the traditional belief in timeless similarities with a thinking in differences is continued in gender studies, e. g. in Judith Butler's claim that a human being should create its own gender identity. No roles are naturally rooted in the human being. Butler encourages self-invention ex negative when refuting the argument that "natural" circumstances should apply to human behaviour, since our notion of the "natural" body is as constructed as "culture".66 r

The Enonce of the Subject Nevertheless, no social network can build upon anarchic individuality any more than individuals can only be perceived by a structure. A middle course 60 Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumiferes?", 573. 61 Rajchman, Michel Foucault, 123, 114. Foucault goes beyond Sartre as he not only postulates the concept of self-invention, but asks about the conditions that make individualization possible. 62 Cf. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualite, 3 vols (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984), III; esp. chapter II, III. 63 Cf. Rajchman, Michel Foucault, 36. 64 "[L]a critique va s'exercer non plus dans la recherche des structures formelles qui ont valeur universelle, mais comme enquete historique ä travers les evenements qui nous ont amenes ä nous constituer ä nous reconnaitre comme sujets de ce que nous faisons, pensons, disons." Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres?", 574 (translation H.°Th.). 65 White, "Michel Foucault", 86. 66 Cf. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1990); esp. chapter I, 8.

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between self-description and the description through others must be found. Foucault's apparently exclusive focus on the subject in his later works leads Richard Rorty to reproach him for rejecting all institutions altogether due to their repressive nature.67 This objection is only partially justified, as in his later writings on the subject in 1984, Foucault is still aware of the problem of how to combine the souci de soi with society.68 Following Kant, Foucault endorses that a public use of autonomous reason (Kant's sapere aude) gives rise to a liberal state. He might have clarified how such a concatenation has to be conceived by describing it by his observations on the enonce, as developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Enonces are statements that establish the dynamic structure of the episteme. In contrast to the unique enunciation that vanishes as soon as it has arisen, the statement is repeatable, but replaced as soon as a more valid statement appears (AK, 116).69 It does not exist on its own, but is dependent on the temporal and spatial context of its application: [The] identity of the statement [...] is itself relative and oscillates according to the use that is made of the statement and the way in which it is handled. (AK, 117) 70

Understood as an act of parole, the statement is not structuralistically considered with regard to its fiinction to the encompassing langue.71 Foucault dismisses the belief in a timeless langue underlying all statements when explaining that "statements do not exist in the same sense in which a language (langue) exists, and, with that language, a collection of signs defined by their contrasting characteristics and their rules of use" (AK, 95). 72 The loose structure of statements is "more diverse than the structure of the sentence"

67 Cf. Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 197. In Rorty's eyes, Foucault could have avoided dismissing all institutions that do not help the subject to develop its own identity by distinguishing the private from the public realm. Rorty suggests combining the subject's striving for autonomy and its social inclination by the figure of the "liberal ironist", the tolerant human being whose knowledge about the contingency of its own perspective allows him or her to accept other standpoints (cf. 61). Linda Hutcheon defines this traditional constructivist attitude as the latest postmodernist handling of reality: "The real exists [...], but our understanding of it is always conditioned by discourses, by our different ways of talking about it." Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1996 [1988]), 157. 68 Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres?", 566-67. 69 AS, 136. 70 "[L]'identite de l'enonce [...] est elle-meme relative et oscille selon l'usage qu'on fait de Γ enonce" (AS, 137). 71 In Dreyfus and Rabinow's wording: "[I]f a rule is a formal principle defining the necessary and sufficient conditions that a speech act must satisfy before it can count as serious, there are no rules at all." Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1982), 55. If langue and parole are identical, there is no point in retaining the distinction any more. 72 "[L]es enonces n'existent pas au sens oü une langue existe et, avec elle, un ensemble de signes definis par leurs traits oppositionnels et leurs regies d'utilisation" (AS, 112).

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(AK, 117);73 paradoxically, its capacity for modification makes it more constant than the rigid structuralist system. Foucault's dynamic network replaces any overall matrix by ways in which enonces are connected with further statements. There is no structure like langue existing a priori and independently of its elements, i. e. the acts of parole. Foucault's system, constituted by the elements itself, is as performative as de Man's reading process which starts from the single paradox. Paradoxically, those elements do not come into being until the structure, however dynamic, conceives them as elements.74 Yet Foucault does not, in structuralist mode, reject parts as not fitting into the overall matrix if their change does not alter the entire system.75 Such practice reduces individuality to a mere function - the opposite of its actual definition. Dreyfus and Rabinow define such "structuralist holism" accordingly when stating that it identifies elements in isolation and then asserts that the system determines which of the complete set of possible elements will be individuated as actual. In this case, one might say that the actual whole is less than the sum of its possible parts.76

If various elements drop out, the structuralist system still prevails. Against such a study of "possibilities", Foucault's archaeology sets a study of "existence", as Dreyfus and Rabinow conclude. The network of enonces formed by those single cases rather consists of "a complex group of relations that function as a rule" (AK, 82; emphasis H.Th.),77 rather than of stable laws of construction, equivalences, and rules of transformation that can be known in advance. Those relations, characterized by the lack of causality and analogy (AK, 10),78 only adopt the workings of fixed laws without being static themselves. Their use, determined by non-logical instances like "institution[s]" and "fieldfs] of use" (AK, 116-17)79, can serve as a model for the connection of subjects, as a statement only makes sense if another subject can connect a ,

OA

t

new statement to it. Enonces are not collected as merely possible realizations of a system, but only the current utterance matters:

73 "plus divers que la structure de la phrase" (AS, 137). 74 Cf. also Dreyfus, Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 54. 75 Tzvetan Todorov: "[I]f the plot stays the same when certain parts are changed, it follows that these are not genuine parts." Translation H.°Th. of: "[S]i l'histoire reste la meme, alors que nous changeons certaines de ses parties, c'est que celles-ci ne sont pas de veritables parties." Todorov, "Les categories du recit litteraire", 132. 76 Dreyfus, Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 55. 77 "[U]n faisceau complexe de relations qui fonctionnent comme rfegle" (AS, 98). 78 AS, 18. 79 "[I]nstitution[s]" and "champfs] d'utilisation" (AS, 136-37). 80 Like de Man's deconstruction of the New Critical static concept 'paradox' into a dynamic sequence of incompatible meanings, Foucault's structure would consist of the subjects' performative utterances.

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[N]ot all the positions of the subject, all the types of coexistence between statements, all the discursive strategies, are equally possible, but only those authorized by anterior levels. (AK, 81) 1 "Earlier l e v e l s " h a s to b e u n d e r s t o o d a s the starting situation w h i c h a certain subject p r o p o s e s , w i t h w h i c h further statements c a n link u p . 8 2 C o n f e r r i n g the c o n c a t e n a t i o n o f enonces

to subject t h e o r y e s t a b l i s h e s d i a l o g u e a s a m i d d l e

c o u r s e b e t w e e n individuality and formalization. T h e m a n w h o m e t M r Κ in B r e c h t ' s story d o e s n o t w a i t for a n y utterance c o m i n g f r o m K , but i m p u t e s a structure t o h i m w h i c h is, o f c o u r s e , b o u n d to m i s s "him". M a y b e e v e r y t h i n g the m a n m i g h t h a v e s a i d w o u l d n e c e s s a r i l y h a v e m i s s e d K , but h e w o u l d h a v e h a d a greater c h a n c e to d o j u s t i c e to K ' s individuality i f h e h a d w a i t e d f o r Κ to s p e a k f o r h i m s e l f . A d i a l o g u e w o u l d h a v e d e v e l o p e d that w o u l d n o t transfer the past to the present, but deal w i t h the relevant p r e s e n t situation. N i k l a s L u h m a n n s e e m s to m e a n this p o s t m o d e r n i s t c h a n c e f o r transformation w h e n saying: O n e should not content oneself with the pleasure of recognition [Wiedererkennen] when, for example, the "subject" [...] is brought up. The re-used arsenal o f forms is meant in a different way. [emphasis in the text] 8 3 U s e d a s e c o n d time, the subject p r o v e s n o t to b e d e f i n e d b y e s s e n c e but b y c o n s t a n t c h a n g e . A c c o r d i n g l y , the m a n w h o m e t M r Κ w o u l d still h a v e rec o g n i z e d Κ as a subject - h o w e v e r , a s a t r a n s f o r m e d subject. P a r a d o x i c a l l y , " [ w ] i t h p o s t m o d e r n f o r m s , r e c o g n i t i o n is m a d e p o s s i b l e - and s i m u l t a n e o u s l y prohibited." 8 4 C a n o n e l e a v e it at the c l a i m that "paradox is the o r t h o d o x y o f our t i m e s " ? 8 5 In F o u c a u l t ' s c a s e , the p a r a d o x reads: p o s t m o d e r n i s t theorists c a n n o t

81 "[T]outes les positions du sujet, tous les types de coexistence entre enonces, toutes les strategies discursives ne sont pas egalement possibles, mais seulement ceux qui sont autorises par les niveaux anterieurs" (AS, 96). 82 Niklas Lutunann's understanding of system illustrates Foucault's structure: "[The] operative understanding of social systems differs radically from a completely different approach, which defines social systems by a majority of interacting elements and by the upkeep of the network even if elements drop out." Translation H.°Th. of: "Dies operative Verständnis sozialer Systeme unterscheidet sich radikal von einem ganz anderen Zugriff, der soziale Systeme durch eine Mehrheit interagierender Elemente und durch Erhaltung ihres Netzwerks auch bei Ausscheiden der Elemente definiert." Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), I, 70. The "completely different approach" which Luhmann mentions here can be defined as structuralist. 83 "Man soll sich mit dem Vergnügen des Wiedererkennens - wenn zum Beispiel von 'Subjekt' oder von 'Demokratie' die Rede ist - nicht begnügen. Das wiederverwendete Formenarsenal ist anders gemeint." Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), II, "Die sogenannte Postmoderne", 1148 (translation H.°Th.). 84 "Mit postmodemen Formen wird ein Wiedererkennen ermöglicht - und zugleich verboten", Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1148 (translation H.°Th.). 85 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1144. Luhmann quotes Henry Adams.

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avoid still thinking in classifications like 'the subject', simultaneously knowing that such entities are impossible. Essences are only thinkable sous rature, as Derrida would put it.86 The concept of connectability could be of current interest to cultural minorities, since it offers a unique opportunity for their self-description. Minorities aim at changing their modes of self-presentation and presentation through others, thus replacing repeatable commonplace assumptions by modes of thinking that better describe them, which, in turn, are succeeded by new descriptions. As there must be an interest connecting to the informative content of the current utterance,87 self-descriptions are more likely to persist than descriptions by others. Since "[y]ou can prove nothing by analogy", as Ezra Pound already observed,88 dialogue turns out to be the alternative to the thinking in equivalences that presupposes a system. The importance of the Nietzschean question "what makes sense" rather than "what is sense?"89 extends beyond postmodernism. Extra-linguistic entities are only thinkable as a paradoxical answer. Beyond postmodernism, it does not signify whether 'reality' is a construct or not, as one has learned to live with the (modern and postmodern) uncertainty that arises in view of the gap between reality and language. This ability allows for a new way of dealing with human issues and communicating values. Aiming at a new force that guarantees stability, de Man replaces the question about reality by meaning, Foucault by dialogue. Texts do mean something (de Man), but their meaning does not lie in their unity or underlying interpretative structure, but in the never-ending process of deconstructive reading. The interest in the subject that was revived by Foucault still exists today; yet the subject is defined by its changing and performative utterances rather than by human essence. What is needed instead of repeatable analogies is an awareness of differences that allows for textual interpretation which, in contrast to a mere application of rules, makes sense, and a genuinely liberal humanism.

86 According to Derrida, a centre like "the subject" could then only be written as aubjeot. 87 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, I, 72. 88 "The analogy is either range-finding or fumble." Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 84. 89 Cf. Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, La pensee 68. Essai sur I'antihumanisme contemporain (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1985), 30.

PETER MORTENSEN

'Civilization's Fear of Nature': Postmodernity, Culture, and Environment in The God of Small Things

1 When speaking about the postmodern condition it is customary to begin by acknowledging that 'postmodernism' and 'postmodernity' remain contested terms allowing for many conflicting (indeed antithetical) definitions. This is not just because 'postmodernism' is inherently ambivalent, but also because the concept must now be understood historically, as a term whose meanings have changed, developed and proliferated since the emergence of the debate in the late 1970s. Appreciating the multiplicity and historicity of 'postmodernism' is never more important than when one is trying to understand what postmodernism means for the environment. In its initial theorisation, postmodernism promised a questioning of unitary progress-narratives and a decentring of the human subject that would also facilitate multiple fundamental reconsiderations of the relation between the human being and the world into which she or he was born. In an essay entitled "Oikos" (1989), for example, Jean-Francois Lyotard linked postmodernism's opposition to oppressive social and epistemological Master Narratives with ecological strategies of representing "the secluded, the thing that has not become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systemic, and that can never become any of these things" - that is, the vital connection to nature that makes humans human and distinguishes children from computers.1 Calling for a new openness towards Being, Lyotard's meditations manifested an awareness that western instrumental reason bears responsibility for abusive and alienating exploitations of the natural 'oikos' or household, and they raised the demand for a more holistic sense of our ties and affinities with the earth and its various life-forms. Coinciding with the end of the Cold War, when for a brief moment it seemed possible that historical

1

Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Oikos" in id., Political Writings, ed. and tr. Bill Readings, Kevin Paul Geiman (London: UCL Press, 1993), 101-07,105.

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developments might precipitate a political turn from 'red' to 'green', Lyotard's postmodernism apparently subscribed to key tenets of the environmentalist movement, which has equally raised doubts about the supposed neutrality of technology and questioned the emancipatory effects of scientific rationality.2 Lyotard, moreover, was not alone in trying to forge this alliance. Speaking with deliberate hyperbole Paul Virilio declared that the ecological battle is "the only one worth fighting".3 Similar commitments undergirded the philosopher Michel Serres' 1992 argument that the Enlightenment tradition's narrow focus on the 'social contract' have blinded western cultures to the deleterious effects of reducing non-human nature to raw material for production: Through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connects us to the world, the one that binds the time passing and flowing to the weather outside, the bond that relates the social sciences to the sciences of the universe, history to geography, law to nature, politics to physics, the bond that allows our language to communicate with mute, passive, obscure things - things that, because of our excesses, are recovering voice, presence, activity, light. We can no longer neglect this bond.4 Writing against the background of mounting ecological anxiety, Serres eloquently amplified Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis that post-Kantian humanism's exclusive attendance to human rights tacitly colludes with - and actually accelerates - the laying-waste of the natural world, as the worldwide scramble for increasingly scarce resources escalates into the apocalyptic scenario of man's all-out war on nature.5 The challenge of postmodernity, Serres holds, is the project of finding a model that will enable Western man to recognise nature in intersubjective terms, not as an enemy to be vanquished but as an equal partner worthy of respect and recognition. Future attempts to address global social inequalities and establish standards of fairness will be meaningless without a parallel effort to formulate a 'natural contract' and thus declare peace with the natural world. After these hopeful beginnings, however, it soon became clear that those inclined to worry about the future well-being and survival of the planet had good reason to be sceptical of postmodernism. Ironically, the heyday of postmodern theorising coincided with the environmental Decade of Disaster that saw the release of poison methyl isocyanate (MIC) at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India (December 3, 1984), the meltdown at the Chernobyl

2 3 4 5

See Fritjof Capra, Charlene Spretnak, Green Politics (New York: Dutton, 1984). Quoted in Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 80. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, tr. Eliabeth Mac Arthur, William Paulson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 48. Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. J. Cumming (London: Verso, 1972).

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nuclear reactor (April 26, 1986), and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (March 14, 1989), culminating with the El Nino phenomenon that triggered world-wide concerns over global warning. These events prompted nature writer Bill McKibben to announce, in a 1989 popular best-seller laden with portentous despair, that humanity's alterations of the atmosphere spelled the end of the Renaissance conquest of nature, and that environmentalists henceforth needed to confront what it means to live in a 'post-natural' universe.6 Writing about the same time, Fredric Jameson described the postmodern condition in similarly eschatological terms, as "a radical eclipse of Nature itself': In modernism, some residual zones of 'nature' and 'being', of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsists; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that 'referent'. Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which 'culture' has become a veritable 'second nature'.7 McKibben and Jameson do not exactly prognosticate the end of the world, for their melodramatic jeremiads pivot on the claim that in a very real sense the disaster has already occurred, and that the whole world is now under human sway. The vocabulary of the postnatural/postmodern is used not only to lament the disappearance of the last wild places from the planet, for the contemporary world is 'post' nature not just in the sense that nature is everywhere under attack, but also in the sense that the philosophical idea of nature, as a nonmanufactured, pre-cultural 'other' entirely outside the human domain, has become meaningless. The primary intention informing these writers' use of the 'end of nature'-rhetoric, then, is the desire to conjure up the terrifying and exhilarating image of a more complete and almost unfathomable form of humanisation, something akin to Heidegger's "age of the world picture" ("die Zeit des Weltbildes"), in which everything, literally everything, has alwaysalready been colonised by human signifying systems and transformed into material for production and consumption.8 As 'postmodernity' has come to signify not a hopeful revaluation of nature's multiple meanings but the fatalistic thinking of nature's death, so 'postmodernism' has increasingly come to refer to (or been co-opted by) a heavy-handed culturalism that seeks not to strengthen but to attenuate all interconnections between the cultural and the natural realms. In understanding

6 7 8

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), 34, ix. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture" in William V. Spanos (ed.), Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Towards a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979), 1-15.

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the evolution and gradual hardening of 'postmodern theory' into a set canon of texts, it is worth pondering how and why the influence of 'nature-sceptical' writers like Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard came to eclipse that of 'natureendorsing' thinkers such as Lyotard, Serres and Virilio.9 In any event it is indisputably true that the dominant strands of postmodern theory and criticism in today's academia are characterised by overriding scepticism of unmediated nature, and by a pronounced tendency to privilege the cultural sign at the detriment of the natural referent. To mention but one practical manifestation of literary theory's demystificatory agenda, most recent critics of English Romantic lyrics have laboured to expose that the 'nature' invoked in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Keats's "To Autumn" refers to nothing outside the register of the self, but is a compensatory anthropomorphic projection of purely socio-political desires and anxieties.10 Kate Soper phrases the point succinctly, when she argues that in contrast [...] to the naturalist impulse of much ecological argument, which has emphasized human affinities with other animals, and regards a dualist demarcation between the cultural and the natural as a mistaken and inherently un-eco-friendly ontology, postmodernist theory has emphasized the irreducibly cultural and symbolic order of human being and has consistently criticized naturalist explanation of the being of humanity."

Or as the ecocritic Lawrence Buell points out, "all major strains of contemporary literary theory have marginalised literature's referential dimension by privileging structure, text(uality), ideology", and in consequence

9

The terms "nature-sceptical" and "nature-endorsing" are used in Kate Soper, What Is Nature? (London: Blackwell, 1995). The emergence of Baudrillard as the postmodernist guru par excellence, at least within the Anglo-American configuration of the field, is especially telling. It is of course Baudrillard who most publicly and explicitly distances himself from what he dismissively labels "the naivete of ecological conviviality", and his theory of 'simulation' the claim that 'real' nature has always-already been abrogated by a smoothly functioning technosphere - remains an extreme but also paradigmatic instance of postmodernism's ingrained anti-naturalism. See Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity, 22001). Baudrillard discusses 'ecological conviviality' in La Transparence du mal (Paris: Galilee, 1990), 108. 10 For a critique of this tendency, see Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Ecological Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992). In his grandiose study of Wordsworth, the American new historicist critic Alan Liu provides a programmatic (and by now notorious) formulation of the social-constructivist view of Romantic nature: "There is no nature [...] nature is the name under which we use the nonhuman to validate the human, to interpose a mediation able to make humanity more easy with itself." Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989), 38. 11 Soper, What Is Nature?, 6.

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"professors of literature [...] easily become anti-environmentalists in their professional practice".12 As it is commonly understood today, postmodernism names the vacuum left behind after "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation".13 Postmodernism abrogates culture from nature and denies language the power to connect to physical reality, because 'nature' itself is seen as primarily subject to cultural determinants. Yet a mere glance at contemporary environmental debates makes clear that postmodern constructivism desperately overstates the importance of culture and underestimates the resilience and recalcitrance of physical reality. After all "[i]t is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the 'real' thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier".14 While it may be too sensationalistic to see the many floods, droughts, storms and toxic spills of the 1980s and early 90s as symptoms of some natural nemesis elicited by humanity's technological hubris, the increasing frequency of natural and man-made ecological disasters more than suggest that Baudrillard and others may have exaggerated the smooth efficiency of the technosystem. McKibben solemnly proclaims the beginning of the 'post-natural' age, and Baudrillard postulates a technocultural cataclysm that has already rendered anachronistic all concerns about nature, but Ulrich Beck's theory of the "second" or "reflexive modernity", stressing the proliferation of environmental risk and the ever-increasing necessity of risk-management, sounds like a more plausible account of future life in the West.15 Not all is gone, and much remains to be saved. Nature has not and will not simply disappear, nor will it be easily subsumed by some man-made 'second nature'. Like other species, we a are still dependent on our ecosystem, but unlike other species we also have the powers to damage and render uninhabitable our native environment.

2 I will now turn from meta-theoretical reflections to imaginative literature, fully cognisant that this is one of the many distinctions that postmodernism tends to

12 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 85-86. See also Arran Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London: Routledge, 1995). 13 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Zone Books, 1995), 12. 14 Soper, What Is Nature?, 151. 15 See Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

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blur.16 What interests me particularly in this context, furthermore, is not the emergence of a school of 'post-natural fiction' in the 1980s, but more the efforts of certain more recent writers to (implicitly or explicitly) resist postmodernism's erasure of natural and cultural distinctions and re-anchor humanity in an awareness of its interdependence with the surrounding world.17 Lawrence Coupe argues for "resisting the global theme park which we call 'postmodernity'", and he calls for literary and critical discourses "more favourable to ecology than to consumerist capitalism" - writing that "works to open up possibilities for both people and the planet".18 In one of his less gloomy moments Jameson likewise speaks of the work of "cognitive remapping" that is necessary to transcend the current malaise and begin "the practical re-conquest of a sense of place".19 What might prove supremely helpful in trying to pass beyond postmodern isolationism are literary texts that integrate nature and culture and view the earth as humanity's home or 'Heimat', to use a German term with suitable Heideggerean resonances. Yet to be convincing such revivals of literary naturalism must tread a thin line. For one thing, the move from ' d t f f e r a n c e ' to 'referance' will be unproductive if it merely repudiates unreconstructed postmodern scepticism from the perspective of an equally nai've mimeticism.20 Rather, seeing nature as more than a cultural construct must be inflected by a subtler philosophy resembling Soper's 'critical realism', glossed as an allegiance to the nature whose structures and processes are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product) and whose forces and causal powers are the condition of and constraint upon any human practice or technological activity, however Promethean in ambition (whether, for example, it be genetic engineering, the creation of new energy sources, attempted manipulations of climatic conditions or gargantuan schemes to readjust to the effects of earlier ecological manipulations). This is the 'nature' to whose laws we are always subject, even as we harness it to human purposes, and whose processes we can neither escape nor destroy.21

16 For one instance of this blurring, see J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (New York: Vintage, 1995) and Jean Baudrillard's exuberant responses in "Simulacra and Science Fiction" and "Ballard's Crash", Science Fiction Studies 18 (1991), 313-30. 17 Cynthia Detering, "The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1890s" in Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996), 196-203. 18 Lawrence Coupe, "Editor's introduction", The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000), 8. 19 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51. 20 Leonard M. Scigaj, "Contemporary Ecological and Environmental Poetry: Diffefance or ReferanceT', Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3 (1996), 1-25. 21 Kate Soper "Nature/nature" in George Robertson et. al. (eds.), FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 31.

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Along the same lines, rescuing a sense of nature as meaningful to contemporary human lives cannot or should not lead writers to simply recuperate traditional literary tropes stipulating a romantic, prelapsarian relationship between man and nature. Instead, launching an up-to-date referentialism will require a scrupulous self-criticism on the part of writers seriously interested in facilitating the human accommodation of the world. The hopeful outcome of such a process might collectively be described as versions of 'post-pastoral', described by Terry Gifford as a truly materialist, ecologically-based "outflanking" of traditional pastoral with "a vision of accommodated humans, at home in the very world they thought themselves alienated from by their possession of language".22 One of the most powerful recent examples of such a disalienation, reconnecting people to the land, is the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy's international bestseller and Booker Prize winner The God of Small Things (1997).

3 Set in the rural South Indian province of Kerala in the late 1960s and early 1990s, The God of Small Things is a novel that cannot be easily fitted into critical categories. It might be said that God of Small Things exemplifies the postcolonial novel, since it deals (indirectly, at least) with the repercussions of the English colonisation of India, and especially with the self-hatred instilled by an educational system that privileges all things English. As the character Chacko puts it, lamenting the effects of his family's "Anglophilia", [...] we've been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort o f war. A war that captures dreams and redreams them. A war that made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves. 23

Subsuming The God of Small Things under postcolonialism or subaltern studies, however, is problematic not least because Roy self-reflexively points to some of the dangers and pitfalls inherent in these discourses. For example, it is tempting to interpret Roy's account of the building known as "the History House" - a colonial mansion converted into a luxury hotel for foreign tourists craving "Regional Flavor" - as a sarcastic hint at certain postcolonial novelists' successful attempt to remarket India as "authentic", "exotic" and "other" (GST, 121). Generally speaking Roy's 'writing back' seems more

22 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 149. 23 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 52. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'GST').

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interested in understanding the nature of post-independence India than in agonising over colonial trauma, or at least she seeks to grasp how newer forms of domination simultaneously continue and replace older ones. Hence the primal scene that Roy's Gothic narrative uncovers - the touchable policemen's murder of the innocent untouchable carpenter Velutha - relates primarily to Indians' treatment of their fellow-countrymen and seems only tangentially related to the problem of colonialism. In another provocative gesture Roy consistently defuses the notion that all India's troubles can be traced to colonial subjugation, by downplaying the role that European characters play with the action, and by reducing such 'conquerors' as do appear (with the exception of the English tea plantation manager, Mr. Hollick) to weak and inefficient individuals. Thus, the teenaged Baby Kochamma's sexual pursuit of the Irish missionary Father Mulligan ironically reverses the standard colonial seduction-narrative. Likewise the American Larry McCaslin who 'abducts' Rahel to Boston seems almost pathetically unable to engage his child bride's affections, and the English-educated husband whom Ammu divorces is less a bullying tyrant than an abject drunk. Applying the label 'postmodern' to Roy's fiction poses similar problems. On the one hand it is clear that Roy's 'Tiger Woodsian' prose style partakes of some of postmodernism's 'freakish' characteristics.24 If one of the main features distinguishing postmodernism from modernism is the former's levelling of old hierarchies between high art and mass entertainment, then The God of Small Things - which mixes references to The Heart of Darkness and The Sound of Music, seemingly without anxiety - clearly belongs in the postmodern camp.25 More significantly, however, The God of Small Things flies in the face of postmodern sensibilities, insofar as it recognises the inseparability of nature and culture. The novel's 1990s episodes describe a 'post-pastoral' India utterly transformed by social, economic and cultural development. Once a rural backwater, Ayemenem has entered the age of late capitalism, rendering defunct the old distinction between the country and the city, the centre and the periphery. In contemporary Ayemenem, Roy shows, political rivalries have been suspended and former enemies become business partners, with one exCommunist named 'Lenin' now working as "a services contractor for foreign embassies". Modes of production have been superseded by modes of consumption, as the old family-owned factories have all closed down, and as the community's economy has come to depend less on the success or failure of the local harvests than on the unpredictable fluctuations of the world's stock 24 These phrases were used in a review by the novelist John Updike, and are reproduced in my paperback edition. 25 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).

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markets. The mythological kathkali dance performances have been relegated to tourist entertainments, their traditional heroics replaced in the popular mind by omnipresent American talk shows and "cheap soft-porn magazines about fictitious South Indian sex-fiends [...] with glimpses of ripe, naked women lying in pools of fake blood" (GST, 15). The God of Small Things envisions - and is itself part of - a globalised, deterritorialised world, where national boundaries have collapsed, where older cultural traditions no longer apply, and where bodies and images mingle in incongruous and unpredictable ways. Not surprisingly, characters in this world seem little affected by nature, and apparently pay little heed to it. Roy uses television to illustrate this separation. When the twins Rahel and Estha return to their childhood home, they find their grandaunt Baby Kochamma and her female servant Kochu Maria glued to the TV set, mesmerised by its neverending stream of satellite-transmitted, mostly foreign-made programmes: Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on Satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so [...] Baby Kochamma followed American N B A league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments. On weekdays she watched The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, where brittle blondes with lipstick and hair styles rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. Baby Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart bitchy repartee. During the day, disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle. (GST, 28-9)

It is pertinent that Baby Kochamma, before she embarked on her second career as a TV addict, was trained as a gardener and spent her time and energy converting a "sloping patch of ground" into "a lush maze of dwarf hedges, rocks and gargoyles" that "people came all the way from Kottayam to see" (GST, 26-7). Much has been written about television's status as a master symbol for postmodernity tout court, but this is generally characterised as a western problem only relevant within a first-world context. 26 Roy's point is that in India as elsewhere, television creates a simulated 'second nature' that intervenes between man and 'real' nature, eroding the sense of place. 26 For example, Jameson writes that "[tjuming the television set off has little in common either with the intermission of a play or an opera or with the grand finale of a feature film, when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work. Indeed, if anything like critical distance is still possible in film, it is surely bound up with memory itself. But memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally): nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film"; Jameson, Postmodernism, 70-71.

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Postmodernity, according to Roy, is a global phenomenon that cannot be used to oppose the 'backward' East and the 'developed' West as each other's monolithic contraries. Hence, while Rahel experiences the cities of "Amayrica" as crime-infested conglomerations reminiscent of dystopian thirdworld nightmares, so postmodern communication technologies make it correspondingly easy for modem-day Keralans to share the media-saturated obsessions and psychopathologies of contemporary westerners (GST, 123). Even here, however, Roy never completely loses sight of nature: outside Ayemenem House, we are told, Baby Kochamma's neglected ornamental garden "had grown knotted and wild, like a circus whose animals had forgotten their tricks" (GST, 28). Nature is not so much absent as simply repressed, and the brilliance of Roy's approach consists precisely in showing that the postmodern denial of nature produces a threatening return of the repressed. Hence the novel's opening, which represents nature on the rebound: [B]y early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the Ρ WD potholes on the highways. (GST, 3)

Hence also, and more importantly, Roy's highlighting of different kinds of waste, refuse, and pollution. Discarding all postcolonial exoticism, the 1990s passages of The God of Small Things depict modern-day Kerala as a blighted, toxic landscape. The river Meenechal that runs through Ayemenem, connecting present and past, smells "of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans", its water "thick and toxic" (GST, 14, 119). The river's water has been diverted to stimulate short-term economic growth, at the cost of longterm human and environmental welfare: "a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby. [...] So now they had two harvests instead of one. More rice, for the price of a river" (GST, 118). With such imagery of massive environmental decay, Roy mercilessly debunks exoticist myths about India's lush landscape and Indians' native veneration for nature: in this unromantic India, children "defecate directly onto the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed" and women wash their "clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents", while old elephants are "electrocuted on the Kottayam-Cochin highway" (GST, 119, 183). Symbolically speaking, pollution may carry many meanings within the novel. Among other things it may refer to the unpunished crime that still contaminates the collective unconscious, and to the unresolved guilt towards their mother that continues to haunt Rahel and Estha. But Roy also remains aware of pollution's materiality, as a matter of interest in its own right. Nature

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is conspicuously absent from The God of Small Things, and yet nature also seems poised to erupt in an unforeseen, unprecedented cataclysm that threatens to overwhelm civilisation: "Filth had laid siege to the Ayemenem House, like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes" (GST, 84). Similarly, while "No Swimming signs had been put up in stylish calligraphy" to warn tourists, Roy wryly comments that "[t]here wasn't much they could do about the smell" of the putrid Meenechal (GST, 119). The wasteland grows both within and without, as parts of the same process. As in other contemporary novels (the "airborne toxic event" in Don DeLillo's acclaimed White Noise comes to mind), Roy's 'toxic discourse' toys with the notion of eco-apocalypse to test the limits of postmodern irony and detachment. The many signs of imminent ecological disaster, in other words, reveal hidden or forgotten relations that render "the unthinkable [...] thinkable" (GST, 31).27 There is no escape back to pristine nature, but at the same time there is no denying the ecological networks in which human beings are imbricated. Contemporary middle-class Indians may have taken leave from reality and sought refuge in Phil Donahue and WWF Wrestling Mania, but reality persists at their very doorsteps. Nothing in this novel is just what it seems. Everything is connected to everything else.

4 Roy's novel's main 1960s narrative yokes culture and nature in similarly unpostmodern ways. On the face of it, The God of Small Things is a family tragedy criticising the effects of deeply-rooted social bigotry. Centred on the fortunes of the doomed aristocratic Ipe family, it describes a semi-feudal society plagued by class conflict, economic exploitation and sexual injustice. A family of high-ranking colonial officials and dyed-in-the-wool Christian "Anglophiles", the Ipe family prospered during Britain's colonial rule of India, but after independence the clan has entered a period of decline and is now "steeped in debt" (GST, 51, 114). Despite their languishing economic fortunes, however, Kerala society's complex and deeply-entrenched caste-system still convinces the Ipes of their innate superiority, enabling them to continue treating other members of the community as menials. The family members' genteel manners cannot entirely conceal the tradition of violence on which its social status rests. The extreme and often brutal arrogance that informs the Ipes in their relation with social inferiors originates with the late family patriarch, the imperial civil servant John Ipe (or Pappachi), who tyrannised his daughter and beat his wife into submission. Pappachi's

27 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986); Lawrence Buell, "Toxic Discourse", Critical Inquiry 24 (1998), 639-67.

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legacy, ironically, is carried on by his cowed wife Mammachi, who enforces caste laws even more rigorously than her husband. To be sure Mammachi inaugurates the untouchable Velutha's upward social mobility when she pays his education and later hires him as "the factory carpenter [...] in charge of general maintenance" (GST, 74). Still, Mammachi also scorns her daughter-inlaw's working-class family connections, she still refuses to admit untouchables into her house, and she waxes nostalgic about the "time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan's footprints" (GST, 71). For these older characters, Roy shows, the obsession with honour and purity corrupts all authentic human relationships. The current family head, the Oxford-educated historian Chacko, is portrayed more positively, as a sensitive intellectual who understands the complex dynamics of history, and who sympathises with the local communists' assertion that "caste is class" (GST, 266). Yet because of his family connections Chacko cannot act on his convictions, and he too remains tragically unable to relate to others except in terms of domination and exploitation. When his wife Margaret leaves him and returns to Britain, Chacko uses his social position to extort erotic favours from lower-caste female factory workers, thus repeating the sexual blackmail whereby Mr. Hollick fathers "a number of ragged, lightskinned children [...] on tea-pickers whom he fancied" (GST, 41). And when his sister Ammu brings disgrace upon the family by fraternising with an untouchable, it is Chacko who evicts her from the household and thus indirectly causes her death. Above and beyond exploring how social prejudices wreck the lives of both the dominant and the dominated, however, Roy also unfolds a subtler history concerning "human nature's pursuit of ascendancy" vis-ä-vis the natural environment (GST, 292). According to Terry Gifford, 'post-pastoral' writers typically convey not only an awareness "of nature as culture and of culture as nature", but also the insight that "[t]he desire to heal our relationship with the earth we inhabit must accompany the healing of our relationship with ourselves as a species". 28 Many postcolonial texts use natural detail as a mere exotic backdrop to a primarily human action, but in The God of Small Things nature often seems to participate in the action, as when the climactic discovery of human sexual deviancy immediately calls forth a "cyclonic disturbance" (GST, 241). Human characters interact not just with other humans but also with non-humans, and Roy convincingly demonstrates how "men's fear of women" and "power's fear of powerlessness" intertwine with and contribute to "civilizations's fear of nature" (GST, 292).

28 Gifford, Pastoral, 165.

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The origin of exploitative human-centredness, like everything else in this novel, lies within the family past. As a family of large landowners the Ipes accumulated considerable wealth by subordinating the surrounding countryside, and by selling nature's products back to those who have no land of their own. Mammachi and later her son Chacko run a food factory, the ironically titled Paradise Pickles & Preserves, which conserves fresh vegetables from the Ipe estate at a considerable profit, and "Chacko [...] always referred to it as my Factory, my pineapples, my pickles" (GST, 56). John Ipe's profession, we are told in the course of the same chapter, was entomology, but we are also assured that the revered scientist never felt a genuine kinship with, let alone love for, the animals that he studied: [Pappachi's] life's greatest setback was not having had the moth that he had discovered named after him. It fell into his drink one evening while he was sitting in the verandah of a rest house after a long day in the field. As he picked it out he noticed its unusually dense dorsal tufts. He took a closer look. With growing excitement he mounted it, measured it and the next morning placed it in the sun for a few hours for the alcohol to evaporate. Then he caught the first train back to Delhi. To taxonomic attention and, he hoped, fame. After six unbearable months of anxiety, to Pappachi's intense disappointment he was told that his moth had finally been identified as a slightly unusual race of a well-known species that belonged to the tropical family Lymantiidae. (GST, 48)

Given Pappachi's attitude towards nature, it seems fitting that when Rahel visits his study many years later she finds that it has been invaded by wildlife: "The room was rank with fungus and disuse. [...] A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill, their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby Berkeley musical" (GST, 148). Although they may seem very different things, the Ipe family's terror at "the scourge of Untouchability" is continuous with the same characters' attempts to keep nature at arm's length (GST, 71). Hierarchical thinking, Roy believes, pits man against nature as surely as it pits the upper classes against the lower classes and men against women. Mammachi's careful classification of people into touchables and untouchables finds an echo in her husband's clinical categorisation and aggressive appropriation of the moth. Who exactly owns nature's resources? Chacko speaks about 'his' pineapples, and Pappachi's treatment of 'his' moth (the episode appears in a chapter tellingly entitled "Pappachi's moth") bespeaks the same egocentric attitude that also dominate his dealings with his family, as when he brutally beats his wife and sadistically torments his daughter for showing signs of independent volition. Nature's chief or only function for Pappachi is to contribute to the aggrandisement of the self. The Ipe family, it seems, has many skeletons in the closet, and Ayemenem is a place haunted by painful memories of both social and environmental violence.

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5 Consequently it is not least on the background of 'civilization's fear of nature' that the cross-class love relationship between Chacko's divorced sister Ammu and the factory worker Velutha takes on such a devastatingly destructive power. Velutha represents the 'other' not only because he belongs to the lowest caste of untouchable 'Paravans'; throughout the narrative Velutha is also positioned as a boundary-figure, a gatekeeper, who mediates between culture and nature. A carpenter with a native talent for woodwork, Velutha "caught fish in the river and cooked it on an open fire. He slept outdoors, on the banks of the river" (GST, 73). Roy continually stresses Velutha's closeness to organic life, and she at various times likens him to a fish, a snake, a wooden log and a crocodile. In trying to account for her attraction to Velutha Ammu repeatedly returns to her childhood memory of the pariah boy "[h]olding out little gifts he had made for her, flat on the palm of his hand so that she could take them without touching him. Boats, boxes, small windmills" (GST, 167). Her twins similarly "loved the way that wood, in Velutha's hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. [...] His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red curry cooked with black tamarind" (GST, 75). For Rahel especially Velutha is inextricably linked to the river landscape that he inhabits: "Rahel closed her eyes and thought of the green river, of the quiet deep-swimming fish, and the gossamer wings of the dragonflies (that could see behind them) in the sun. She thought of her luckiest fishing rod that Velutha had made for her" (GST, 141). Before Ammu's first tryst with Velutha she finds him floating "farther downstream in the middle of the river, [...] looking up at the stars": He began to swim towards her. Quietly. Cutting through the water with no fuss. He had almost reached the bank when she looked up and saw him. His feet touched the muddy riverbed. As he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps, she saw that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars. He moved so easily through it. As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made had molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace. (GST, 315-16)

In this passage and throughout the ensuing rhapsodic account of Ammu and Velutha's intercourse, Roy (wittingly or unwittingly) evokes the affair between the aristocrat Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors in D.H.Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Writing about his own work in "A Propos of Lady Chatterley", Lawrence celebrated sexuality as a cosmic ritual that tears down conceptual hierarchies and revitalises humans by reintegrating them in nature's universal rhythms of destruction and renewal:

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Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter, of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth.29

Ammu and Velutha's embraces, significantly, take place outdoors, and their first encounter, when "fear was derailed and biology took over", happens against the backdrop of a rising violent rainstorm or "unseasonal downpour" that "could have seemed like an omen from an angry god" (GST, 318, 241). When Ammu crosses the river to engage Velutha's caresses, then, she not only offends against the "Love Laws" that proscribe sexual contact between members of different castes; by reconnecting mind and body she also transcends "civilization's fear of nature" and thwarts "human nature's pursuit of ascendancy" (GST, 222, 292-93). Earlier in the novel Chacko entertains the twins with a pedagogical narrative about 'the Earth Woman': "He made them imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred million years old - was a forty six-year old woman [...] It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was" (GST, 52). Still keeping D. H. Lawrence in mind, it might be said that in surrendering to her passion for Velutha Ammu resurrects the mystical 'Earth Women' within herself.30 Certainly Ammu's river-crossing undermines Ayemenem's rigidly stratified and carefully policed system of social identities, but it also unleashes deeper-lying energies and catalyses more fundamental changes, precipitating a reconnection of humanity and natural environment. Exploring and expressing their love for each other, Ammu and Velutha rediscover their biological identities as a man and a woman inhabiting a living, breathing universe.

6 Reading Arundhati Roy's fiction against current notions of the postmodern opens up towards a possible revaluation and recovery of the concept. Using the eclectic prose style of the typical postmodern bricoleur, Roy yokes the classics of western High Modernism - Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Proust, Mann, Faulkner - to classical Indian kathkali performances and intersperses all with

29 D. H. Lawrence, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" in id., Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin, 1994), 323. 30 For an exploration of this motif in Lawrence's writing, see Dolores LaChapelle, D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive (Denton: U of North Texas P, 1996).

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knowing allusions to international mass cultural icons including WWF wrestling, The Phil Donahue Show and The Sound of Music. Yet The God of Small Things also casts doubt on the tenets of postmodernism, by castigating the ongoing exploitation of man and nature that it allows and conceals, and by insisting that human culture remains anchored in, rather than separate from or elevated above, the organic environment. This (post)postmodern critique of postmodernism is especially evident in the chapter ironically entitled 'God's Own Country', where Roy describes a luxurious five-star tourist holiday resort constructed in Ayemenem by a transnational corporation: Kari Saipu's house had been renovated and painted. It had become the centerpiece of an elaborate complex, crisscrossed with artificial canals and connecting bridges. Small boats bobbed in the water. The old colonial bungalow with its deep verandah and Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses - ancestral homes - that the hotel chain had bought from the old families and transplanted in the Heart of Darkness. Toy histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph's dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. 'Heritage', the hotel was called. (GST, 120)

In its gaudy tastelessness and faux-original splendour, 'Heritage' attempts to repackage Ayemenem's ethnic culture for the pleasure of discriminating foreign tourists, who are the only ones likely to appreciate and willing to pay for "Regional Flavor" (GST, 219). Within the novel, 'Heritage' functions as an emblem of the postmodern impulse to commodity everything authentic by reducing it to consumer-friendly pastiche. From Roy's sceptical perspective, in other words, Heritage constructs a false version of reality and represses the very tangible connections linking East with West, past with present, and (again) culture with nature. Constructed at the site of the History House, 'Heritage' suppresses history by covering up the murder committed when "a posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenechal River, sluggish and swollen with recent rain" (GST, 288). No less importantly, man's continuing obliviousness towards nature is registered by the signs of environmental ruin surrounding the hotel. Heritage overlooks the dried-up Meenechal, which is now "thick and toxic": "Once it had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers" (GST, 119). The sadly polluted river still communicates the important insight which Ammu and Velutha discovered at the cost of their lives, and which every other character seems to have forgotten: that people are not alone on the planet, and that the possibility of human welfare depends on - cannot be imagined without - establishing a meaningful non-violent relationship to the non-human. In her provocative polemical article "The Greater Common Good", Arundhati Roy expresses her sense of living at a "point in time when human

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intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival", and she discusses the dangers that lie in "the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on [...] the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence".31 In a recently published interview, Roy similarly asserts that The God of Small Things is "not just about small things. It's about how the smallest things connect to the biggest things [...] that's what writing will always be about for me". 32 According to Charlene Spretnak, thinking the world in terms of wholeness, integration and complex interconnections is exactly the task posed by the postmodern, although too many writers and theorists have used the concept to promote the opposite agenda. 33 After selling several million copies of her book and winning the 1997 Booker Prize, Roy has moved into direct social and environmental activism, antagonising the Indian government by her protests against nuclear testing and the monumental Narmada river dam project. 34 Similarly, although The God of Small Things at times overwhelms its reader with forbidding images of destruction and decay one should not exaggerate the novel's pessimism. Deliberately, one assumes, Roy chooses to backtrack and end her narrative with her lyrical description of Ammu and Velutha's first sexual encounter, when "biology designed the dance" while "the river pulsed through the darkness, shimmering like wild silk" (GST, 317). The novel's last word, repeated twice, is "tomorrow" (GST, 321). Despite many signs to the contrary, Roy hereby seems to imply, there is still hope. It is still possible to reverse the present course of destructiveness and find a different path into the future.

31 Arundhati Roy, "The End of Imagination" (access for subscribers only) . 32 Paul Kingsnorth, "Peace Profile: Arundhati Roy", Peace Review 13 (2001), 591-95, 594. 33 Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). 34 See also Roy, "The Greater Common Good" (16.6.2003). Roy's statements in these essays caused her recent arrest on charges of contempt of court.

Beyond Postmodernism

IHAB HASSAN

Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust and we know at heart how beauty surely binds, binds us to otherness in the sweet jigsaw of creation. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, "Beauty: An Ode"

Introduction My theme is the evolution of postmodernism, or rather, our own evolution in postmodern times. Since I owe readers clarity and concision, which have all but abandoned us in academe, let me focus the issue at the start. What lies beyond postmodernism? Of course, no one knows; we hardly know what postmodernism was. But questions have a way of inveigling an answer. I will offer a double response in the form of two, major intertwined themes: postmodernism expands into geopolitical postmodemity while seeking to become a postmodernism not of suspicion but of trust. The braided strands of this proposition may define the cultural code of our moment. How?

What was Postmodernism? Let us step back for a moment. What was postmodernism in the first place? I am not at all certain, for I know less about it today than I did some thirty years ago. No doubt, that is because I have changed, postmodernism has changed, the world has changed, and historical concepts, unlike Platonic Ideas or geometrical forms, suffer the tyranny of time. Of course, postmodernism was born in strife and nursed in contention; it still remains moot. Lock ten of its foremost proponents in a room, and watch the blood trickle under the door. Hype and hyperbole, parody and kitsch, media glitz and ideological spite, the sheer, insatiable irrealism of consumer societies all helped to turn postmodernism into a conceptual ectoplasm. I cite -

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from an essay called "From Postmodernism to Postmodernity" - four current exemplars of the phenomenon, nearly at random:1 1. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall's Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki's Tsukuba Center (Japan) qualify as postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even vulgarity. 2. In a recent encyclical, titled "Fides et Ratio", Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine - in short, from the Church's point of view, incipient nihilism. 3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism often surrenders to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being "unpolitical" or, worse, not political in the right way. Postcolonialism is deemed a serious concept, postmodernism a light one. 4. In Pop culture, postmodernism - or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly - refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo's David - pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders - advertising Kon Tiki Travel in New Zealand. What do all these have in common? The answer is familiar by now: fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, sophistical stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, willy nilly, we have begun to gather a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to sketch a context, if not a definition, for it. More ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens' The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest introduction to the topic I know.2 But who needs definitions nowadays, anyway? The desert grows, the desert grows, Nietzsche growled only yesterday, and our mouths now parch with dedefinition, with disbelief. Still, rather than construct bizarre tables, contrasting modernism with postmodernism, as certain critics have done, I propose to engage postmodernism in ways that may lead us through it, beyond it.

1 2

Ihab Hassan, "From Postmodernism to Postmodernity", Philosophy and Literature 25,1 (April 2001), 1-13. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern (London, New York: Routledge, 1995).

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The Equivocal Autobiography of an Age In 1784, Immanuel Kant asked, in a celebrated essay, "Was ist Aufklärung?". The question was taken up by Michel Foucault, though we do better to ask ourselves, in terms of this particular occasion, "Was ist Postmodernismus?". How could we ever share the historical poise of the punctual thinker of Königsberg? Versed in suspicion, inward with incredulity, votaries of decenterment, pluralist, pragmatic, polychronic, we can hardly privilege our moment as Kant privileged the Enlightenment. Instead, we betray an abandon of belatedness, a delirium of reflexivity, a limitless anxiety of self-nomination. Who am I, who are we - is that not the chorus of the moment? Perhaps postmodernism can be defined, after all, as a continuous exercise in selfdefinition. Or perhaps we can simply call it the equivocal autobiography of an age. This is not altogether flip: two pivotal points are at issue here. One regards the hermeneutic seductions of postmodernism in developed societies. The other relates to the crisis of identity, driving geopolitics in the postwar era (I will return to that idea in discussing postmodernity). Let me begin with the former. Autobiography, as we all know, is a verbal interpretation - not simply recollection, not simply construction - of a life. So is postmodernism a collective interpretation of an age. More than an artistic style or historical trend, more than a personal sensibility or Zeitgeist, postmodernism is a hermeneutic device, a habit of interpretation, a way of reading all our signs under the mandate of misprision. I simply mean that we now see the world through postmodern-tinted glasses. Rabelais? Look at all those excesses of parody and pastiche, all those paratactical lists. Sterne? Please, don't be obvious. Jane Austen? See all those self-reflexive ironies, those subtle deconstructions of squirearchy not to mention phallocracy. And so it goes (as Vonnegut would say). Moreover, it's all true, or at least partially true. But not even a fatwa would induce me to consider Rabelais, Sterne, and Austen postmodern or, preposterously, pre-postmodern. Certainly, we read history from the vantage of the present; certainly we write history as narratives, tropic and revisionary. But this gives us no license to cannibalize our past to feed our flesh. History, too, has its pragmatic truth, its otherness, which refuses assimilation to our needs, our desires. History, too, requires our tact, our respect, our trust: I mean that measure of intuition, empathy, and self-discipline enabling every cognitive act. I hope you do not think I have lost myself in the labyrinths of postmodernism. Words like truth, trust, tact are key to the idiom of this paper, and I will return to them, repeatedly. For the moment, however, I wanted simply to suggest that postmodernism could be understood as a kind of

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autobiography, an interpretation of our lives in developed societies, linked to an epochal crisis of identity, the other pivotal point.

A Global Crisis of Identity What, then, is that global crisis of identity? Look everywhere, the evidence chills the blood, boggles the mind. Fortunately, some sane and readable books, like Michael Ignatieff s Blood and Belonging and Amin Maalouf s In the Name of Identity, help us to awake from this particular nightmare of history.3 The latter work is especially pertinent here, though I can summarize its generous argument only in the baldest terms. Maalouf calls for the acceptance of multiple and dynamic identities, without prejudice to any; he rejects, in all of us, a single, static, essential self, "deep down inside", coercing other allegiances. And he insists on respect, reciprocity, non-exclusiveness, in the exacerbated traffic between fields of cultural force, anthropological zones, estates of personal being. Still, since modernity is so often perceived as "the hand of the stranger" in many cultures, the shadow of suspicion, indeed of outraged rejection, falls on the West, especially on the United States. In this nexus, a free spirituality, loosely attached, or even unattached, to the need to belong, may prove salutary. Maalouf concludes by enjoining us to act and to dream: We must act in such a way as to bring about a situation in which no one feels excluded from the common civilization that is coming into existence; in which everyone may be able to find the language of his own identity and some symbols of his own culture; and in which everyone can identify to some degree with what he sees emerging in the world about him, instead of seeking refuge in an idealised past.4

That is, indeed, the practical dream of a pluralist postmodernity. But how is that crisis of identity relevant to postmodernism itself? And how do I distinguish between postmodernism and postmodernity? In the past, I resorted to a neologism, "Indetermanence", to interpret postmodernism. I meant to designate two decisive antithetical, but not dialectical, tendencies: indeterminacy and immanence.5 Since then, the double process of 'localization' and 'globalization', as every CEO now glibly says, has become dire. What I had hinted has become the daily grist of our news: I 3

4 5

Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993); Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, tr. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001). Maalouf, In the Name of Identity, 163. See Ihab Hassan, "Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence" in id., The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus OH: Ohio State UP, 1987), and the "Postscript" in id., The Dismemberment of Orpheus (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2 1982).

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mean the sundry movements of secession, decolonization, separatism, on the one hand, and the fluent imperium of high-tech, media capitalism, on the other - cargo cults here, satellites there, the Taliban in one place, Madonna everywhere. In sum, cultural postmodernism has mutated into genocidal postmodernity (witness Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Ulster, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Afghanistan, Tibet ...)· But cultural postmodernism itself has also metastasized into sterile, campy, kitschy, jokey, dead-end games or sheer media hype. To these changes, the world responded with vast changes of its own, changes that I describe as postmodernity.

From Postmodernism to Postmodernity This brings me to the first, braided theme of this essay: namely, the expansion of postmodernism into postmodernity. It is as if the breaks, the indeterminacies, of the former have turned into tribalism (postcolonial factions), and the immanences of the former have accelerated world interactions (globalization). I say "as i f ' because I distrust large and symmetrical explanations. In any case, the horrendous facts of postmodernity invade our lives continually: diasporas, migrations, refugees, the killing fields, a crisis of personal and cultural values seemingly without parallel in history. Therefore, we may be forgiven to conclude: a specter is haunting Europe and the world the specter of Identity. Can we wonder that its ghostly steps lead everywhere, from the jungles of the Philippines to those of Peru, from the ruins of the World Trade Center to the wastes of Gaza, from the tenements of Belfast to the mosques of Kashmir? Some will proffer socio-economic explanations, the inequities of north and south, west and east, which feed the iniquities of the world. Some will adduce vast conflicts of civilizations, which, since 9/11, have given Samuel P. Huntington renewed plausibility. And some will cite sociobiology, the "epigenetic rules" of E. O. Wilson or the "mass soul" of Elias Canetti, hard-wired in our species.6 Yet none of these facts suffices alone, as Amin Maalouf would agree. Beyond postmodernism, beyond the evasions of poststructuralist theories and pieties of postcolonial studies, we need to discover new relations between selves and others, margins and centers, fragments and wholes - indeed, new relations between selves and selves, margins and margins, centers and centers

6

Elias Canetti, Auto-da-fe (New York: Seabury Press, 1978); Ε. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1998).

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- discover what I call a new, pragmatic and planetary civility. That's the crux and issue of postmodernity. But how establish this civility without borders? Needless to say, short of omniscience, short of omnipotence, I find no answer to this query. But I can try to put certain ideas, certain words, into play, words that we have forgotten in academe, words that need, more than refurbishing, reinvention. I mean words like truth, trust, spirit, all uncapitalized, in addition to words like reciprocity and respect, sympathy and empathy, so central to In the Name of Identity. Here twines the second strand, or major theme, of the essay.

Truth and Trust If truth is dead, then everything is permitted - because its alternatives, now more than ever, are rank power and rampant desire. True (pun intended), we no longer share an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth. But in daily life, we distinguish well enough between truth and falsehood, from little white lies to darker deceptions. It is repugnant to pretend that the atrophy of transcendent truths licenses self-deception or justifies tendentiousness - truth is not pravda. Truth is a single phoneme, but it carries the curse of miscellany, of sundry semantemes. There is traditional truth: what myth and tradition hold to have been always so. There is revealed truth: what a divine, sacred, or supernatural authority declares as true. There is the truth of power: what a tyrant proclaims, believe it or die. There is the truth of political or social or personal expediency: it would be good for the party, or for the community, or for my own interest, to assume such to be the case. There is truth as correspondence: in naive science and empiricism. There is the more sophisticated truth of scientific falsification: a theory is held true until disproven. There is truth as coherence: in the arts, especially music, in mathematics and logical systems. There is the truth of a poetic intuition: for instance, Yeats's quip that we "can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence". There is subjective truth: what you intensely feel or experience or desire becomes incontrovertibly so. There are probably other kinds of imbricated truths, and they all revert to some underlying axiom or belief. William James knew this nearly a century before Rorty or Derrida. In Pragmatism, he acknowledges the fecund diversity of truth, a truth, he says "made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience".7 But this is not an invitation to cynicism, self-interest, or ideological mendacity. For at the heart of James's own philosophical practice is an idea of trust: truth rests not on transcendence but on trust. This fiduciary 7

William James, Pragmatism (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 143.

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principle is epistemic, ethical, and personal all at the same time, since our trust must also depend on another's trust, and our faith, James remarks in The Will To Believe, "is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case".8 Hence the self-defeating character of radical relativism, of extreme particularism, which denies reciprocity, denies both empathy and obligation. Epistemic trust flows, in Western cultures at least, from evidence, logic, dispassion, trial, doubt - from intuitions and speculations, too, that can earn our unselfish assent. Altruism, like self-criticism, is conducive to trust. Such trust, I have said, is fragile. "How can one and the same identical fact experience itself so diversely?" James asks in A Pluralistic Universe? And in the end - I repeat, in the end - he answers that our "passional natures" must decide "between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds".10 But these "passional natures", I wonder, have they no cognizance of broader restraint, a larger reference? The question reclaims maligned universals. Both social determinism and cultural constructionism find them anathema. Yet universals, not Platonic but empiric, abound. For instance: languages; human emotions; marks of status; ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death; gods, spirits, taboos and their rituals; not to mention socio-biological imperatives like the sixty-seven cross-cultural practices Wilson lists in Consilience." Human beings are not a terra nullius colonized by myriad systems of signs. Human beings also create themselves and recreate their environments, and chance and aeons of biological evolution help shape their lives. To hard-core cultural constructionists, I say: browse Matt Ridley's The Genome Project or Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate to see the intricacies of 'nature' and 'nurture', no longer separable in their interactions.12 In sum, human beings not only vary infinitely; they also share a portion in the infinite. Pragmatic or 'soft' universals need not alarm us; they enable both individual and collective judgments. Without them, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights would vaporize; without them, Amnesty International would whistle in the wind; without them, jurists at the Hague would sit in an empty court; without them, Greenpeace or the Kyoto Protocols would founder in the Pacific. In short, without qualified generalizations, no appeal to reason, freedom, or justice can stand; no victim can find redress, no tyrant retribution.

8

William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 9. 9 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977), 94-95. 10 James, The Will to Believe, 11. 11 Wilson, Consilience, 160-61. 12 Matt Ridley, The Genome Project (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002).

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I am aware of the arguments against Truth (capitalized), from Nietzsche to Derrida. Nietzsche offered the best challenge, first in his youthful essay on "Truth and Lying in the Ultra Moral Sense", then in his posthumous Will to Power. Truth, he said in the earlier essay, is "a mobile army of metaphors";13 truth, he later declared, is an aspect of the "will to power", thus a "processus in infinitum, an active determining".14 But the Truth he pretends to rout is not pragmatic; it is universal. William James, we have seen, also abandons the transcendental view of truth, opening it to our "willing nature", nudging it toward a "noetic pluralism", a process more than state, subject always to contestation. Still, his view makes place for a will to truth, as strong in certain human beings - the great saints, artists, scientists, intellectuals - as the will to power or the will to believe. Does not Oedipus embody, beyond a shady Freudian complex, that miraculous will to truth - what interest can it possibly serve? - that implacable will to truth, at the cost of self-destruction, entailing blindness, bringing a deeper, luminous sight? Oedipus here is apt. Truth, I have said, rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust. But what is trust? Roundly, I answer: more than consensus, trust depends on self-abnegation, self-emptying, something akin to kenosis. It requires dispassion, empathy, attention to others and to the created world, to something not in ourselves. But, ultimately, it demands self-dispossession. That is why truth and trust remain spiritual qualities - not simply psychological, not merely political, but, above all, spiritual values. At the mention of spirit, some may grit their teeth. So, put spirit aside, if you must; I will not insist on a willing suspension of disbelief. Consider another line of thought. The humanities, by the very nature of their epistemologies, can not resist the incursions of history and politics, ideology and illusion. But that is precisely why the humanities must not yield to their promiscuous incursions, which would degrade knowledge, deface evidence, defeat answerability. Truth does matter, as we know from Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture (a single truth is more powerful than all the weapons of the world, he claimed);15 as we have rediscovered in the Sokal Affair. Truth matters, and the "calm sunlight of the mind", as Susan Haack put it in her wise Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate}6 We may be all biased, as the jejune

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense" in Geoffrey Clive (ed.), The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: New American Library, 1965), 508. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter J. Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 298. 15 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Nobel Lecture on Literature, tr. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 16 Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998), 5.

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slogan goes, but we are not all biased about the same things, or to the same degree, or in the same manner, nor, above all, do we all comply with our biases invariably. Discriminations here are the life-blood of thought, nuance is mind. If nothing else, let us recover the truth of tact and nuance, the trust of intellectual courtesy, which tacitly assumes self-control, if not outright kenosis.

Realism and the Aesthetic of Trust I come at last to the aesthetic, to the literary question, in my subtitle: "Toward an Aesthetic of Trust". As you know, Beauty is back in the work of Elaine Scary, Wendy Steiner, Charles Jencks, among others - and I am immensely cheered. But I will consider the aesthetic here from another ambit, that of realism. Realism, you cry, in 2003, realism? A moment ago, I spoke of trust as a quality of attention to others, to the created world, to something not in ourselves. Is that not the premise of realism? Realism is no light matter: it touches the inviolable mystery of mind's relation to the world. It refers us to the enigma of representation, the conundrum of signs, the riddle of language, the chimera of consciousness itself. So let us step gingerly here. Elsewhere, I have presumed to remark on realism in science, philosophy, painting, photography, and literature, concluding that realism, despite its cunning, is a convention built on answerable faith - something like Santa Claus.' 7 Ernst Gombrich summed it up in Art and Illusion with wondrous concinnity: "the world", he said, "can never quite look like a picture, but a picture can look like the world".18 And in literature? We all know the epochal work of Erich Auerbach, a Teutonic hymn to mimesis. But a reader of that work may well conclude that the great scholar regards the loss of mimesis in modernism with acute ambivalence. The "uninterpretable symbolism" in the works of Joyce and Woolf; the "multiple reflection of consciousness" leaving the "reader with an impression of hopelessness", "something confusing, something hazy [...] something hostile to the reality which ... [the works] represent"; the "atmosphere of universal doom" and implied "hatred of civilization"19 Auerbach finds all these distressing in modern literature. At the same time, he fairly recognizes that in the work of Virginia Woolf "random occurrence" can 17 Ihab Hassan, "Realism, Truth, Trust: Reflections of Mind in the World" in id., Symbolism and Third Text (forthcoming). 18 Ε. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 21972), 395. 19 Erich Auerbach, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953), 551.

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yield "something new and elemental ... nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice".20 I am not sure that Saul Bellow or John Updike would disagree with Auerbach. I am not sure that younger writers, like David Malouf (this the Australian not the French Maalouf now) or Salman Rushdie or Vargas Llosa or Michael Ondaatje would disagree either. I am not sure that certain qualified postmodernists would fail to recognize the price literature has paid in renouncing realism altogether. Hence, the innovative, not to say magical, realism in such novels as Maloufs Remembering Babylon, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Vargas-Llosa's The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (which the author claims to be an accurate description of life in Sri Lanka, a claim similar to that of Garcia Marquez about life in his native Columbia). The critical point here is that literary realism, though it may not suffice, remains indispensable; its discontents spill into, indeed inform, other genres. Myself, I believe that Virginia Woolf s strictures against certain realists - Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, as she called them with withering courtesy - still stand. They are "materialists", she wrote in The Common Reader, by which she meant that "they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring".21 That has ever been the banal flaw of realism. Yet Woolf herself had great faith in the possibilities of the novel, and in the same essay, "Modern Fiction", she reminds us that there is no limit to the novel's horizon, "and that nothing - no 'method', no experiment, even the wildest - is forbidden, but only falsity and pretense".22 Only falsity and pretense are forbidden: these words lead to my penultimate section.

On Spirit and the Void Falsity and pretence stand nearly antithetical to truth and trust. Hence my interest in what I will call fiduciary realism, a postmodern aesthetic of trust. Such an aesthetic would assume "negative capability" (Keats), but would go farther toward self-emptying; as in Shakespeare, Kafka, or Beckett, it would become acquainted with Silence, with the Void. For Nothing (Nothingness) is the other face of fiduciary realism. Emily Dickinson expressed it stunningly:

20 Auerbach, The Representation of Reality, 552. 21 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1951), 187. 22 Woolf, The Common Reader, 194.

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By homely gifts and hindered words The human heart is told Of nothing "Nothing" is the force That renovates the World

She might have said as well: 'That renovates the Word'. For a realism of faith must know that Silence or Absence is the ground of language, the ground of Being itself. This idea, surely central to both modernism and postmodernism, makes lis all acolytes of the void. This intuition, central again to postmodernism, surely engages spirit as I understand it. But how do I understand, if not define, spirit? For the last time, I need to step back a little, in order to see past, beyond, postmodernism. By the late eighties, I have said, I began to wonder how postmodernism could recreate its best self. Could it take a spiritual turn? Could the materialist ideologies of the moment open or crack? And what would spirit mean in our intellectual culture of disbelief? Certainly, it would not mean atavism, fundamentalism, or occultism; it may not mean adherence to orthodox religions - Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam - though it would not exclude them. I did not answer these questions, though I made a stumbling start in an essay titled "The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times".24 There, with some encouragement from figures as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and John Cage, I envisaged a postmodern, spiritual attitude compatible with emergent technologies; with geopolitical realities (population, pollution, the growing obsolescence of the nation state); with the needs of the wretched of the earth; with the interests of feminists and minorities and multicultural societies; with an ecological, planetary humanism; and perhaps even with millennial hopes. I could so envisage the prospects of a postmodern spiritual attitude, without occult bombinations or New Age platitudes, because spirit pervades a variety of secular experiences, from dreams, creative intuitions in art or science, and a sense of the sublime, to extraordinary, visionary states, including the gift of seeing the eternal in the temporal, an apprehension of primal relations in the universe. Indeed, spirit echoes even in geopolitics, as in current debates of the idea of Forgiveness with regard to genocides (see the references to Ricoeur, Derrida, Morin, Kristeva, among others, in a recent issue of PMLA).25

23 R. W. Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1998), III, 1413. 24 Ihab Hassan, "The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times: Between Nihilism and Belief', Georgia Review 51, 1 (Spring 1997). 25 PMLA 117, 2 (March 2002).

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Dictionaries offer many senses of 'spirit'. These usually center on something fundamental to human existence yet intangible, an activating principle, a cosmic curiosity, a meaning, often religious or metaphysical in character, shading into the ethical yet irreducible to it. This bedrock meaning is not obsolete; for as Saul Bellow noted in his Nobel Lecture of 1976, when distraction increases, so does the desire for essentials.26 Can that desire be alien to our spiritual impulses? Is it not alive still in the work of another Nobelist, Seamus Heaney, who spoke of poetry as a "matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul", and of "tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium"?27 Yet spirit does not offer invariable solace. As mystics know - 1 am not one - spirit is exigent; it has its harshness, its clouds of unknowing, its dark nights of the soul. It may begin in agnosticism and end in despair. This is particularly true in postmodern times, times of irony, suspicion, nihilism. Yet even nihilism, at its best, can serve as a penultimate form of lucidity. Thus, as I have insisted, a postmodern spiritual attitude may become deeply acquainted with kenosis - self-emptying, yes, but also the self-undoing of our knowledge in the name of something more fundamental than deconstruction: that is, in the name of Reality. I have no space here to elaborate this concept of unknowing, of cognitive undoing or nescience, a kind of intellectual via negativa. I need only repeat that fiduciary realism - a postmodern realism, if any - demands faith and empathy and trust precisely because it rests on Nothingness, the nothingness within all our representations, the final authority of the Void.

Conclusion My path has been sinuous. Perhaps I can make some amends by carrying forthrightly the argument to its conclusion, a quasi-utopian conclusion, I admit. What lies beyond postmodernism? In the larger scheme, postmodernity looms, postmodernity with its multiple crises of identity, with its diasporas and genocides, with its desperate negotiations between local practices and global procedures. To call this condition simply postcolonial is to misperceive our world. For colonialism and its afterglow cast only a partial light on our condition; colonialism is not the whole of our history. In this regard, I regret that prominent postcolonial critics have sometimes chosen to tap the vast,

26 Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994). 27 Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 19293.

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often justified, resentments of our moment instead of bringing to it fresh, equitable, and true discernment. We, in our literary professions, must turn to truth, truth spoken not only to power but, more anguished, truth spoken to ourselves. This cannot be sectarian, self-serving truth, which appeals only to partisans and subverts trust. Trust, I have claimed, is a spiritual value, inward with self-dispossession, and in its postmodern form, familiar with the void. For only through nihilism is nihilism overcome. Our second innocence is self-heedlessness, and beyond that, 'unknowing'. In the Japanese Hagakura, there is a shocking statement, inviting meditation, not explication: "This man has worth. In the highest level, a man has the look of knowing nothing".281, for one, would trust such a man. I would also trust Voss, in Patrick White's shattering novel by that name, who at the end of his spiritual agonies in the Australian desert cries: "Now that I am nothing, I am, and love is the simplest of all tongues".29 Does love have a place in an essay on postmodernism? It does. A postmodern aesthetic of trust, I have argued, brings us to a fiduciary realism, a realism that redefines the relation between subject and object, self and other, in terms of profound trust. Are we not close here to something deeper than empathy, something akin to love? Are we not broaching, beyond realism, Reality? An aesthetic of trust is, ultimately, a stance toward Reality, not toward objects. At the far limit, such a stance demands identification with Reality itself, dissolution of the distinction between the I and not-I. Emerson said it famously in "Nature": "[...] all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see all".30 That is the horizon, infinitely far, attainable only by the elect, toward which fiduciary realism tends. I repeat: it is a horizon, seen and perhaps imagined but never reached. But in the sublunary world we inhabit, fiduciary realism must content itself with humbler aims. It needs only acknowledge its debt to spirit, its wide attentiveness, its intuition of kenosis. Such an intuition may also assuage the trials of postmodernity, the clamors of identity - sages say, the solution to identity is, get lost - thus linking our two themes, cultural postmodernism and global postmodernity. Identities created by an assured way of being in the world flow toward ultimate mysteries, sometimes called sacred, beyond the horizons of their assurance. And they can do so without benefit of dogma church, mosque, temple, shrine - because spirit finally empties itself out of its own forms.

28 Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, tr. William Scott Wilson (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1979), 26. 29 Patrick White, Voss (New York: Viking, 1957), 291. 30 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" in id., Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 10.

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But even that acknowledgment may put on postmodernists too great a demand. Perhaps it will suffice, on any good day, for fiduciary realism, to follow the advice of David Malouf in Remembering Babylon: [T\he very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are lookingfor to see what is there.3

Rub your eyes, rub them, please, without undue reflexivity, and without prejudice to Creation. That is my charge to postmodernists, which I hope is neither nostalgic nor Utopian.

31 David Malouf, Remembering original).

Babylon (New York: Vintage, 1994), 130 (italics in the

KLAUS STIERSTORFER

Wobbly Grounds: Postmodernism's Precarious Footholds in Novels by Malcolm Bradbury, David Parker, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand. Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand. (E. St. Vincent Millay, Figs from Thistles, "Second Fig")

Introduction People's apprehensiveness about the reliability of the ground they literally or symbolically stand or live on is, first of all, a time-honoured topos which can be traced far back to antiquity. In the theological outlook of the JudeoChristian tradition, for example, the solidity of the ground was ultimately granted by God who might also withdraw the privilege of this safety from those who strayed from his path, as witness the fates of rebellious Korah, Dathan and Abiram, reported in the book of Numbers: "[...] the ground under them was split apart. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up [...] So they with all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol; the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly" (Num. 16:33). This imagery is taken up and further developed in the New Testament, where Jesus not only walks on water, but is also able to extend this potential to those who believe in him (Mk. 6:45-52 and par.); and those who hear his words and act on them are "like a wise man who built his house on rock", whereas those who do not act on them "will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand" (Matt. 7:24-27). Proverbial wisdom took up the imagery, and not only the issue of building on rock or sand, but talk of thin ice, sayings about earthquakes, quicksands and quagmires have transcended their concrete, literal meanings and taken on various symbolic uses, themselves long since well-worn and familiar. In the Western world, the essentially religious approach was literally shaken by the great earthquake of Lisbon which on 1 November 1755 destroyed large parts of the city. For one, this was the first earthquake which, although it caused a flurry of sermons to the contrary, was not only interpreted as a drastic means of communication between God and men, but spawned an equally voluminous amount of writings which sought for a 'natural', scientific

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explanation, Immanuel Kant's three treatises' among them. What is more, however, the Lisbon earthquake became an argument in the hands of those who attacked the smug enlightenment philosophy expressed, for example, in Pope's phrase of "Whatever IS, is RIGHT" 2 or the famous Leibnizian dictum of the best of all possible worlds. The most illustrious exponent of this argument was undoubtedly Voltaire who attacked both Pope and Leibniz, the former in his "Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne" (1756),3 the latter in his aptly subtitled novel Candide ou L'optimisme (1759).4 Here, the real earthquake in the event created or at least solidified the earthquake as symbol of the dramatic uprooting of traditional systems of beliefs or general outlooks. What follows here is not, of course, a history of this cluster of motifs and its variations - tempting and prolifically fruitful as this project would certainly appear - but a selective and altogether local account of its (re-)appearance in several novels of a very recent date, where this topos of ground, symbolic or otherwise, discovered to be dramatically unstable, has taken on a searching intensity and a significance which seems highly remarkable, if not unprecedented at least in the annals of English literature. It will quickly become clear that its function here is to be seen in the context of a culture of scepticism or doubt which links up in its roots with the critiques stimulated by the Lisbon earthquake and characterizes Western thought through much of the last century to our present day, as most fundamental 'truths', including the idea of 'truth' itself, have been radically undermined in a development which is generally - albeit with typical doubt and apprehensiveness - called 'postmodernism' and variously described as a further intensification and radicalization of modernism's chronic uncertainties, so pointedly formulated by W. B. Yeats under the impression of the First World War:

1

Immanuel Kant, Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen bei der Gelegenheit des Unglücks, welches die westlichen Länder von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres getroffen hat (1756) in Kants Werke I, Akademie Textausgabe (Berlin, 1968), 417-428; Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfalle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Theil der Erde erschüttert hat (1756) in Kants Werke I, 429-462; Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen (1756) in Kants Werke I, 463-472.

2

Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man, I, 294; The Poems of Alexander Pope. A one-volume edition of the Twickenham text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963, repr. 1984), 515. "Philosophes trompes qui criez: 'Tout est bien' / Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses / Ces debris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses, / Ces femmes, ces enfants l'un sur l'autre entasses, / Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres disperses; / Cent mille infortunes que la terre devore, / Qui, sanglants, dechires, et palpitants encore, / Enterris sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours / Dans l'horreur des tourments leurs lamentables jours!", Voltaire, Melanges, Jacques van den Heuvel (ed.), Bibliotheque de la pleiade, 152 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 304-309,304.

3

4

See for example Wolfgang Breidert (ed.), Die Erschütterung (Darmstadt: WBG, 1994).

der vollkommenen

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world [...]5

As is to be expected, the traces of the malaise can also be found among the Victorians where, unsurprisingly, the metaphoric realm of our topos is already being established. While Gerard Manly Hopkins still regretted both the barrenness of the soil as a result of industrialization and the loss of contact with it through the selfsame 'civilization' with which modern man surrounds himself ("the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod"6), the narrator of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Maud", under the impress of his approaching madness, perceives the future solidity of his ground in great doubt, with the resulting wish that he may be able to enjoy life's sweetness before it fails him: O, let the solid ground Not fail beneath my feet Before my life has found What some have found so sweet! Then let come what come may, What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day.7

In an even more sombre mood, Matthew Arnold saw the very foundations of Britain itself, and with it Western culture as he treasured it, in imminent danger and pictured it in his poem "Dover Beach" as stones grinding against Britain's shores under the surface of the tidal waves, thus gradually eroding the solidity of the island. What will, however, be found to set off Hopkins', Arnold's, or Tennyson's doubts from the complaints addressed by the novelists analyzed below is, primarily, the Victorians' conviction that they are pinpointing an impending peril against which protection can be procured, however widely their suggested remedies may differ. "Maud's" narrator eventually finds his controversial bearings in a martial commitment to his country's good; Hopkins directs his readers to return to nature and to God, respectively the Catholic Church, and Arnold has his much-discussed concept of 'culture' against the anarchy of an erosive philistinism. It is not that the Victorian examples given here attained these solutions lightly, indeed the dramatics of their struggle ultimately form the elementary material from which their respective poems draw their strength; but the prospect of newly cementing a rich and reliable security which they can offer to their readers clearly emerges on the horizon. By contrast, the novels now to be examined reveal an outlook where the Victorians' darkest fears seem to have come true with a vengeance; where, in fact, the loss of ground is, 5 6 7

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1919) in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), W. B. Yeats The Poems. A New Edition (London, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1984), 187. Gerard Manly Hopkins, "God's Grandeur", 11. 7-8 in Catherine Phillips (ed.), Gerard Manly Hopkins. The Oxford Authors (Oxford, New York: OUP, 1986), 128. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Maud", 11. 398-404 in Robert W. Hill (ed.), Tennyson 's Poetry. A Norton Critical Edition (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Co, 1971), 225.

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putting it quizzically, the ground from which they begin their explorations. Whether they are able to move beyond a negotiation of life without footholds, so to speak, towards some kind of newly-constituted solidity, and hence leading 'beyond' most scholar's concepts of postmodernism, is a major line of inquiry of the following readings.

Loss of Ground: Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet Of all the books published in recent years it is undoubtedly Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)8 which has the most direct approach and laser-sharp focus on the theme: loss of ground is inscribed in every filament of this novel's texture. It is announced in the fanfare of its title and forms the centre of its story in the earthquake which swallows up the female protagonist, Vina Apsara. In typical Rushdie fashion, this is not a book of hints or implications: Here, the author is no longer the Romantic prophet or seer who senses seismic irregularities long before ordinary sensitivities can feel them. Where an Arnoldian acuteness of hearing was required to notice the subaquatic grinding of stones under an apparently calm surface ("The sea is calm tonight [...]"), Rushdie's earthquake is no glass-trembling, dish-jostling tremor, but a cataclysmic gaping of the earth, a "monster quake" to a resounding "full nine on the Richter scale" (GF, 470-71), an apocalyptic Dies Irae involving a surrealist deluge of Tequila and raining suitcases (GF, 13). The narrative lens of Rai, the book's pseudo-Sibyllic narrator-cum-photographer, further zooms in to provide detailed footage of Vina Apsara's disappearance, which is given in two stages. First, there is the last photograph he took of her in the Mexican town of Tequila, where the earthquakes started: In my last photograph of Vina the ground beneath her feet is cracked like crazy paving and there's liquid everywhere. She's standing on a slab of street that's tilting to the right; she's bending left to compensate. Her arms are spread wide, her Hair's flying, the expression on her face is halfway between anger and fear. Behind her the world is out of focus. [...] This last Vina is calamity incarnate, a woman in extremis, who is also by chance one of the most famous women in the world. (GF, 466)

After that, when she has flown to the villa El Huracän without him, he mentally reconstructs her final moment: In her last minutes she is bathed in the beauty of the world. Perhaps she sings. I want to think of her singing, against the orange and purple sky. Though I hear nothing else, yet can I hear her heroic voice raised in song. Then the ground simply opens and eats her, like a mouth. A great sweep of Pacific coastline is similarly, simultaneously, devoured. [...] Water, earth, fire belch high into the sky. The deaths,

8

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'GF').

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the disappearances, are measured in the tens, the hundreds of thousands. The earth closes over her body, bites, chews, swallows, and she's gone. (GF, 471-72)

The photograph thus provides the 'realistic' detail which is, however, oversaturated with the whole range of calamities that can possibly occur to any particular spot of solid ground a person might find herself standing on in a bad moment: not only is the earth cracking; it is also turning liquid and, to make matters worse, the hard bits left are tilting tremendously into the bargain. By contrast, Rai's vision of Vina's last moment is shrouded in myth, or, more precisely, its description is an extended play on a metaphor, as found in phrases such as 'the mouth of hell', which is taken literally and depicted in action. In keeping with the dramatics of this central event, with which the narration starts, to which it continually returns and around which it virtually circles, layers of signification are piled sky-high. To start with, in both of the earthquake scenes just quoted, a very private, intimate reading of the event is intricately bound up in a kind of double vision with its wider social, even global or cosmic significance. Rai pictures Vina's death as the very private loss of his and of Ormus Cama's greatest love; but he at the same time realizes Vina's superstar status as "one of the most famous women in the world" as well as the coincident death of hundreds of thousands of other victims. Rai's last picture of her will firmly be placed, on a par with "Monroe's flying skirt", as "part of the collective memory of the human race" (GF, 467). This ineluctable ambiguity of the private and public perspectives is, however, only a first aspect of the novel's overall impression which will be amply born out in closer analysis: this is a text oversaturated with metaphoric signals and metonymic virtualities. It is so crowded with intertextual references and rife with allusions and double entendres, with puns and jokes both arcane and obvious that a monolinear reading becomes impossible. It is a literature of excess. Again, a further look at the earthquake motif provides rich evidence. As all reviewers of the book immediately recognized on its publication in 1999, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice obviously forms the mythic base of the novel. To say nothing of the three-headed Cerberus on its dust-jacket, of the explicit pointer in the summary on the back flap ("a stunning 're-make' of the myth of Orpheus") and the references, markers and allusions in the text too abundant even to enumerate here, Ormus Cama actually enacts the story in his 'Into the Underworld Tour' after Vina's death, "conceived as a giant travelling memorial to Vina" (GF, 557). However, the multiplying variations on this theme quickly undermine any simple allegorization of the Greek myth. There is of course the 'original' form of the story as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (Books X-XI), but readers will soon notice the presence of an Indian version as the myth's alter ego in the Kama and Rati story, where the gender roles are inverted and it is the love god Kama who is brought back to life by his wife Rati. The intertextual reference is already present in Ormus Kama's surname, but Ormus is moreover actually visited by a mysterious female figure in the 'underworld' of his delirium who brings him back to life

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(GF, 316-17, 323-24).9 This inverse mirror-image of the Greek plot is further refracted in the proliferation of later, Western variations on the story. Rushdie picks out Gluck's version from all operatic Orfeos (Monteverdi, Poliziano, Rossi): Vina's host in Tequila, Don Angel, sings its final "Trionfi Amore" to which Vina Apsara joins in. She brings Gluck's and his librettist Calvabigi's happy ending in the triumph of love to a close just before the earthquake starts (GF, 12), thus opening the prospect of a positive turn to the novel's ultimately tragic love story. More complex readings of the Orpheus myth are invited by the summary of Francis Bacon's Orphean interpretations towards the end of the novel (GF, 563-64). As the narrator reports Bacon's view, Orpheus' death is to be understood as a presage of the end of 'culture' (Greek and Roman), and the "barbarians are at the gates and cannot be resisted". In his Sapientia Veterum (1609),10 Bacon had identified Orpheus with philosophy or wisdom, focusing on the sequel to his, i. e. philosophy's frustrated effort "of restoring the dead body to life": She "turns to human affairs" or to the "civil affairs" that is law and discipline which is then followed by the "building of houses, the founding of cities, the planting of gardens with trees; insomuch that the stones and the woods are not unfitly said to leave their places and come about her". However, this reign of philosophy in 'human affairs' also has "its periods and closes". After some time, "a season of barbarism sets in" before "the waters of Helicon" break out again in another, unexpected place. Certainly, Bacon's turn from the lofty affairs of Orpheus' lyre to the sphere of human affairs marks the end of Rai's own story, when he says on the novel's last page: In my lifetime, the love of Ormus and Vina is as close as I've come to a knowledge of the mythic, the overweening, the divine. N o w that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life. (GF, 575)

This ordinariness is what Rai finds in his more earthbound love for the former Vina-double Mira and her daughter Tara: I'm looking at Mira and Tara, my islands in the storm [...] The mayhem continues, I don't deny it, but we're capable also of this. Goodness drinking o.j. and munching muffins. Here's ordinary human love beneath my feet. Fall away, if you must, contemptuous earth; melt, rocks, and shiver, stones. I'll stand my ground, right here. This I've discovered and worked for and earned. This is mine. (GF, 575)

Bacon's barbarians also make their entry at the story's final curtain in another variant of the Cama and Rati story: When Ormus returns to India which is also being shaken by earthquakes, the story is repeated. This time it is the impresario Madonna Sangria who acts as Rati and it is Ormus' insane brother Cyrus, the jailed mass murderer, who is to be brought back from the 9

Cf. Michael Wood, "The Orpheus of MTV", The New York Times on the Web, April 18, 1999, 4, (10.4.2002). 10 Francis Bacon, "Orpheus or Philosophy" in Sapientia Veterum (1609), Francis Bacon, The Essays, Appendix 3, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985), 267-68.

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underworld of his prison. In an ironic twist, the same stardom machinery which worked to bring Vina Apsara, the Venus and Angel as her names suggest, to the summit of fame, are now applied to raise a convicted serial killer, Ormus' negative foil, on the pedestal. The age of Vina and Ormus is replaced by that of Madonna and Cyrus, reproaching Ormus for his "suppression of race and skin modalities in the interests of the untenable Western dogma of universals" (GF, 565). The time of barbarism has come. There is yet another variant of the Orpheus myth which must be considered, although Rushdie does not explicitly refer to it. In The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971, 2nd ed. 1982), his pioneering attempt to pinpoint the rise of postmodernism in literature, Ihab Hassan used the image of the dismembering of Orpheus as his central metaphor. In this reading, postmodernism is the natural consequence of modernism's overstrung logocentrism and hypersensitivity about form and its meanings, which had ended in a 'terrible silence'. Beyond this silence, an art of sorts could only break out again in the form of the singing head of the dismembered Orpheus: vitality would again have overcome orphic order and discipline and the art that follows is one of playfulness, disjunctive, open antiform, anarchy and dispersal, aspects which Hassan finds characteristic of postmodern art.11 It seems difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize these divergent readings suggested by the various Orphic intertexts into a coherent interpretation of Rushdie's novel. A main problem which immediately meets the eye is the correlation of order and discipline suggested by Bacon's and Hassan's versions of the myth with the novel's depiction of the Ormus and Vina period. In fact, the world Ormus and Vina inhabit, expose as their reality, and ultimately themselves help to shape, curiously resembles the anarchic, chaotic, but also playful state of affairs ascribed by both Bacon and Hassan to the post-Orphic period. Thus, the narrator at one point seems to confess in exasperation: Certain patterns recur, seem inescapable. Fire, death, uncertainty. The carpet whipped out from under us to reveal a chasm where the floor should have been. Disorientation. Loss of the East. (GF, 313)

Again, the same outlook obtains when he comments on Ormus Cama's visionary subversions of reality: The world is irreconcilable, it doesn't add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can't make judgements or choices. We can't live. When Ormus Cama saw his vision, he revealed himself to be a true prophet, [...] he was genuinely ahead of his time. We've all caught up now. He isn't here to see them, but the contradictions in the real have become so glaring, so inescapable, that we're all learning to take them in our stride. (GF, 352)

11 Cf. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971, 2nd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982), esp. 267-68; The Postmodern Tum. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Ohio State UP, 1987), esp. 13,71-72.

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Indeed, the text of the novel itself bears witness to this loss of orientation and form in its wild intermingling of snippets of song lyrics, of slogans and advertisement catchphrases. The bad style and execrable puns which reviewers have criticized,12 must in fact be read as 'popular language', which is, however, no longer the same "language really used by men" that the Romantics had employed. Now the multimedia overkill in text, sound and image crowding in on people today is reproduced in features of speech on the creative side which evoke Bacon's description of the post-orphic phase: And [...] it is not long before letters also and philosophy are so torn in pieces that no traces of them can be found but a few fragments, scattered here and there like planks from a shipwreck [,..]13 If, however, the phase of Ormus' and Vina's rock stardom is postmodernism, that is postmodern literature and art are correlated to the Orphic ideal, then the conclusion of Rushdie's novel already referred to above must be read as a glimpse of life after pop music, rock stardom, but also after postmodernism. What, then, are the characteristics of this new 'phase'? At least three different visions are given in the novel. First, there is the threat of Cyrus Cama as Ormus/Orpheus' negative alter ego, who threatens to bring barbarism as racism and disrespect of life, promoted by and utilizing the same machinery that had been created to propel Ormus and Vina to superstardom. Violence and barbarism are shown as the flip side of postmodernism's playfulness and apparent lack of ethical commitment. Second, there is Rai's private solution in his settling down to a human, no longer angelic love with Mira and daughter Tara in a quotidian existence of orange juice and muffins, creating his own, local reality and piece of ground to stand on in the midst of the continued ragings of chaos. Thirdly, Rai returns to his trade after his long participation in Ormus' and Vina's tours around the world: I left the tour and went back to New York and got on with my work, I even went back to photo-journalism for the first time in years and ended up dodging bullets in places whose names I couldn't pronounce. (GF, 562) This getting on with one's work does, of course, sound familiar, as it is already part of Voltaire's grand total of the post-optimistic world in his Candide. Is there also a message, the reader may feel invited to speculate, for authors after postmodernism? Would they, after having submerged in a postmodern feast of intermingling of styles, media and genres, now have to go back to their 'trade', become more 'writerly writers' again? This may be taking things too far, and certainly this is not the main thrust of Rushdie's novel, which is definitely 12 Thus, Chandrashekhar Sastri gives examples as "a last kiss before parting, a last piss before starting" or "[...] and jeepers if those peepers didn't pop open [...]" and concludes: "The Ground Beneath Her Feet is bad as writing, bad as a novel and does little credit to a writer who held such great promise as Rushdie." "Review of The Ground Beneath Her Feet", (10.4.2002). 13 Francis Bacon, "Orpheus", 268.

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looking backwards and could be read as a stock-taking, but also as a celebration of the age of a multicultural and transnational global age of postmodernist pop culture. As so often happens, however, epic works of this kind are often written when the age they describe is felt to be drawing to a close.

Recuperation I: The Localized Metaphor in David Parker's Building on Sand (1988) Comparing now David Parker's earlier book Building on Sand,M there is a marked turn from the dramatic rifts and gaping ruptures of Rushdie's Mexican earthquakes to the more gradual and subversive uncertainties of Australia's shifting sands. "The House was built on sand", is the first sentence of the book. The house in question is that of protagonist Jude Watson's grandfather Edward Rowe-Jones. It stands on Australia's Southern coast on the outskirts of Adelaide. Here Jude grows up, looked after by his grandparents, because he was abandoned by his mother whose husband could not forgive her this illegitimate child. The novel tells the story of Jude's boyhood and adolescence in this sprawling Adelaide neighbourhood in the 1950s. In his first-person narrative, Jude describes the many crises in his search for identity, marked by a frequent change of names, including such fantasy existences as 'JRJ', the smashing naval officer, but also Judd, the failed schoolboy poet or Judah, the biblical lion. On one level, the story thus follows the Bildungsroman structure of a boy's search for himself, from his early childhood memories and awakenings to self-consciousness through a number of role models inspired by his peers, notably his laddish uncle Waldo, the famous football star, driver (and smasher) of a dazzling FJ Holden, and successful doorstep-vendor of window blinds (BS, 103). Jude starts out from the solidity of his grandfather's Victorian self-assurance and his grandmother's Irish Catholicism. Between them, his grandparents represent the certainties of Australia's traditional settler society. Grandfather Edward, aged 70 as the novel begins (BS, 24), could still tell about his own father, who was "conceived on the voyage out from England and was bom, in 1851, in a colony that was only fourteen years old" (BS, 5). What these colonists had, however, brought with them was a goodly measure of Victorian imperial assurance about their identities and their place in society, and this is how they apparently brought up their children. Witness grandfather Edmund, who is described as follows: He was, in his own phrase, a fine figure of a man. He stood erect before the mirror adjusting his tartan tie, in his impeccable fawn linen jacket. With his freshly trimmed grey military moustache, his thin white hair brushed rigidly back, his high

14 David Parker, Building on Sand (North Ryde, NSW, London: Angus and Robertson, 1988). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'BS').

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suntanned forehead, he was a handsome man of nearly seventy, though he looked years younger. (BS, 24)

Untouched by self-doubt, his confidence gives him authority and the assurance to lead the way, as his solid conviction of the right way to swim can exemplify: Edward had firm ideas on the proper way to swim. He couldn't stand back and see someone not swimming properly. When he saw a boy doing something wrong, such as not putting his head right down into the water, he would go up to him and offer correction. [...] Somehow he did this with such an air of command that he never gave offence. "Edward rules the waves," [uncle] Waldo once said. (BS, 34-35)

That Edward was drawing his strength from his firm rootedness in a thoroughly British imperial tradition, as here implied by Waldo, is repeatedly driven home to the reader and put in an emblematic vignette in the grandfather's taste for English brogues: He believed above all in proper leather shoes, well-cleaned. [...] "You see, these are solid shoes," he explained, pointing to the three layers of leather on the soles, "not like the rubbish they make here these days. I've worn these for ten years. Look at them, like new." So they were. The white stitching that held the three layers together was still sound, not a thread broken. On the instep you could still see the brand, stamped in ghostly gold lettering, "J. Church and Co., Northampton, England." Like his father before him, Edward would never walk out in anything else. (BS, 23)

This unflinching certainty is not, however, something which Edward perceives as founded in his present, but as remembered in the distant past, cut off from the present by "two Depressions and two world wars", and as hoped for in his waking dreams. In both instances, the yearning is telescoped into the image of a solid building drawn from the biblical reference to the buildings on sand versus those founded on rock. Turning to the past, he would take his grandson back to "a world of known beginnings and known ends", and especially "to his childhood, the days of the horse and trap, when his family lived in a vast house set on the firm rocks of enterprise, uprightness, and reputation" (BS, 3). When he would now be woken by the storms threatening his present house literally built on sand, he "lay awake awaiting the fate of the foolish man in the bible and dreamed of his bunker. He would dig deep into the lea-side of the hill, prop it up with railway-sleepers, then bring in rocks for the foundations, setting the whole thing in concrete two-foot thick. It would be solid, solid as a rock. And he would sleep all night" (BS, 3). His present dwelling on sand is, beyond its literal meaning, not only symbolic of his and his family's economic decline. The permanently changing, wind-swept and wave-tossed character of the dunes on the South Australian shore signify the shifts in the settler society which seem incompatible with the grandparents' Victorian values. The new waves of European immigrants of the post-war years - "New Australians" (BS, 28), as they are called - bring in

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members of other nationalities which begin to alter the social structures dominated by British settlers and their descendants. Moreover, the influence of American pop culture is making itself felt. The cars, music and sexual mores are shown to become increasingly 'Americanized' and the social web of the kind of Australian society Edward represents becomes tenuous and is disrupted. For Edward, sand remains a negative image full of uncertainty and dread. His grandson will experience this differently. For Jude who starts out as a kind of social misfit in this traditional society, being, as he eventually discovers, a 'bastard', illegitimate child dumped on his poor grandparents, the social break-up increasingly develops into an opportunity of self-exploration and role-play. He goes through subsequent phases of booze, poetry, religion, and free love gradually to find his own place and self-consciousness. He eventually recognizes his own fate from an existentialist perspective when he starts to work for his Ph.D.: I read Nietzsche and Sartre and began to feel at last that I could understand my whole experience of life and books. My thesis would be on Identity and Authenticity in novels of personal growth, from Jane Eyre to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I saw all the heroes in these books as learning to break free from the bad faith of social belonging. The nineteenth-century novels could be seen as gropings towards the idea of individual authenticity [...]. (BS, 248-49)

Ultimately, he is able to accept his own changing and precarious existence: "I've been several different people and yet underneath, always the same too" (BS, 246-47). This aspect of his life is a feature of which the sand and dunes of his boyhood ramblings are emblematic: the same sand, but permanently shifting and changing shape. Sand remains the central experience and the most prominent motif in Jude's story and occupies the place of origin in his memory. In this function it parallels his grandfather's memory of the solidity of the "vast house set on the firm rocks". The plasticity and unpredictability of sand which his grandfather dreaded become increasingly positive values to his grandson. Sand is both the concrete reality of his boyhood experience of life on the beach and the symbolic experience of his shape-shifting development in a changing Australian society. In this eminently readable book, David Parker thus manages not only to portray the reversal of valences between rock and sand in a changing society, but to show how the revaluation of sand and its symbolic properties are true as a specifically local, Australian feature in a postcolonial setting, giving due respect not only to the geological characteristics of the continent's terrain, but also to the specificities of an immigrant, multicultural society characteristic of modern Australia. On yet another level, however, there is also continuity from grandfather to grandson. Edward, as Jude had observed, used to recover his balance from his fear engendered by the house built on sand through reaching back to the past and the house built on rock, or into the dream-like future of the bunker he wanted to build. His strategy to effect the linkage and cover the chronological

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distance was the telling of stories: "When he told his stories he was no longer worried" (BS, 3). With stories he covers the 'era of sand' to reach the assurance of rocks. By narrating the story of this book, his grandson can be said to use the same strategy: He is also telling stories to cover his life built on shifting sands, only that there is no rock either at the origins or at the end. The effect, however, remains the same: For Jude, the story becomes the shifting sand which can adapt to the changing times and provide coherence despite the impossibility of assigning it any definitive identity which would correspond to a constant experience in the past or which could constitute a predictable future. Thus, while for his grandfather stories had a teleology, leading back to the Victorian house built on rocks or forward to the dream bunker, Jude's stories are an end in themselves and they only share a metonymic co-existence with the properties of sand. It is these properties of change and adaptability themselves which give continuity and assurance, not only to Jude, but as a local, specific feature of an autonomous Australian society, free from its colonial past and free to start all over again and again: In time the sand would always fill everything up, undermining all imaginings and endeavours like the waves that made it. [...] I stared at its whiteness as at an empty page. (BS, 6) The ultimate reliance on stories as productive of identity rather than any essentialist, rock-solid concepts, and its stress on the local, individual puts this novel firmly in the same category as many other texts described as postmodern. Its appropriation of the Biblical imagery of building on sand, taken from the Western cultural tradition and reinterpreted within the local, Australian context that does not lend itself easily to generalizations for other places and other times provides, however, a special, 'post-colonial' note.

Recuperation II: Graham Swift's Waterland: Reclamation through Narration? David Parker's novel can be said to echo many functions of narration which are central to Graham Swift's still earlier Waterland (1983).15 Stories and indeed histories form Swift's major concern, summed up in the novel's protagonist-cum-narrator (s.o.), Tom Crick, a flailing history teacher who has turned from history to story in his classroom practice and has now been given the sack by his utilitarian headmaster. Waterland has undoubtedly remained Swift's most famous and most frequently analyzed work to date and it is impossible to do full justice here to its multi-layered conception and complex narrative structure which David Leon Higdon has succinctly portrayed as follows: 15 Graham Swift, Waterland (1983, London, Basingstoke, Oxford: Picador, 1984, revised ed. 1992). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'W').

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[Waterland] is Swift's most powerful, most ambitious, most technically accomplished novel. It is simultaneously a murder confession, a history of the fen country, and indictment of the modern world for its ignorance of history, an essay on the life of the eel - a grim intertwining of incest, suicide and murder played against two hundred years of family histories and an apocalyptic sense that time may be coming to an end. There can be no doubt either that Waterland's pages search for some type of realised meaning.16 In this search for meaning, however, the novel's title and the topography of the novel's setting in the Fenlands with their geographic features, with their typical flora and amphibian fauna, function as a focal image emblematizing key concepts and metonymic similarities. The uncertain grounds of an area where water and land, as in the title, are hybridized into one word and merge into an equally hybrid, oscillating existence, here form a threat to the solidity and reliability of an unequivocal terra firma as encountered in Rushdie's earthquakes and Parker's shifting sands. Before further exploring the emblematic dimensions of this landscape, however, the overall perspective of the novel must briefly be adumbrated. Rarely noted by commentators, Waterland is presented as a narrative which springs from and is situated in a very specific situation in which its narrator, Tom Crick, finds himself in the narrative present. As the story evolves, Crick's narrative motivation emerges ever more clearly as springing from his current, deeply upsetting and desperate circumstances. Not only does Crick carry a burden of the past in the form of three deaths (Freddy Parr's, his wife's unborn foetus' and his brother Dick's) for which he feels responsible, but the life as history teacher and husband he had fabricated for himself despite all these painful memories suddenly comes tumbling about his ears. He has lost his faith in history and has turned to story-telling in the class-room; his wife has gone mad, stealing a baby from a pram and ending up in a mental hospital; his job is axed and he is about to be sent off to early retirement. The makeshift grounds of his existence are finally failing him and he is desperately trying to recover his balance and retain his own foothold. The result of this search in extremity is, in one sense, the novel itself. Its stories of the past - biographical, autobiographical, historical - as told by Crick, constitute a concerted effort to (re-)establish meaning, primarily for Crick's life, but increasingly with wider implications as readers discover that very elementary human concerns are at issue. Not only the antithesis of natural and 'artificial' history, as some commentators have reductively averred, 17 must be seen at issue here, however, but really five different, albeit interrelated,

16 David Leon Higdon, "Graham Swift and Julian Barnes" in James Acheson (ed.), The British and Irish Novel Since I960 (Houndmills, London: Macmillan, 1991), 174-191, 186-87. 17 Cf. e. g. John Brewer, Stella Tillyard, "History and Telling Stories: Graham Swift's Waterland", History Today 35 (1985), 49-51; Susanne Mecklenburg, Martin Amis und Graham Swift. Erfolg duch bodenlosen Moralismus im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000), 148.

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approaches to the past identified by Richard Todd:18 Next to the natural history as visualized in the Fenland habitat, and the 'artificial' or official history which Crick teaches, there is also the dynastic history of Crick's family, going back to the time of King Charles, when the name "was spelt sometimes 'Coricke' or 'Cricke'" (W, 10); there is a 'fantastic' history involving Sarah Atkinson's catatonia and the ghost appearances after her death pointing to the well-known tradition of English Gothic novels, and all of these are in turn to be integrated with Crick's autobiographic memories. It has been repeatedly noted that, if Tom Crick, calling man "the storytelling animal" (W, 62), is able to recover meaning, it is through this telling and interweaving of (hi)stories, and in this respect the novel's overall drift is not so different from Parker's, or indeed, many other works classified as 'postmodern' on precisely the grounds that they show a marked return to narration.19 One of the features that makes Swift's novel so unique, however, is its use of natural history as orientational imagery of the strategies and effects of its narrative process. His pertinent observations of nature are as acute as they are powerfully suggestive: For the chief fact about the Fens is that they are reclaimed land, land that was once water, and which, even today, is not quite solid. [...] What silt began, man continued. Land reclamation. Drainage. But you do not reclaim a land overnight. You do not reclaim land without difficulty and without ceaseless effort and vigilance. The Fens are still being reclaimed even to this day. Strictly speaking, they are never reclaimed, only being reclaimed. (W, 9-10)

The Fens become an image for the kind of ground of human existence, both individual and collective; always in doubt, never quite solid, permanently endangered. The ebb-and-flow element in this, together with the novel's numerous excursions on eel biology (esp. W, 196-205), have led some readers to construct the overall outlook underlying Swift's text as cyclical.20 The frequent references to the never-ending struggle to reclaim land which is then lost again, and indeed the awareness that the struggle for reclamation itself

18 Richard Todd, "Narrative Trickery and Performative Historiography: Fictional Representations of National Identity in Graham Swift, Peter Carey, and Mordecai Richler" in Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community (Durham, London: Duke UP, 1995), 305-28,307. 19 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, "Tradition und Innovation im Roman der 1980er und 1990er Jahre" in Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Klassiker und Strömungen des englischen Romans im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Gerhard Haefner (Trier: WVT, 2000), 189219, 190; Tamäs Benyei, "Narrative and Repetition in Saterland", British and American Studies 1 (1996), 109-16; Ronald Η. McKinney, "The Greening of Postmodernism: Graham Swift's Waterland", New Literary History 28 (1997), 821 -32, esp. 822. 20 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, "Tradition und Innovation", 196-97; this view is opposed by Susanne Mecklenburg, Martin Amis und Graham Swift, 144-45 and n. 315.

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inherently contains its own defeat,21 may evoke the task of Sisyphus. What is more, the novel's reflections seem to further this emphasis on repetition against historical progress, not only through the wary comments on the merits of the French Revolution which Crick has been teaching in his earlier history lessons, but also in a very direct reference to the fenland imagery, as in the following passage: There's this thing called progress. But it doesn't progress. It doesn't go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It's progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. (W, 291) A closer look at precisely this passage will, however, show that it is not an argument for a cyclical model of history, but rather the integration of both cyclical and progressive modes in an overriding concept that Swift's narrator has very ingeniously brought about. In fact, this 'phlegmatic' statement can very aptly be read as an appeal for the vital necessity of progress. While ground is continually under erosion and breaking away at all sides, the utmost effort to reclaim land at the same time is the only way to maintain a delicate balance; people living in this amphibian country need, so to speak, run at breakneck speed simply to stand still and not go backwards all the time. Maximum progress is necessary against continual erosion of solid ground. Can this become a model for the novel's concept of narration? The best analogy that can come to mind here seems to be, once again, the case of Scheherazade: she is telling stories to save her life, and her life is saved as long as she is telling her stories. No individual story by virtue of its art can do the trick, but the act of successful storytelling itself is vital and only effective as long as it lasts. This, precisely, seems to be the underlying narrative concept in Waterland, emblematized by the process of the recovery of land. There are no stories, no master narratives which could have lasting, global significance and thus, once told and believed in, might permanently provide solid ground. Just like the treacherous silt, they are eroded by time and by the forces of nature's ebb and flow, and the story-telling needs a continual 'progression' in the literal sense of going forward to maintain an even balance between loss of meaning and new textures of signification. In theory therefore, solid ground is after all just possible, albeit only in a moment out of time and in the narrative process: compare Scheherazade.

21 "Silt: which shapes and undermines continents; which demolishes as it builds; which is simultaneous accetion and erosion; neither progress nor decay" (W, 8-9); "Because silt obstructs as it builds; unmakes as it makes" (W, 11); cf. also explanation of peat (W, 12).

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Recuperation III: Malcolm Bradbury's 'Postmortemism' in To the Hermitage In his last, and perhaps most capacious novel, Malcolm Bradbury explored in a sweeping gesture the foundations of Western thought, including the crises these were undergoing in postmodern times. To the Hermitage (2000)22 works on two time levels, symmetrically marked by the chapter headings "now" and "then". "Then" describes the French philosopher Diderot's 1773 journey to and stay at the court of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in the past, while "now", set in the notable year 1993, tells about the voyage of a group of scholars, the first person narrator among them, on a ferry from Stockholm to St. Petersburg and back, forming the vaguely-defined 'Diderot project' with the purpose of following and if possible further exploring the traces of the famous Frenchman. The parallelism between the two time frames is obvious and intended, and people, places and activities freely reveal their similarities. Both the narrator and, formerly, Diderot were in the throes of writing, the narrator alluding to a book he is about to begin (H, 459), Diderot scribbling away in the coach during his long journey at the story of his itinerant servant antihero Jacques in his famous novel Jacques le fataliste et son maitre. Russia permanently holds the prospect of turmoil, there in the tsarina's constant struggles to suppress the unending line of Romanov pretenders and the peasant rebellions they incite, here the Russian president Yeltsin ("Tzar Yeltsin" as he is called; H, 202, 317) and Russia's dark hour of the storm on the White House in the upsetting events of 1993, which are the political scene and backdrop as reported on the ferry radios. On both time levels, the places of departure in the West, Paris and Stockholm respectively, are presented, albeit with an ironic slant, as centres of civilization and order. With the departure from the West and the approach to Russia, however, entropy encroaches and clear-cut, 'enlightened' perceptions are dispersed. Thus Diderot reflects about his stay in Russia during his journey home: [H]e knows something has happened. Everything has altered, and he's not a bit the man he was when he came. [...] It isn't that any of his ideas have changed; not really, not exactly. But they've grown more contradictory, volatile, unreliable, inconsistent, passionate: quite unpredictable, even to him. (H, 439)

In its own way, the Diderot project is similarly affected, indicated by the loss of academic discipline as the ferry is headed for Russia and the plan to have regular seminar papers presented at the daily meetings disintegrates (a tendency to which all seminars seem to be inherently prone, university teachers will be quick to add). The effect of the Russian experience on Diderot,

22 Malcolm Bradbury, To the Hermitage (London, Basingstoke, Oxford: Picador, 2000). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as Ή').

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as on the members of the Diderot project two hundred years later, is the loss of the assurance concerning enlightenment certainties. They experience the Russian situation as a permanent loss of ground, as Galina, the Diderot Project's Russian guide points out: It was Didro who said the best thing about Russia. He says everyone in Russia acts as if they live in a place that has just suffered an earthquake, so nobody can trust the ground under their feet. (H, 348)

And the relevant passage from Diderot comes verbatim towards the end of the book in a long quotation from Diderot's letter to his mistress on his homeward journey: It's as if they [the Russian people] have only lived in a time o f floods and earthquakes, tremblings of the soil, and have never known how to feel the solid ground beneath their feet. (H, 451-52)

This feeling of insecurity and disorientation, however, which the Russian experience engenders in the characters of Bradbury's novel essentially and importantly coincides with the general outlook summed up in the authornarrator's diagnosis of the decade at the end of which the novel appeared: I don't think I much like the look of the new Naughty Nineties, with its lazy decadence, ideological vacancy, consumerist ethics, empty narcissisms. People are self-creationists; drunk on drugs and aimless shopping, they pass by in the streets with pins through their noses, nails through their navels, clowning with their bodies. The seasoned, reasoned, puritanically serious world I've taken as history since the fifties seems to be wearing out. (H, 27)

As the Diderot project's ship approaches the Russian main and the project's order is dissolving with the loss of the framework of the scholarly treatise emblematic of the rational, enlightenment approach to life, two 'papers' nevertheless do get read after all, one by Jack Paul Verso and the other by the narrator himself. Readers will easily identify these two statements as the alternative approaches left in a post-enlightenment, that is post-modern world. Jack Paul Verso, "Professor of Contemporary Thinking" from Cornell University, the project's embodiment of the postmodernist scholar as indicated by his telling name,23 sums up his outlook as follows: We don't have reason; we have computation. We don't have a tree of knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don't have real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no

23 Jack for Jacques Derrida, Paul for Paul de Man and Verso for the London radical publishing house which, originally trading as New Left Books, developed an early reputation as a translator of classic works of European literature and politics by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Emest Mandel and Max Weber and, more recently, of Giovanni Anighi, Norberto Bobbio, Guy Debord, Giles Deleuze, Che Guevara, Carlo Ginzburg, Andre Götz, Jürgen Habermas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Virilio.

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longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles. We no longer have brains that serve as the seat of our thinking minds; we have neural sites, which remember, store body signals, control genes, generate dreads, anxieties and neuroses, quite independent of whether they think rationally or not. So starting from reason, where did we get? We have a godless world in an imploding cosmos. We have a model of reality based on a glorious chaos. We have a model of the individual based on biological determinism. (H, 193)

Clearly, when he is to give his paper, the author-narrator recognizes that the traditional, logocentric approach of the Enlightenment credo as personified by the project's organizer, Bo Luneberg, will not do in the context of the Russian revolution which is happening as they are on board ship, but which also signals the shaking ground of the postmodern condition, when he observes: Bo is already speaking. Difficult events surround us [...] But when the world is in chaos, all the more reason for all the more reason. [...] When things are in confusion, there must always be those who follow the bright torch of truth. [...] As Bo goes on speaking, in his reassuring fashion, as if it is perfectly normal for us to read theoretical papers to one another while sailing into a revolution, I try to draw thought and idea together from the darkness of stupor. (H, 149)

The answer the author-narrator gives to this dilemma is entitled "A Paper that is not a Paper", because it is, as the speaker hastens to explain, a story; and in an afterthought, alluding to the title of Diderot's tale "This is not a Story" (Ce η 'estpas un conte): "Except the story is not really a story either - because it's perfectly true, and starts from a real experience I had in Stockholm just two days ago" (H, 150). The experience to which he alludes is his search for Rene Descartes' grave, presumed to be in Stockholm, which resulted in his gradual discovery of the long journey which Descartes' body took through the whole of Europe, shedding, relic-like, a limb here, an organ there, so that in the end his body was 'disseminated' all over Europe, as the members of the Diderot Project are told: He became a great posthumous power. In fact both he and his famous dilemma the Cartesian dilemma - have been buried, disinterred, scattered, venerated, execrated and generally fought over by every generation of philosophers and writers from then to this very day. (H, 151)

The speaker, who first confesses that his usual plan had been to talk about 'Diderot and Postmodernism' had, on the Descartes experience in Stockholm, now decided to talk about Lawrence Sterne and about 'Postmortemism' instead. He stresses that Barthes' idea of "books as an open play of floating signs between writer and reader" is not at all new, but can be found, not only in Diderot, but above all in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The conclusion that interest in authors would therefore diminish is, however, utterly denied: [Wjhile in modem theory we pretend we have no need of an Author to explain our interest in books, the truth is we like to grant lives to our authors, and even view

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them as real persons just like all the rest of us. [...] Even the critics and scholars amongst us are deeply interested in literary biographies and autobiographies [...] (H, 152)

In fact, even when they are dead, the authors remain important: [According to my new theory of Postmortemism, the end of the story isn't the end of the story at all. It's simply the opening shot in the next story: the necrological sequel, the story of the writer's after-life, the tale of the graveyard things that follow. Wakes and processions, cemeteries and dripping yews. [···] Statues, plinths, busts, poets' corners, writers' houses, pantheons. Libraries, collects, lost manuscripts, translations [...]. (H, 153)

Thus, authors' biographies, which may, as the speaker accedes to Verso's interjection, be themselves stories, nevertheless are of interest and continue to live, very much as, and this is Bradbury's textualist slight of hand, their works continue to disseminate and produce offspring. He exemplifies this by means of Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby, who, in Diderot's appropriation of the character turned into his famous servant Jacques the Fatalist, who in turn spawned Beaumarchais' Figaro who then inspired Mozart and Rossini, but also Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov (H, 161). The physical, material interest in the afterlife of the authors' dead bodies is paralleled by the same interest taken in Bradbury's novel with the afterlife of their fictional characters and their books. "Books breed books" is one of the recurrent catch phrases in To the Hermitage. They do so metaphorically, as Sterne's novel bred Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. In the story of the Diderot Project, they also do so in a metonymic, material sense, since the books the author-narrator is given as a secret present by Galina in the Diderot archive turn out to be the heavily annotated volumes 5 and 6 of Diderot's own copy of Tristram Shandy, in the pages of which the narrator finds a manuscript page of Jacques le Fataliste, as Diderot had scribbled it in the coach to Petersburg. Here Sterne's book physically forms a nest wherein Diderot's manuscript has been bred. This yoking together of mind and matter, of fiction and gross material reality is one of the prominent features in Bradbury's novel. Although the prospect of an all-encompassing, logocentric discourse as envisioned by the Enlightenment philosophers may be denied, their ideas live on in the very material sense of their disseminated bodies and places to which they were attached and in the physical presence of the books they wrote, but also in the textual reality of both the stories they engendered and, on a meta-level, in the stories their lives and work still engender, such as Bradbury's book. "Books breed books": Although this motto may not prove an ultimate solution to recover the solidity of ground once lost, Bradbury's surprising 'postmortemist' findings may help to see the persistence of a continuous process of germinating meanings. Ultimately, Bradbury's strange survivals of dead authors also result in an emphasis on stories as the best way to approximate or

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indeed replace former concepts of truth, although his narrative conception may be a far cry from the traditional forms of story-telling as advocated by Swift, as a story that is not a story.

Conclusion: The Outcomes of Postmodernism As the lack of chronological order in the discussion of the four novels already suggests, movements 'beyond postmodernism' cannot be expected to develop in a neatly evolutionary and teleological pattern. It is very likely that, on the one hand, the concepts and literary modes variously described as 'postmodern' by literary and cultural critics over the past few decades will be with us for some time to come, and indeed may themselves be only beginning to unfold (cf. Peter V. Zima's argument in this volume). On the other hand, however, trusting to the received wisdom that discourses regularly breed their counterdiscourses within them, new beginnings leading beyond anything reasonably adaptable to a postmodernist concept may appear in the midst of postmodernist negotiations. No clear-cut paradigmatic change, such as Virginia W o o l f s October 1910' is therefore probable. This fairly complex developmental structure is certainly borne out by the sample of novels analyzed in this paper. They certainly do not conform to a movement beyond postmodernism in accordance with their publication dates. To come to a preliminary conclusion in the evaluation of each book's approach and attitude to postmodernism, Wendy Wheeler's sagacious comments on Swift's Waterland should be remembered. Wheeler writes: The task which Swift sets himself is that of discovering how the self-destructive melancholias of modernity can be turned into the healthy mournings of something that we might call poiftnodernity. [...] we might say that the outcome of postmodemity, seen as the attempt to live with loss and uncertainty as a permanent condition, might be the discovery or invention of ways of being in the world which move beyond the harsh individualism of utilitarian modernity, and towards a different way of accounting for and valuing human needs. 24

If this outcome of postmodernism referred to by Wheeler is seen as a step beyond the postmodernist paradigm, it suggests to focus primarily not so much on an epistemic break, but on developments that were triggered off by or directly result from postmodernism, but can no longer be subsumed within it. Looking for the 'outcome' of the four novels therefore seems an apt conclusion.

24 Wendy Wheeler, "Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Grief: The Novels of Graham Swift" in Roger Luckhurst (ed.), Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present. Longman Studies in 20th Century Literature (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 63-79,65 (italics in the original).

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If Salman Rushdie's book is accordingly put to the test, it may be said to explore new ground with acceptance of at least the contingent safety of a steadying flow in turbulent waters, created by Rai's settling down with his new-found partner and her daughter in an individualist and rather isolated form of comfort. Still, if this were to be seen as a kind of 'moral' in conclusion of this sparkling book, it would certainly come as a damp squib after all the rhetorical and literary fireworks set off before. Thus, Rushdie's approach, while eying towards an exhausted, solitary peace 'far beyond' at its conclusion, remains a frenetic and grandiose celebration of postmodernist culture so effectively dramatized in Vina's and Ormus's pop version of the Orpheus myth. David Parker's variations on the valences of sand clearly indicated that what had come to signify key elements of postmodernist consciousness in the imagery of the unreliability and shiftiness of sand in the Western tradition may acquire a very different and indeed positive meaning in another cultural context and a different topographical setting, when the sand's flux of form and malleability can be treasured as the shape-shifter's creativity and adaptability. Although Parker's conclusion thus is also in a sense localized and specifically culture-bound, it is a far cry from Rushdie's 'global individualism'. Swift coincides with Parker in the resorting to local imagery, but Swift uses the symbolic and metonymic qualities of his Fenland setting to infer a general, human need to find however transient, contingent footholds in the telling of stories. While Swift's story-telling is rather an escape from dire, monotonous reality as epitomized by the bleak landscape of the Fens, a filling of their vacuum by life's creativity, Bradbury starts out from this positive estimation of stories and dreams which can build entire cities (such as the equally swamprecovered St. Petersburg25), he sees the materiality of the real encroaching in the form of authors' relic-like bodies or the physicality of books or letters and their tradition and dissemination. Obliquely, perhaps, Bradbury reopens a way for a wary re-introduction of a "liberal humanist" outlook (H, 118) based on a post-Cartesian Enlightenment: "when the world is in chaos, all the more reason for all the more reason" (H, 154); yet "Reason, but within reason" (H, 142). The results of this metaphoric cross-section of postmodern novels are ambiguous, as could be expected from an investigation of developments leading beyond the postmodernist paradigm. No novel approaches to literature were identified, which could clearly be shown as transcending the vast and diffusive area of postmodernist practices. Still, the novels examined in this paper all do conform to a pattern which definitely can be marked as an overall 25 "A new European capital, that just appeared like a mirage when no one was expecting it at all. [...] It's been planted on nowhere, except under-salinated Baltic water and Finnish fen, autumn fog and winter ice" (H, 66).

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tendency, however far approaching or infringing postmodernist borders. Margaret A. Rose's differentiation between 'positive' and 'negative' concepts of the postmodern is particularly helpful in this categorization. With a view to her discussion of postmodern parody, she uses the distinction "to describe the way in which some theories of the post-modern have moved from the negative function of describing the end or failings of modernism, or of other theories of the post-modern, to describing something more creative or innovative".26 Unfortunately, though, Rose also fails to give us a clear idea what exactly this "something more creative" might mean, but her argument is helpful and its general outline can be used to describe the novels discussed above. These newly creative or constructive features beyond the merely negative anti-modernism represented by these authors may, of course, be subsumed under the postmodernist umbrella by stretching an ill-delimited term, and in Salman Rushdie's case this has proved the commendable strategy. In the cases of Parker, Bradbury, and Swift, however, the question must be asked whether they do not posit new concepts which, for all their contingency and, especially with Parker and Swift, conscious cultural and geographic limitations, are characterized by a new authority and assurance which dyed-in-the-wool postmodernists might find highly suspicious and unsavoury. Parker's shifting sands, Bradbury's contingent enlightenment and Swift's stories against the insecurities of a Fenland existence may prove, after all, powerful supports indeed in the struggle to survive Rushdie's postmodernist cataclysms threatening the grounds of human existence.

26 Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 197.

VERA NÜNNING

Beyond Indifference: New Departures in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century Even though it has become fashionable to announce the death of almost any thing under the sun - such as, for instance, the death of history, the death of the subject, and the death of the author - British fiction at the turn of the 21st century is very much alive and kicking. There are quite a number of authors who publish to wide - albeit not unanimous - critical acclaim, and names like Zadie Smith, Will Self, and Nick Hornby, who were virtually unknown a decade ago, enjoy the esteem of a large readership. These authors stand for a large number of contemporary novelists who do not just carry on established traditions: they also introduce new trends into British fiction, they employ narrative conventions to new ends, they give common themes new twists, and they even come up with new topics. Their works do not boast features that we have learned to regard as 'postmodern'. Rather, they stay away from typical 'postmodern' ventures, using quite a number of the themes and narrative devices that were established in the last four centuries for new purposes. Before I begin my short account of four new trends in British fiction at the turn of the 21st century, I would like to emphasise that, given the various and quite often brilliant and contradictory attempts at defining postmodernism, one has to come to the conclusion that there is no 'postmodernism' in the singular. The heterogeneous mass of data rather calls for the acceptance of different 'postmodernisms' in the plural. Moreover, there 'is' no such thing as postmodernism, because such phenomena do not exist as such, but are constructed from the onset. The world - and this holds true for literary developments as well - "is not already organised into categories or kinds, which human beings passively register".1 Just like other literary epochs and movements, postmodernism is a construct rather than the 'objective' designation of an entity or a category 'out there'. As Brian McHale has put it in his seminal work Constructing Postmodernism (1992), "postmodernism exists discursively, in the discourses we produce about it and using it".2 And

1 2

This is one of the standard objections to realisms; see Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 188. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York, London: Routledge, 1992).

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this, of course, holds true for the construction of post-postmodernisms - of new departures beyond postmodernism - as well. Although the heterogeneous mass of British novels published in the last decade defies any attempt at neat categorization, I would like to construct four new trends in British fiction, which can arguably be empirically confirmed by a look at a number of recently published novels. The aim of my paper is to gauge the relation of both ethics and aesthetics and between narrative techniques and underlying notions of identity and memory. I will argue that four main departures in British fiction at the turn of the century can be identified, all of them existing contemporaneously: First, the return to ethical questions and the revival of narrative; second, a concern with popular culture, often expressed in a language that is deemed to be 'not literary'; third, the increasing interest in the topics of cultural memory and national identity, a trend which is sometimes closely linked to the deconstruction of authenticity; and fourth, a merging of realism and experiment. These new departures in British fiction will be discussed with reference to selected, more or less representative novels.

1 There are quite a number of novels which testify to the first trend, which is characterised by an opening up of ethical dimensions and a return to narrative. Whereas Peter Zima has argued that postmodernism is characterised by its pluralism and its indifference to ethical values, 3 one strand of contemporary fiction shows a pronounced interest in ethical questions. The return to ethics is probably the most widespread tendency in contemporary fiction, but in the following I can only point to four or five works which illustrate this trend. First, quite a number of novels often subsumed under the umbrella term of 'New English Literatures' focus on ethical questions, especially on questions of (hybrid) identity and authenticity. These works participate in the revival of narrative, but they employ different forms of narration. Meera Syal, for instance, uses a homodiegetic narrator in her quasi-autobiographical work Anita and Me (1996), while Zadie Smith employs a heterodiegetic narrator who interweaves the stories of different characters through several generations in her spectacular novel White Teeth (2000). Just like Meera Syal in Life isn 't all ha ha hee hee (1999), Zadie Smith explores the problem of hybrid identities of people of different origins living - and quite often born - in London. Graham Swift gives 'multiperspective' forms of narration a new twist in his work Last Orders (1996), in which the thoughts of different narrators are

3

See Peter V. Zima, Moderne/Postmoderne: Gesellschaft, Francke 2001 [1997]), 83-84, lOOff., 345-61.

Philosophie,

Literatur

(Tübingen:

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accorded separate chapters. Each narrator tells his or her own story, raising any number of moral questions along the way. Will Self chooses yet another way of exploring ethical concerns in his work Great Apes (1997), in which an arty yuppy wakes up and realises that he has turned into an ape, living in a world inhabited by apes, an animal world that nonetheless disconcertingly mirrors, reflects, and distorts values of the 'human(e)' world. Michael Frayn combines questions of truth with ethical concerns in his work Headlong (1999), in which a story told by an unreliable narrator raises questions of authenticity, religious persecution and the narrow borderline between unconventional and egocentric behaviour. Even the enfant terrible Martin Amis has returned to straightforward narrative in his short novel Night Train (1997), which is told by a rather unusual female police officer. Amis modifies the conventions of the hardboiled detective story in this work, in which an inexplicable suicide raises questions of the meaning of life. In spite of the wide range of narrative techniques employed by these authors, all of the novels have two things in common: the exploration of ethical concerns and the return to narrative. Due to the sheer number and diversity of novels illustrating this trend it is next to impossible to pick out a work that might be said to be 'representative'. In the following I will concentrate on Meera Syal's Life isn 't all ha ha hee hee, because it raises ethical questions that are typical of a number of works of the so-called 'New English Literatures', and because its 'multiperspective' form of narration serves to highlight the questions of truth and authenticity which haunt many of the characters. Syal's work therefore testifies to a return to narrative which corresponds to a careful attention to formal aspects, which are given a new twist in this and a host of other contemporary works. The three protagonists of the novel face the same problem as many other characters in similar works, because they have to negotiate Indian and English values. All of them are born in England, but while they share most of the concerns and tastes of British teenagers and adults at the end of the 20th century, they have been educated according to the ideals of their parents, who were born and bred in India. The fact that they live in two cultures and have to bridge the gulf between them more often than they care to acknowledge is illustrated at the beginning of the novel, in which one of the three, Chila, is married to Deepak, a successful (and in many ways 'westernised') Indian business man. The marriage ceremony follows Indian rules, and the older women are quite satisfied: "A perfect day, because rituals had been observed, old footsteps retraced, threads running unbroken, families joined, futures secured." 4 As soon as they are in the wedding car, however, Deepak wipes the traditional make-up off Chila's face and takes off his turban, before they both

4

Meera Syal, Life isn Ί all Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: Black Swan, 2000 [1999]), 26. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'L').

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"pick up a Kentucky bargain bucket, as neither of [them] had eaten in all the excitement" (L, 29). More often than not, the three women, who have been good friends since their school days, are caught in the abyss between Indian and British values. Sunita, who works in a municipal office, finds that she can sympathise with an eighty-odd-year-old man "raging against the bloody Pakis - er Pakistanis next door" (L, 50), whose way of living he simply cannot fathom. Although Sunita sees what her position is supposed to be - "Us and them. [...] Defender of my people" - she does not feel like this: "Maybe it's something to do with being a mother. You see everybody's point of view." (L, 50) Her friend Tania has also become "used to not belonging anywhere totally" (L, 56). In contrast to peripheral aspects of Indian culture, like superstitious beliefs in the disastrous consequences of, for instance, leaving the house shortly after sneezing, the negotiation of the traditional relation between husband and wife is something the younger generation has to struggle with as well.5 Tania knows any number of Indian women who are very successful in their respective jobs, saving lives on the operating table or hiring and firing others, but who undergo a transformation similar to Jekyll and Hyde the moment they step over their threshold. Then "the Armani suit shrinks and crumples away, [...] the head bows, the shoulders sag, within a minute they are basting and baking and burning fingers over a hot griddle, [...] bathing in-laws and burning with guilt" (L, 147), and, of course, duly apologetic and respectful to their husbands. The three friends have chosen different ways of dealing with marriage and partnership, with Chila trying to live for her husband and her home, Sunita realizing that her decision not to take her exams and to sacrifice her career as a lawyer for her family was wrong, and Tania placing her career first, which results in losing her partners, breaking her ties with her family, and even temporarily estranging her two old friends. By presenting three different ways of dealing with human relations in greater detail, and mentioning any number of further characters who have chosen slightly different paths, the book raises important ethical questions, but it does not give an easy answer to any of them. The attempt to present the three protagonists sympathetically is reflected in the 'multiperspective' form of the novel, which consists of two distinct chapter forms which are presented in strict alternation: On the one hand there are

5

The decisions the three characters have to take often involve problems which are specific to women. Young Chila, for instance, is taught by a priest that if she is good she will be born again in a different form after her death, the staircase to heaven being marked by the steps 'cow', 'woman', and 'man'. Giving birth to a girl counts for nothing, and divorce is always taken to be the wife's fault. The one divorced Indian character in the novel has to face the hostility of others, even though-according to Western standards-she is certainly not the one who is to be blamed: "Five broken ribs, nose broken twice, broken arm, bums to chest [...]. No low-cut tops for me, sweetie. And I am the whore for leaving him, apparently." (L, 81)

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chapters in which the actions and the thoughts of different characters are presented in what has been called 'figural narration' by an unobtrusive heterodiegetic narrator who abstains from judging or evaluating what is going on, and on the other hand there are chapters in which one of the three protagonists functions as an I-narrator who tells her own story.6 In the latter the three women present their own point of view. This alternation between figural narration, in which several characters serve as 'reflector' figures, and Inarration, in which each of the three friends has the chance to present her own feelings, adds up to a 'multiperspective' account which can be said to come quite close to an 'objective' portrayal of three different lives. Moreover, the question of whether it is possible to provide an 'objective' presentation of events is often discussed, mostly with regard to the truthfulness of films. This is partly motivated by the fact that Tania has launched a career in the film business, and that she wants to describe her friends' lives (among others) in the first documentary she produces herself.7 The presentation of authenticity is complicated by the fact that even in private video documentaries the characters like to play roles that are more often than not modelled on film stars. Thus even the priest who marries Chila and Deepak is conscious of his effect on the screen, choosing Elvis as his rather unlikely model: "He often thought of Elvis Presley at this juncture in the wedding ceremony, how the King would possess the microphone, angle that profile [...]. At such moments, Pandit Kumar forgot he was bald, sweaty and bandy-legged. He had the stage [...] and he had a god-given duty to put on a good show" (L, 17). The bride, moreover, has ample reason to feign sadness, because this will satisfy her relations in India, who will watch the video and decide "what sort of a wife and person [she was]. 'You see that, Bunty? The trollop almost smiled at the camera. May she only bear daughters, the hair-dyed hussy!'" (L, 28) When Tania describes the form of her documentary, which, as she emphasises later on, only tells the truth (L, 180-81), she is implicitly commenting on the form of the novel: "This is going to be a really wide-ranging look at relationship alternatives, no narrator, letting people tell their stories the way they want to" (L, 90). But matters turn out to be more complex than that. Selecting and arranging shots is not a neutral business, as becomes obvious when the film is shown. The order in which some shots are arranged functions

6

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The novel is divided into two parts, each of which begins and ends with a chapter told by the heterodiegetic narrator. In the first part, first Chila, then Sunita and Tania tell their own story, in the second part, Sunita begins, followed by Chila and Tania. But films are also shown to structure the perception of the characters. Thus some characters experience a happy moment as "a film set in your head" (L, 53, cf. 122-23), and Chila has to realise that her view of divorced Indian women is acquired from movies, in which the divorced woman is always a ruthless, egotistic, and ultimately unsuccessful female that bears no resemblance to the only real specimen she ever meets.

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as an ironic commentary on the words of the speaker, as, for instance, when Sunita's husband says: " O f course, in my work you get to recognise the warning signs in a bad relationship very early on.' Close up of Sunita twisting her wedding ring round and round. 'The main problem is communication. [...]' Shot of Sunita vacuuming around Akash's pile of books" (L, 177).8 But it's not easy to dismiss the attempt at objectivity, either. Tania betrays her friends by exposing them, but, as she defiantly says, "I just told the truth" (L, 180). After all, she deliberately chose documentary films as her genre, and she carefully avoids using a narrator: '"The camera as objective witness, that's what it's all about'" (L, 130). Her friends' reactions when they first view the film seem to confirm Tania's opinion, because they find it a very painful experience to see themselves from the outside and realise how ridiculous they appear in the eye of the camera. Their very shame seems to support Tania's claim to truthfulness. But even leaving the question of ethics and Tania's betrayal of her friends' trust aside, it is an open question whether her version of her friends' lives conforms to the version that is told in the novel. Perhaps Deepak is right when he claims that "[t]he camera does lie" (L, 179). After all, people in the film business talk of 'mockumentaries' instead of 'documentaries', because for them, it's the "let's film some ordinary people doing stuff and shape it into a story afterwards sort of genre" (L, 251). Whether the camera is an "ironic eye" (L, 175) or an 'objective witness' is ultimately left for the reader to decide. Since the parallels between film and fiction are emphasised by the interchangeability of "[t]he camera or the notebook" (L, 312), the many references to the objectivity or distortion of Tania's documentary not only draw attention to the form of the novel, which resembles that of her film, they also raise the question of whether it is possible to give a 'truthful' or 'objective' account in any medium, be it film or fiction. Incidentally, Syal's work is not the only novel which testifies to a growing interest in other media. Whereas in the 18th and 19th century young readers especially girls - were supposed to be susceptible to the influence of fiction, late twentieth-century novels illustrate the importance of photography, comics, films, and music for many characters' lives. This is quite pronounced, for instance, in such different works as Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1996), which deals with the importance of pop music for the construction of personal identity, and Vikram Seth's novel An Equal Music (1999), in which chamber

8

Readers might have expected this, because Tania has drawn attention to the impossibility of objectivity even in a genre like reportage earlier on. Even the coverage of the beginning of a war is highly subjective, as her teacher makes clear: "where do you first point the camera? Where the bomb lands or where it dropped from? What do you say to accompany the visuals? Hooray for our lads, the freedom fighters, or boo to the barbarian terrorists? What tone? [...] At every stage you make choices. You play God. [...]. The biggest lie is that we claim to have the real answers." (L, 138)

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music structures the life and feelings of the protagonist. 9 Syal's interest in films is mirrored in works like Adam Thorpe's Pieces of Light (1998) or Stephen Fry's Making History (1996), but her way of using a discussion of the inherent subjectivity of documentaries as an implicit commentary on the form and concerns of her novel is quite unique.

2 A second departure in contemporary fiction is marked by the quite astonishing success of novels which are steeped in popular culture and concerned with any number of details which are often regarded as trivial. Brand names, TV shows or pop music are not usually taken to be the 'proper stuff of fiction', but some authors nowadays take Woolf s dictum that "everything is the proper stuff of fiction" quite literally and deal extensively with apparently minor aspects of popular culture, which are shown to be of major importance for many characters. These books start from the premise "that popular culture is an important part of all our lives and it should have some kind of reflection in the books we are reading". 10 One of the earliest novels which centre around such popular concerns is Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (1992), which features a soccer fan obsessed by 'his' club Arsenal London as an unlikely - and not very literate - protagonist. In Germany there is a comparatively large - and notorious - group of contemporary authors whose works are subsumed under the category 'pop literature' and who esteem Hornby's second novel High Fidelity (1996) as 'the mother of the 90s-pop-novels'," mainly because it hits upon an ingenious way of inscribing trivial details of popular culture into ('high') literature: the list. The thirty-odd-year-old protagonist Rob Fleming and his mates spend a considerable amount of time making up top-five lists of their favourite pop songs ("top five Elvis Costello songs") or films ("OK, guys. Top five Dustin Hoffman films").12 For them, pop music is an important means of establishing (group) identity, of excluding others, and, most importantly, of trying to stave off thoughts about more serious issues. Some of the popular novels turn to violence, perhaps because this is an adequate alternative to the attempt to stay on the surface of things and describe the

9

Another unlikely candidate for influencing a contemporary characters' life is seventeenthcentury painting, which is a very important topic in Michael Frayn's novel Headlong. 10 Interview with Nick Hornby, (5.11.2002) 11 In his book Der deutsche Pop-Roman: Die neuen Archivisten (München: Beck, 2002), 50, Moritz Baßler calls Fever Pitch the "Mutter der 90er-Pop-Romane". 12 Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1995]), 76, 35.

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glittering world of consumer culture, as Hubert Winkels suggests.13 British examples of novels concerned with the rebellious and violent aspects of the popular culture of the 1990s are Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993) and Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning (1996) as well as his Country of the Blind (1997), all of which attracted large audiences and rather ambivalent critical reception. 14 In the following I want to concentrate on one of Hornby's novels that features many characteristics of such popular novels, but still retains quite a number of qualities usually associated with 'high literature', About a Boy (1998). Contrary to the expectations that are raised by the title, the book is the story of the initiation of two characters; of Marcus, who is aptly described as the "oldest twelve-year-old in the world" and Will, who is nominally 36 years old.15 Since he has immersed himself enthusiastically in the more trivial aspects of the popular culture of the early 90s, Will has, however, successfully avoided becoming an adult. His life is governed by everything that counts as 'cool', and he makes a great effort to keep up on that score. This already becomes obvious when Will is mentioned for the first time in the novel: How cool was Will Freeman? This cool: he had slept with a woman he didn't know very well in the last three months (five points). [...] He had spent more than twenty pounds on a haircut (five points) (How was it possible to spend less than twenty pounds on a haircut in 1993?). He owned more than five hip-hop albums (five points). He had taken Ecstasy (five points), but in a club and not merely at home as a sociological exercise (five bonus points). [...] [H]e had both grown a goatee (five points) and shaved it off again (five points). The bad news was that [...] he did still think, if he was honest (and if Will had anything approaching an ethical belief, it was that lying about yourself in questionnaires was utterly wrong), that owning a fast car was likely to impress women (minus two). Even so, that gave him ... sixtysix! He was, according to the questionnaire, sub-zero! He was dry ice! (AB, 5-6)

Will is introduced by one of those lists which feature prominently in 'popnovels' of the 1990s. All the elements of this enumeration, which runs to more than a page, point to Will's great aim in life: to be cool. Anything that serves

13 Hubert Winkels, "Deutscher Roman schlägt Fußballnationalmannschaft. Moritz Baßlers Buch über die Popliteratur ist die beste Theorie der neunziger Jahre", ZeitLiteratur, Sonderbeilage 57 von Die Zeit 41 (Oktober 2002), 37-38, 38. 14 For an interpretation of Brookmyre's, Welsh's, and Hornby's heroes as 'Cynical Young Men', see Göran Nieragden, '"Cynical Young Men '-ein neues Paradigma fur den englischen Roman der 1990er Jahre?: Christopher Brookmyre, Nick Hornby, Irvine Welsh" in Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Klassiker und Strömungen des englischen Romans im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Gerhard Haefner (Trier: WVT, 2000), 221-242. New approaches to violence in literature and film are discussed in Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). 15 Nick Hornby, About a Boy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1998]), 60. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'AB').

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this purpose is welcome, and questions of ethics only crop up in relation to men's magazines, which have succeeded the authorial narrator of nineteenthcentury novels in so far as they have taken over the role of the 'communal voice' 16 and function as the highest tribunal of evaluation. Will is proud of the fact that he has immersed his life in the popular culture of the day, and he thinks that a life circling around one's own pleasures, without the distractions offered by close friends or a family, is both laudable and difficult: "It wasn't easy, floating on the surface of everything: it took skill and nerve" (AB, 221). As far as 'coolness' is concerned, Marcus is the direct opposite of Will, for this teenager has been taught to reject everything that is just fashionable: He is not allowed to go to McDonald's (his mother persuaded him to become a vegetarian); he is made to listen to Joni Mitchell songs (because the songs of pop bands display a negative attitude towards women); and he does not own anything that is fashionable. This does not help him to get along with his class mates, however, and Marcus is regarded as weird and is soon turned into an outsider. His problems multiply when his mother develops a depression and tries to commit suicide. Even though his efforts to cope with the situation are movingly depicted, the comical aspects of the experiences of the two protagonists are duly noted. Marcus can neither understand nor help his mother, but his idiosyncratic way of appraising what's going on is more often than not quite funny. When he wonders why his mother is crying while she prepares his breakfast, for instance, he remembers fondly that "she had sounded OK this morning - not angry, not unhappy, not mad, just kind of normal and mum-like - when she shouted for him to get a move on" (AB, 25). In the course of the novel, Will and Marcus develop in ways that mirror each other: Will learns to relate to people and to care for others, while Marcus learns not to mind too much and to experience things in the way his classmates do. In short: at the end of the novel Marcus "had developed a skin - the kind of skin Will had just shed" (AB, 277). The differences and parallels between these two developments are stressed by the form of the novel, the structure of which is rather tight. In each chapter one of the two protagonists serves as the sole focalizer; that is, everything that happens in a chapter is depicted in the way either Marcus or Will experience it. The chapters are arranged in such a way that each chapter in which Marcus' perspective is dominant is followed by one in which Will's thoughts and feelings are presented. The narrator only provides background knowledge concerning the setting etc., he does not evaluate or judge what is going on. He depicts even deception or lies in a neutral, sometimes even sympathetic way, thereby keeping value judgements at bay and highlighting the comical aspects of such behaviour. Most of the 16 Elizabeth D. Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 65-92, has pointed out that this is one of the most important characteristics of authorial narrators of nineteenth-century British novels.

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information about the fictional 'facts' is therefore filtered by the consciousness of the two protagonists, which invites the reader to feel sympathy with them and sometimes even leads readers astray. This becomes obvious when Marcus first meets Ellie McCrae, a 'cool' teenager who embodies the rebellious aspect of popular culture. When Marcus tries to draw her into conversation by politely asking her who is depicted on her sweatshirt, Ellie shows him how devastatingly 'uncool' and dumb he is: "That's incredible. That's like not knowing the name of the prime minister or something." "Yeah." Marcus gave a little laugh, to show her that at least he knew how stupid he was, even if he didn't know anything else. "Who is it, then?" "Kirk O'Bane." [...] "What does he do?" "He plays for Manchester United." (AB, 138) Even readers who score quite a number of points on the 'coolometer scale' are invited to feel sympathy with Marcus, for they are just as unlikely to know who this Kirk O'Bane is as the poor kid, and this makes it easy to share Marcus' sense of frustration and insecurity. The matter is cleared up later by Will, who suggests that Marcus got the name wrong, and that it's actually Kurt Cobain, the singer of Nirvana. This turns out to be right, and it shows the consistency with which the narrator restricts himself to what is perceived by Will and Marcus, for even though the name of the singer is spoken by Ellie, it is spelled in the way that Marcus (mis)hears it. Since the chapters focussing on what is going on in Will's and Marcus' consciousness alternate, the reader has to keep adjusting to either Marcus' or Will's perspective, both of which are, needless to say, quite contradictory. After all, Will instantly adopts the slightest nuances of the newest fashions, because he knows what the point of fashion is: "it meant that you were with the cool and the powerful, and against the alienated and the weak" (AB, 125). Marcus, on the other hand, has to suffer from the contempt, ridicule, and violence of his classmates, because they resemble Will; they, too, have accepted 'coolness' - wearing the right kind of sneakers and hearing the right kind of music - as the measure of everything. By the narrator's concentration on the characters' views and feelings one at a time, readers are invited to identify with the character who serves as a focalizer. Because of the alternation between the perspectives of the two protagonists, the reader is asked to understand and even sympathise with two contradictory points of view and to arrive at a balanced and benevolent evaluation of both characters. As chapters quite often show the characters' reaction to similar things, differences and similarities between them emerge quite clearly. It has to be kept in mind, however, that the comparison between the two and the evaluation of these contradictory ways of dealing with the world is left entirely

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to the reader. The novel therefore raises some complex ethical questions - how sensitive or 'thick-skinned' should one be? In how far should one adjust to the fashionable but shallow lifestyle of the 90s? What is 'normal'? - but the means by which these questions are raised bear no resemblance to the stylistic features often said to be characteristic of postmodern fiction. There are no metafictional comments, no intrusions of the narrator, there is no juggling around with different levels of time and place, no fragmentation, no hybridity, and no parody. Instead, Hornby uses narrative devices deemed to be representative of modernist fiction: concentration on the consciousness of the characters, absence of narratorial comments, and extensive use of free indirect discourse. In terms of narrative perspective and structure, Hornby's novel might be compared to Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1925), with its dominance of free indirect discourse, the emphasis on the characters' subjective views and random thoughts, and its tight structure. There are, of course, important differences, since Hornby restricts himself to two focalizers. Moreover, his sense of humour and his use of a lower register turn this book into an enjoyable read and make it easy to overlook its more serious concerns. Even though both novels resemble each other in so far as they stay clear of any kind of didacticism, raise ethical questions only implicitly and refrain from providing any simple answers to them, Hornby's novel uses modernist devices in a way that reflects contemporary concerns of the 90s. His numerous references to pop-culture show a fascination with trivial and profane details which were not deemed to be 'the proper stuff of fiction' until a decade ago. His intertextual references do not point to Shakespeare or Shelley but to Irvine Welsh and popular TV shows; and in contrast to Septimus Smith, his protagonist, Marcus, learns to survive by becoming interested in pop music and the right brand of sneakers. The costs of this adjustment are high, however, for the boy loses not only his sensitivity and uniqueness, but also his sense of himself. Hornby's novel therefore testifies to a re-involvement with ethical concerns, while at the same time inscribing aspects of popular culture into the realm of literature.

3 A third recent trend in contemporary British fiction, the increasing interest in the topics of cultural memory and national identity, is manifested in quite a number of contemporary novels - such as Peter Ackroyd's English Music (1992), Antonia S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale (2000), Stephen Fry's Making History (1996), Christopher Hope's In Darkest England (1996), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996), Adam Thorpe's Ulverton (1992), and his Pieces of Light (1998) as well as Lynne Truss' Tennyson's Gift (1996) - and has already received some

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scholarly attention.17 Julian Barnes' novel England, England (1998) is especially interesting in the present context, because the whole plot revolves around the construction and deconstruction of traditional notions of Englishness. Moreover, Barnes' novel combines the deconstruction of authenticity and originality, often held to be representative of postmodernist fiction, with a return to the topics of cultural memory and national identity. In this novel Barnes returns to both linear narrative and to a realist - if sometimes farcical and satirical - account of a story, which nonetheless sports any number of self-referential features. England, England explores, constructs, parodies, and deconstructs those 'invented traditions' known as 'Englishness', mainly by describing the venture of building an essence-of-England theme park on the Isle of Wight. Delineating the realization and success of this scheme, which results in an 'original reproduction' (oxymoron intended) of England's cultural heritage, Barnes not only expresses a wide range of versions of Englishness, but also provides reflections upon both the invention of cultural traditions and the questionable notion of historical authenticity.18 In contrast to many postmodern novels, however, there are no narratorial comments which explore the elusive nature of truth; the concern with epistemology and historiography is, rather, illustrated by the activities of the characters. Having taken a poll to determine which things potential visitors primarily associate with England, Sir Jack Pitman and the steering committee of the essence-of-England theme park rebuild all that England was renowned for on the Isle of Wight, which is renamed 'England, England'. All the historical sites - including the major battlegrounds, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Anne Hathaway's cottage, and the grave of Princess Di - are situated within easy visiting distance, with Harrods being conveniently placed within the Tower of London. In 'England, England' tourists can meet icons like the King and Queen of England, chat with historical celebrities like Samuel Johnson or Nell Gwyn, and even encounter myths, Robin Hood's band of Merrie Men being especially popular with the visitors. The whole project is based on the premise that the authentic has lost its value, and that postmodern subjects prefer the

17 Cf. the articles collected in the special issue on Englishness which Stephan Kohl guest-edited for anglistik und englischunterricht 46/47 (1992), and Silvia Mergenthals recently published book Erziehung zur Tugend: Frauenrollen und der englische Roman um 1800 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). A forthcoming issue of the European Journal of English Studies guestedited by Jürgen Schlaeger and me also centres around the topic of Englishness. 18 For a more detailed interpretation of Barnes' novel see my "The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and Deconstruction of Englishness and Authenticity in Julian Barnes' England, England", Anglia 119,1 (2001), 58-76. On the invention of traditions, see Eric Hobsbawm's illuminating "Introduction: Inventing Traditions" in Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (London: Cambridge UP, 1992 [1983]), 1-14.

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well-made simulacrum to the real thing. Tailored to contemporary tastes, the venture turns out to be a huge success. Exploring the relation between the authentic and the replica, the content and form of the novel examine and deconstruct the notion of authenticity. The novel also lays bare the processes involved in the invention of cultural traditions, deconstructing the notion of an 'authentic' Englishness located in a remote past, and calling into question the notion of historical 'truth'. The "primal English myth"19 of Robin Hood is given particular attention by the committee. After all, it embodies ideals such as freedom, (justified) rebellion, and the brotherhood of man, as well as providing an attractive rural setting. Moreover, the project managers initially assume that - in contrast to even the most important facts in British history, about which most of the characters are in blissful ignorance - everyone knows what the legendary Robin and his 'merrie men' did in Sherwood Forest. But even this seemingly straightforward feature of Englishness turns out to be full of pitfalls. First, the committee is at a loss to provide any clear account of the 'merrie men'. Were there any women or homosexuals among them? Since feminist visitors as well as gays might object to a gang of mainly male heterosexual outlaws, the matter is investigated by the historian Dr Max, whose knowledge only complicates the issue, for he comes up with further unresolved questions. The steering committee's innumerable problems of hitting upon anything authentic and the ingenious ways of constructing versions of Englishness that please the visitors imply that Englishness is nothing but an invented tradition. With regard to Robin Hood, the committee even toys with the idea of having two gangs, each embodying the expectations of different groups of visitors. The '"repositioning of myths for modern times'" (E, 148) therefore turns out to be a very complex issue. Barnes' deconstruction of the Hood myth as a quintessential item of Englishness also illustrates the power of myths, because the nostalgic embodiment of Robin Hood's band soon begins to act like the original. Not only do the 'merrie men' hunt for their own food, thus decimating the carefully preserved animals in the Heritage Park, they also steal poultry and vegetables, complain about the presence of homosexuals among them, and demand the right to "ambush the Sheriffs men anywhere" (E, 224). In short, they behave like unscrupulous outlaws. Barnes' treatment of the Robin Hood myth (which is mirrored in his treatment of other myths and historical figures) thus suggests that even a popular myth may contain unfavourable connotations which, if they were specifically English, would not project a very flattering image of the nation. In addition, the influence of the myths on the actors, who take over

19 Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Cape, 1998), 146. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as Έ ' ) .

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alleged characteristics of people they impersonate, illustrates the great influence of invented traditions. Instead of emphasizing that the English past lingers on in the present, England, England deconstructs the assumption that people share a common knowledge about the past. Thus the 'echo-chamber' supposedly ringing with voices of the past is shown to be hollow, consisting at best of names, dates or meaningless catch-phrases. By way of contrast, Barnes' novel abounds with references to music, and Sir Jack is characterised by his musical tastes. Ironically enough, though, Pitman often recalls the works of two composers regarded as typically German, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner. In contrast to Ackroyd's English Music, in which references are confined to British music, Barnes' novel suggests that the educated Englishman's mind is steeped in memories of continental music, with Bizet, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner being much more important than any English tradition. Barnes' novel also suggests that one of the major functions of a nation's collective memory lies in its importance for forging its national identity. Although it is impossible to retrieve 'authentic' past manifestations of Englishness, their exploration still helps to construct and stabilise a sense of identity. The construction of a continuous history gives coherence to fragmentary experiences, makes it possible to establish patterns, and to provide explanations for what happened. The fictional theme park, which can be regarded as the epitome of the current 'heritage-culture', is meant to serve the needs of present-day visitors, who want to amuse themselves, perhaps finding some continuity and meaning in the nostalgically adapted past, which might help them to make sense of the fragmentary presence. In sum, the committee's activities as well as the private experiences of Martha and other characters illustrate de Certeau's thesis that "the past is the fiction of the present".20 These fictions differ according to the "myth-kitty" (E, 148) and the needs of the present, but they will never represent a 'true' copy of the past. By foregrounding the processes of construction which result in the invention of national characteristics, the novel shows that the tools forging the selection and enhancement of features which are ultimately presented as 'English' are largely Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, and male. The English tradition that is the result of this process comes dangerously close to being chauvinist, xenophobic, and racist. It is, however, not the factual existence of past events or specific character traits that England, England calls into question, but man's ability to know or faithfully represent the true course of history. Any attempt at constructing Englishness by having recourse to the past is bound to result in just another invented tradition, serving primarily as a

20 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 10.

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means of coming to terms with the present. Exhibiting the biases and problems of current versions of Englishness, and presenting a "scandalous analysis of our nation's glorious past" (E, 92), England, England forcefully illustrates that "[g]etting its history wrong is part of becoming a nation". 21 Exhibiting many of the biases and problems of current versions of Englishness, and presenting two versions of Englishness one might usefully reject, Barnes once again raises ethical questions and suggests that England may be in need of new traditions. After all, in the 19th century Englishmen - with a little help from historians like John R. Seeley - managed to invent a new tradition of Britain as an imperial nation when they realised that the older self-image of freedom-loving Englishmen no longer served the needs of an imperial power. Moreover, England, England displays some features of Englishness that do not bear any overt chauvinist or separatist connotations and might serve as a starting point for the invention of new traditions: One of the recurring motifs of the novel is St. George, "patron saint of England, Aragon and Portugal, as well as protector of Genoa and Venice" (E, 12,47, 265).

4 The fourth new departure I would like to discuss briefly is a merging of realism and experiment. As Julian Barnes' novel indicates, the simple opposition between 'postmodernism', which is often held to be antirepresentational and experimental, and 'realism', which is said to be representational and characterised by its lack of formal experiments, is far too simple. Malcolm Bradbury already pointed out in 1994 that David Lodge should be termed an 'experimental realist'. 22 As I have tried to show in a former article, even in the 1960s and 1970s there are novelists such as Doris Lessing, John Fowles, David Lodge, and B. S. Johnson, whose works are characterised both by representational features and by formal experiments. 23 Since then, the number of novels which combine seeming opposites has grown remarkably. In The Information (1995), for instance, Martin Amis parodies nearly all the characteristics of nineteenth-century authorial narration and refuses to conform to the dogmas of political correctness, while simultaneously

21 Julian Barnes in Penelope Denning, "Inventing England", The Irish Times 8 Sept. 1998, an interview about England, England, (access for subscribers only): . 22 See Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001 (London: Penguin, 2000 ['1994]), 377. 23 See Vera Nünning, "Parodie, Metafiktion und die Transformation des realistischen Erzählens im englischen Roman von 1960 bis 1980: Die 'experimentellen Realisten' Doris Lessing, John Fowles, David Lodge und B. S. Johnson" in Vera and Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Klassiker und Strömungen des englischen Romans im 20. Jahrhundert, 87-115.

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presenting a gripping story, which involves, among other things, the abduction of a child by a violent maniac. Fay Weldon continues to deal with feminist topics in her novel Splitting (1995), which is concerned with the identity problems of a female character suffering from multiple-identity syndrome, which is aptly fictionalised by having the different 'selves' of this character presenting their own stories and talking to each other. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) features a Kafkaesque world in which it is no longer possible to decide what is 'representational' and what is not. These novels challenge the fictional illusion of reality and question realist conventions, but they are far from dispensing with them entirely. They are "in the Great Tradition - but with a Difference"; 24 the difference being that they cross the border between realism and experiment. It is no longer possible to neatly categorise novels into being either representational or anti-representational; rather, they combine elements of both. The combination of parody - quite often held to be a representative feature of postmodern, anti-representational fiction - with the telling of a story with a plot that is full of suspense, sports many references to the real world and invites the reader to identify with the main characters is one of the most outstanding characteristics of Martin Amis' The Information. Whereas his earlier work, especially London Fields (1989) can quite safely be subsumed under the heading of 'postmodernism', Amis' work of the late 1990s tends to unite seeming opposites. On the one hand, he provides a gripping, realistic story, on the other hand, he parodies nearly all of the features of the specific type of realism he employs in his novel. In many ways Amis' work, which centres around the frustrated novelist Richard Tull, whose major aim in life is to 'fuck up* his former friend Gwyn Barry, because he simply cannot stomach Gwyn's success as a novelist, resembles a nineteenth-century novel. The sheer size of the book, which runs to five hundred pages, the range and cast of characters from different social classes, the use of an omniscient (and quite garrulous) narrator, the intertwinement of a plot and a subplot involving revenge, marital problems, adultery, and the endangering of private life by criminals - all of these features suggest that Amis consciously places his book in the tradition of nineteenthcentury realism. At the same time, however, Amis parodies many features of authorial narration. There is an authorial narrator who often evaluates what is going on, voices his opinions, generalises, comments on plot and characters, poses rhetorical questions, addresses the readers, appeals for their sympathies and plays with their expectations. The narrator also uses flashforwards which serve to keep the reader in suspense, and he seems to delight in metanarrative

24 Lars Ole Sauerberg, Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The Implosion of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 109.

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comments. But whereas the omniscient narrator in nineteenth-century realist novels guides and reassures the reader, who knows that common values will not be violated, Martin Amis uses the traditional device of the authorial narrator to quite different ends. The most outstanding characteristic of Amis' narrator is his amoral stance. In spite of his many value judgements, the narrator refuses to criticise many outrageous thoughts and actions. The relentless thoughts of Steve Cousins, for instance, are presented without any disclaimers, as the following quote illustrates: "Steve was still in a lenient mood, after his recent success. He had beaten up the man from the Ten O'Clock News: and, the next night, it was on the Ten O'Clock News. You do a newscaster: and they give you a newscast about it. Now that's the way the world's supposed to be run." 25 Passages like this create the impression that the narrator implicitly sanctions the distorted views of a criminal character, who has aptly been described as "the quintessential [...] decadent devil". 26 Amis' flaunting of politically correct attitudes is implicit, for instance, in that he presents racism as though it conferred subtle advantages on blacks, which is reflected in the advice the cruel thug Steve Cousins gives to the black driving instructor Crash: " O u t there in the little Metro. Some rich flip sits herself down on your courting finger. And if she so much as blinks you go: 'Raciss!' [...] Enjoy it, mate'" (I, 57). In contrast to omniscient narrators in Victorian novels, who reinforced common values and "assert[ed] that this world is one", 27 the narrator in Amis' novels attacks rather than reinforces common values; he serves to tear the fictional world apart rather than to unify it. The moral impact of narratorial comments directed against widely accepted norms is undercut, however, by the extensive use of parody. The narrator, for instance, parodies the heroic style used in many Victorian novels in order to render the heroes' fateful decisions, when he describes the protagonist's state of mind after having hit upon an idea of how to harm his rival Gwyn: "Nonetheless, he was decided. He even raised his chin for a moment in simple heroism. His nostrils widened. Richard Tull had resolved to send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times" (I, 66). Such passages create an ironic distance between the narrator and the protagonist, who is the main focalizer in this novel. Moreover, other parodic and metafictional asides highlight the difference between Victorian and modern mores, as the following rhetorical questions which draw attention to the characters' use of language illustrate: "What was that Richard said, bent over the netpost? 'Oh Jesus. Nda! Piece of

25 Martin Amis, The Information (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 73. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as T ) . 26 Janis F. Bellow, "Necropolis of the Heart [rev. art: The Information, and Sabbath's neater]", Partisan Review 62 (1997), 699-718, 703. 27 Elizabeth D. Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840-1895 (London: Routledge, 1997), 89.

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shit.' What was that Gwyn said, standing in the tramlines? 'Richard, you're a gilder of lilies"' (I, 108). The style and the content of such imitations illustrate both the difference between traditional and contemporary ways of viewing the world and the inadequacy of older conventions. They also emphasise the lack of a common moral standard. In contrast to the stern and respectable Victorian narrators, their counterpart in The Information sports wilfully subjective views. Many value judgements, for instance, are both idiosyncratic and contradictory: When Richard snobbishly claims never to have been to America, the narrator comments: "I quite agree. What an asshole" (I, 132), only to modify this statement on the next page: "In mitigation, it should be said that an asshole is not the same thing as an arsehole" (1,133). In spite of his posture, Amis' narrator turns out not to be omniscient at all. His foreshadowings, for instance, are contradictory and quite often not correct.28 It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that he repeatedly admits that what he told before "wasn't quite true" (I, 258, 306) and asks both himself and the reader, "how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know anything?" (I, 63). Although in contrast to Richard Tull's latest novel, another flop titled Untitled, The Information does not boast of a "rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators" (I, 170) with a climax "in which five unreliable narrators converse on crossed mobile-phone lines while stuck in the same revolving door" (I, 324), it features an omniscient narrator who is deliberately provocative, sometimes contradictory, and anything but omniscient or reliable. The parody of traditional features of omniscient narration heightens the reader's awareness of the narrator's lack of knowledge. Thus the narrator ridicules the Victorian predilection for explaining everything satisfactorily when he engages in longwinded explanations of meaningless details - he discusses, for instance, five different reasons why the minor character Crash was called Crash (I, 54). In contrast to such volubility, the narrator proves to be unable to provide any enlightenment concerning more important issues. In an imitation of the Victorian manner to raise - and then, of course, to answer questions which provide the key for an understanding of the intricacies of human motivation, the narrator asks himself and the reader: "But did [Richard] hate Gwyn any less? That would have been the key to it. Did he hate Gwyn any less?" (I, 286). Not only is this question never answered - which emphasises the narrator's ignorance - , it turns out to be irrelevant in the first

28 See, for instance, the prediction: "And violence wouldn't come for Richard. It would come for Marco" (I, 138). This prediction is borne out by many other incidents and the fact that Steve Cousins eventually abducts the child. Near the end, however, the narrator reassures the reader: "But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them. Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be strictly observed." (1,479)

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place. The narrator's lack of knowledge concerning the key issue of human motivation, which is what holds the plot together and makes it possible to understand what is going on, is highlighted by his confession that he does not have a clue concerning the motivation that leads to the more sinister actions threatening the life of Richard's son and other characters: "Don't look. You won't find it, because it's gone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry" (I, 170). The extensive use of parody emphasises the inadequacy of realist narrative conventions that cannot represent the fragmentation and discontinuity of modern life. As several metafictional comments in The Information illustrate, traditional genres and conventional narrative tools are of no use to contemporary novelists. The old forms have lost the power to impose order and meaning, and new forms have not yet emerged. In the end Richard raises the question: "now what? [...] How do we burst clear of all this? [...] whither the novel?" (I, 435-36), but, despite its title, The Information provides no answer to this and other important questions. Because of its simultaneous use and questioning of realist narrative devices, Amis' novel is one of those contemporary works that may be said to be in the 'Great Tradition' - but with a difference; a difference that results in crossing the border between realism and experiment. Let me end my short overview by pointing out yet another tendency which intersects with the four developments I have identified. This trend is characterised by a development towards internationalisation, a growing concern with what Lars Ole Sauerberg in his latest book has called 'intercultural diversity' and 'a compound voice'. 29 This development is manifested, for example, in the interest of many British writers in non-British settings and themes on the one hand, and the exploration of multi-ethnic experiences in Great Britain on the other hand. The interest in "thematic elements such as national and sub-national identity formation and cultural intersection" results, in Sauerberg's words, in "a literature which merges rather than dissolves traditions and experiences". 30 Sauerberg's findings, therefore, testify to the prevalence of the new concerns discussed in this article, for they confirm not only the interest in ethics and national identity, but also the merging of realism and experiment, i. e. of quite different narrative conventions and traditions.

5 Instead of a summary, I would like to emphasise once again the discursive and constructive nature of any label we might want to fix on what is currently 29 Sauerberg, Intercultural Voices, 29ff., 161. 30 Sauerberg, Intercultural Voices, 117, 3.

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going on in British literature. Since we are always dealing with constructed models of postmodemisms, or 'post-postmodernisms', I want to suggest that we at least attempt to bring some clarity into studies of 'post-postmodernisms' by laying open the criteria according to which these phenomena are constructed and analysed. Instead of subsuming anything and everything under fashionable new labels, we should try to keep our eyes and minds open for new departures in contemporary literature, some of which I have tried to sketch in my short account of four recent trends in British fiction. These new departures cannot neatly be divided into 'schools' or anything of the sort; they rather testify to current concerns and new ways of dealing with established narrative conventions. It therefore does not come as a surprise that there is a certain amount of overlap between the various trends outlined above, which highlights the fact that some of the authors are interested in more than one new development at the same time. If one wanted to come up with a sort of umbrella concept, designating an interest that is shared by many of the authors that I have discussed, it would be the return to ethical questions and a renewed interest in narratives. As I have tried to show in this article, this does not mean, however, that British authors at the turn of the century just nostalgically hark back to former times and choose to ignore the developments that led to postmodernist fiction; they rather pursue exciting new roads, the destinations and intersections of which have yet to be explored.

DIETMAR BÖHNKE

Shades of Gray: The Peculiar Postmodernism of Alasdair Gray The contemporary British writer Alasdair Gray (b. 1934) has often been seen by literary critics as the postmodern Scottish writer par excellence. Thus he appears as a paradigmatic example of postmodern fiction in works by Brian McHale (1987), Alison Lee (1990), and Stephen Baker (2000).1 In this essay, I will attempt to re-evaluate this view in the light of recent developments in literary and cultural theory and with the help of Gray's own writings - in particular the novels Lanark (1981), Poor Things (1992) and A History Maker (1994).2 I will try to show the continuities as well as the complications that emerge by putting Gray's fiction in a postmodern context, thereby commenting on the current state of the postmodern paradigm in general and its relevance in contemporary British and Scottish literatures in particular. With that, I hope my essay will engage in a dialogue with the other contributions in this volume on the possibility of going 'beyond postmodernism'.

The Trouble with Postmodernism The long and heated debates about the concept of postmodernism during the past few decades do not seem to have resulted in a universally agreed understanding of the phenomenon. On the contrary, precisely because it has become so widespread and is now being used in a variety of different fields with almost as many different meanings, it has become increasingly confused. In The Idea of the Postmodern: A History Hans Bertens writes: Postmodernism is an exasperating term, and so are postmodern, postmodernist, postmodernity, and whatever else one might come across in the way of derivation. In the avalanche of articles and books that have made use of the term since the late

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Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1987); Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1990); Stephen Baker, The Fiction of Postmodernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000). Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981); Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury, 1992); A History Maker (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'L' and Ή Μ ' ) .

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1950s, postmodernism has been applied at different levels of conceptual abstraction to a wide range of objects and phenomena in what we used to call reality. Postmodernism, then, is several things at once.3

This evasive quality of the concept of postmodernism together with its proliferation is the context in which claims for the demise of postmodernism as a whole are beginning to be heard. This is also, I take it, the starting point for this volume, which attempts to chart the as yet unknown - or unnamed territory 'beyond postmodernism'. The questioning of and challenge to postmodernism is not quite so new, however: it was with the growing influence of postmodern ideas and theories in the 1970s and '80s, especially in the academic world, that criticism of the concept also became stronger, culminating perhaps in the so-called 'science wars' or even 'culture wars' in the 1990s, mainly in the U. S.4 Even though the atmosphere meanwhile seems to have cooled down somewhat, it is far from clear whether one of the 'opponents' has been victorious and whether the talk of the death of postmodernism is justified. There are indications, however, of a still-evolving 'moderate' position. It is possible to detect in more recent discussions of postmodernism a cautious movement towards some kind of compromise between the more extreme and relativist claims of some practitioners of postmodernism and the traditional positivist position. Hans Bertens has commented on this as follows: Radical postmodern theory must be regarded as a transitional phenomenon, as instrumental in the creation of a more moderate new paradigm that is already building upon its achievements while ignoring its more excessive claims. [...] After an overlong period in which Enlightenment universalist representationalism dominated the scene, and a brief, but turbulent period in which its opposite, radical anti-representationalism, captured the imagination, we now find ourselves in the difficult position of trying to honor the claims of both, of seeing the values of both representation and anti-representation, of both consensus and dissensus. Postmodern or radicalized modern - this is our fate: to reconcile the demands of

3 4

Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London, New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. This was/is a usually polemical exchange of broadsides between scientists on the one hand, who defend the integrity and relatively value-free nature of science and what is often collectively called 'postmodernist' scholars from the humanities on the other, who investigate the social and cultural implications of science. One of the high (or low) points of these 'wars' was the 'Sokal hoax' in 1996, an allegedly relativist but in fact nonsensical article planted by the theoretical physicist Alan Sokal in Social Text, one of the leading American journals in cultural studies. Cf. Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2 1998); Andrew Ross (ed.), Science Wars (Durham, London: Duke UP, 1996); Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science (London: Profile, 1998); Daniel Cordle, Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999).

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rationality and those of the sublime, to negotiate a permanent crisis in the name of precarious stabilities.5

The present volume certainly is one instance of this negotiation process. In any case, it seems to me rather futile to discuss these matters in very general and abstract terms, where the multiplicity of possible backgrounds, theoretical frameworks and different connotations not only of 'postmodernism' necessarily leads to incompatibilities and misunderstandings. This is why I will narrow my focus to Scottish literature and the work of Alasdair Gray, a closer investigation of which might finally result in more general (although certainly tentative) conclusions about the current state of postmodernism as a whole. In the field of British and especially Scottish literature, critics have frequently detected a more detached position towards postmodernism even in its 'heyday', if not actual hostility. Although works such as John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) or the novels of Salman Rushdie are widely seen as postmodern literature, it seems that the British novel in general also retains a number of 'pre-postmodern' features and is still very much rooted in the realist tradition. Many critics see it as adopting a moderate or middle position, as expressed by Stephen Earnshaw: In the British novel the tradition is one where the novel is a laboratory for analysis of manners and mores within a liberal humanist framework, and it is this, as much as any empirical turn of mind, which constrains the British novel post Second World War to steer a middle course in reaction to modernist and postmodernist dominance.6

In Scottish literature the opposition to postmodernism seems to be even more pronounced. Gavin Wallace has talked of Scottish literature as a "tradition that has been slow to learn the sensitivity to narrative experiment and formal selfawareness taken for granted in other literatures"7 and one critic even went as far as to suggest that "Scottish writers refuse postmodemity". 8 Alasdair Gray himself has expressed his dislike of the label 'postmodern' in connection to his works many times, in interviews as well as in his fiction. 9 This may also have

5 6 7

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Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern, 242-43, 248. Steven Eamshaw, "Novel Voices" in Clive Bloom, Gary Day (eds.), Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Volume Three: 1956-1999 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 51-75,65. Gavin Wallace, "Voices in Empty Houses: The Novel of Damaged Identity" in Gavin Wallace, Randall Stevenson (eds.), The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993), 217-31,228. Hanne Tange, "'Psychedelic Tartans': Reflections on the Contemporary Scottish Novel", Angloftles 107 (2000), 1-27, 16. An example of this occurs in his short story "Edison's Tractatus", where he writes: "For several years I have been perplexed by the adjective post-modern, especially when applied to my own writing, but have now decided it is an academic substitute for contemporary or fashionable. Its prefix honestly announces it as a specimen of intellectual afterbirth.": Mavis Belfrage: A Romantic Novel with Five Shorter Tales (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 152-3.

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to do with the perceived inferiorisation of the literary work itself in much 'postmodern' criticism, where 'theory' is often tantamount to the actual object of investigation. Therefore, in the following analysis of the ambiguous postmodernism of Gray's fiction, I will try to accord the literary work at least the same status as the theoretical views, thus hopefully facilitating an intervention of the 'object' of discussion in the postmodernism debate itself. I will proceed from the question of the more specifically literary expression of postmodernism in Gray's work to the more comprehensive - and possibly more problematic - question of postmodern theory and its relation to Gray's novels. In doing so, I am trying to circumvent to some extent one of the pitfalls of the catch-all concept of postmodernism: that by calling a writer 'postmodern' because of his literary techniques one runs the risk of simultaneously invoking all kinds of controversial theoretical tenets that are also commonly denominated 'postmodern' but which may be difficult to reconcile with the work of the author in question.

Gray's Postmodern Writing: Metafiction, Intertextuality, Science Fiction Many aspects of Gray's work can doubtless be regarded as almost prototypically postmodern. This is certainly true for the more strictly literary features commonly associated with postmodernism. Since the publication of his first novel Lanark (1981) his self-conscious style and his frequent use of metafictional devices have become something of a trademark of Gray's writing. In the Epilogue in Lanark (which comes four chapters before the end of the novel) we find an instance of that set element of postmodern literature, the 'interview' between 'author' and protagonist (whose name is Lanark), as well as the hilarious "Index of Plagiarisms" which details (mock) sources and influences for the novel as a whole. There is a typically postmodern mise-enabyme when the author tells Lanark: "[...] Read this and you'll understand. The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence but I don't care." With a reckless gesture he handed Lanark a paper from the bed. It was covered with childish handwriting and many words were scored out or inserted with little arrows. Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark's eye was caught by

Gray likes to ridicule the notion of postmodernism in his work (other examples would be the mock criticisms he frequently includes on the covers of his works - for example in the paperback edition of Poor Things - or passages in Something Leather (London: Cape, 1990), e. g. 145-46, and A History Maker, 202-03; and he has told me in a personal letter that "[a]ll postmodernist debates and criticism I have encountered devoted so much energy to defining what post-modernism was that they had no time to illuminate anything else. [...] Post Modernism [sic] seems the creation of scholars acquiring a territory to lecture upon." (31 December 1997).

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a sentence in italics which said: Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark's eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said: Lanark gave the paper back asking, "What's that supposed to prove?" "I am your author." (L, 481) It is already obvious from this passage that Gray is being self-conscious or ironic even about his own metafictional techniques (note the passage "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence ..."), and this is borne out by the Epilogue as a whole, which keeps referring in footnotes and the marginalia of the 'Index' to a whole tradition of literary forebears that is being reworked and rewritten here, including the metafiction of a Kurt Vonnegut or a Flann O'Brien. Therefore, Gray's use of postmodern elements is motivated less by a desire to be 'up to date' or to show playfulness for its own sake but always by some deeper relevance to his intended 'message'. The Epilogue thus offers the reader a kind of 'elevated perspective',10 from which they can get a more comprehensive view of the complicated structure of the book (which has two parts with four 'books' in the order 3-1-2-4 and two main protagonists) as well as its genesis and 'influences', including autobiographical information. Similar motivations lie behind Gray's application of other literary techniques that are commonly regarded as postmodern, such as intertextuality. In Poor Things, for example, there are multiple references and allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from the central story of a young woman being 'created' out of the dead body of a suicide and the brain of her unborn child in fin-de-siecle Glasgow, to the different names of the protagonists" or the epistolary form of much of the novel. Once again, there is a deeper significance to these intertextual games. Underlying the whole novel is Gray's concern for the 'poor things' of the title, the powerless and suppressed classes of Western society in general and of Glasgow's Victorian as well as present society in particular. There is strong criticism of the Frankenstein-like recreation of a false and sanitised version of Glasgow's past during the 10 I am referring here to Stephen Bernstein's perceptive interpretation of Lanark in Alasdair Gray (Cranbury: Associated UPs, 1999), in which he stresses the aspect of perspective, emphasising the importance of elevated points of view, such as the Ben Rua mountain or the Glasgow Necropolis in the novel, as well as the motif of mapping and triangulation, where a third perspective is needed to get a comprehensive view of the land / the life / the novel, and suggests that the Epilogue is the site of such a holistic perspective. 11 For example, there is Godwin 'God' Baxter, the surgeon who 'creates' Bella (the young woman, who also calls herself Victoria). His name can be read as an allusion to Mary Shelley's father William Godwin and, as Marie Odile Pittin has pointed out, also to one of his friends, the Scottish merchant William Baxter. Cf. Marie Odile Pittin, "Alasdair Gray: A Strategy of Ambiguity" in Susanne Hagemann (ed.), Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1996), 199-215, 212; the name can also be read - since his full name is given as Godwin Bysshe Baxter - to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Bella/Victoria herself, on the other hand, constitutes the link to Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft, if not in name but in her development in the course of the novel into a socialist and feminist doctor.

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festivities in 1990 when Glasgow was Cultural Capital of Europe.12 The underside of exploitation, poverty and suffering comes back to haunt the city, as it were, in Gray's book. This criticism can also be broadened to include the more general injustices and exploitation at work in Western societies in Victorian times as well as our own age, which have a lot to do with people's (and companies') greed for knowledge, fame and money - a theme that is clearly among Gray's constant concerns as they emerge from his works, most notably, perhaps, in Lanark, where the dystopian vision of Books 3 and 4 in particular invites an allegorical reading along these lines. The intertextual link with Frankenstein brings up another element that is frequently connected to postmodernism in literature: the use of 'science fiction' elements or conventions. This is sometimes seen as proof of the erosion of boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' literature. Brian McHale goes as far as to detect a simultaneous "science-fictionalization of postmodernism" and "postmodernization of science fiction".13 In some sense, Gray's work can be seen as a case in point of this development: all the three novels I have chosen for examination here (including his latest two14) use science fiction elements to a greater or lesser extent. However, once again this is not merely a fashionable ploy.15 Just as in Frankenstein, which is often seen as a classic or precursor of the science fiction tradition, it is the general question of the virtues of scientific progress and the responsibilities (not only) of the scientist within Gray's critical vision of Western society which is raised in his novels. In Poor Things, these issues have a decidedly contemporary ring to them, concerning the problems of transplantation and the special status of the human brain/mind and, by implication, the dangers of genetic manipulation. Such problems involving the role of morality in science are

12 Gray opposed the official celebrations at the time because of their έΙΗβ character and disconcern of the actual workers living in Glasgow. He was also associated with the countercampaign called Workers' City. Poor Things was written at the same time or shortly afterwards and published in 1992. In his earlier novel Something Leather (1990), Gray had already commented on the whole affair in a chapter significantly entitled "Culture Capitalism". 13 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 65ff., 68ff. 14 Gray's works published since A History Maker are in different genres: novella/short stories (Mavis Belfrage), political pamphlet (Why Scots Should Rule Scotland 1997, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), play (Working Legs, Glasgow: Dog and Bone, 1997), and literary history/criticism (The Book of Prefaces, London: Bloomsbury, 2000) respectively. 15 I also have my doubts about McHale's explanation for the phenomenon, who takes science fiction's interest in the construction/representation of a variety of (often radically different, conflicting) 'worlds' as the element that makes it amenable to postmodernism/postmodernist fiction, which he sees as dominated by ontological issues (as opposed to the epistemological 'dominant' in modernist fiction, this distinction being itself certainly debatable).

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explicitly mentioned several times in the novel.16 It is important to note that these 'science fiction' elements thus form part of Gray's more comprehensive social criticism rather than being employed for their own sake or as an expression of some 'ontological dominant' (in that, Gray stands in a tradition reaching from Mary Shelley via H. G. Wells to Huxley and Orwell). This is equally apparent in Lanark (especially in the dystopian and apocalyptic vision of Glasgow and more generally Western society that he evokes in Book 4 of the novel) and in A History Maker. The latter may be Gray's most sciencefictional work to date, being set in 23rd-century Scotland (he describes it on the cover in characteristic fashion as "a kilted sci-fi yam full of poetry and porridge, courage and sex"), but it is above all a meditation on the (impossibility of Utopia at the end of the twentieth century, since the apparently ideal society depicted in the novel soon turns out to be far from satisfactory and the reader is left with a highly ambiguous ending in which a conspiracy to bring back the old days of inequality and oppression is narrowly defeated but the future seems insecure. Therefore, if the science fiction elements in Gray's work are a sign of his postmodernism, they are certainly also part of his 'message' of social criticism. In the light of the foregoing evidence (and I could add other relevant features that point in the same direction17), there can be little doubt that Gray is indeed a postmodern writer, always with the qualification that postmodernism must not be understood as irresponsible relativism and playfulness for its own sake. However, the purely literary expression of postmodernism through the above techniques is only one side of the coin, and possibly the less problematic one. Much more controversial is Gray's involvement with the more theoretical tenets of postmodernism, as I will try to argue in the following; and this may also complicate the concept of postmodernism more generally.

16 One example comes on page 68, where Baxter says about the operation he carried out to (re-) create Bella/Victoria: "Selfish greed and impatience drove me and THAT [...] is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second." 17 One important aspect that I cannot explore in detail here is Gray's personal inter-art discourse between the written text and the illustrations, design and typography of the books. Since he is originally a painter, his works tend to be Gesamtkunstwerke, and this intermediality can be regarded as part of the 'postmodern' quality of his works. In this respect, I do not quite agree with Vera NOnning's argument in this volume, which seems to suggest that this aspect somehow represents a new departure in contemporary literature. In my view, it has very much been part of the postmodern literary project from the beginning. Arguably, the same could be said for some of the other "new departures", such as the return to ethical questions and the revival of narrative.

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Interlude: Gray's Historiographie Metafiction In reality, it is unfortunately hardly ever possible to separate literary theory and practice as clearly as I have suggested above. If metafiction and intertextuality can be seen as 'postmodern' literary means without necessarily linking them to more comprehensive theories of postmodernism (after all, they are by no means new techniques), this is already a little more complicated in the case of science fiction. It becomes even more problematic with the category of 'historiographic metafiction', the application of which to Gray's work can be seen as another indication of its (ambiguous) postmodern quality. This is why I will try to evaluate Gray's writing in the light of this concept before moving on to the more exclusively theoretical issues. In her book A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon proposes historiographic metafiction as the supreme expression of postmodernism in literature.18 The subtitle of this study explicitly links the terms 'history' and 'fiction' by the third term 'theory'. Thus, if we can classify Gray's writings as historiographic metafiction, they would simultaneously be linked to more comprehensive postmodern theories. And indeed, there seem to be significant convergences, if we take the following definition by Hutcheon as a point of reference: Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains [i. e. literature, history, theory]: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past. [...] [Historiographie metafiction asks us to recall that history and fiction are themselves historical terms and that their definitions and interrelations are historically determined and vary with time. 19

It is not difficult to apply this concept to the three novels under discussion here, and thus to link them to the 'postmodern' problematisation of the question of history.20 18 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1988). This study has been very influential in postmodern literary criticism and introduced the concept of historiographic metafiction to an international audience. The practical conflation of this concept with postmodernist fiction by Hutcheon is certainly problematic and has subsequently been criticised, among others by Ansgar Nünning (cf. his study in two volumes Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion, Trier. WVT, 1995). 19 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 5 and 105. 20 I cannot here go into the details of the more general theoretical discussion of history in the postmodern context. Suffice it to mention the growing scepticism towards notions of 'objective' history and the stress on diverse, even contradicting 'histories' as opposed to universal 'History'. In this context, both Michel Foucault's emphasis on the "discursive" formation of knowledge and Hayden White's investigations of the narrative structure of

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Most obviously, Poor Things engages with these issues not only through its historical setting and reconstruction of Victorianism but also by its use of multiple narratives that contradict and sometimes exclude each other. The title page of the novel tells the reader that he is going to read "Episodes from the early life of Archibald McCandless M. D. Scottish Public Health Officer, edited by Alasdair Gray". The printed 'facsimile' of McCandless's memoir is prefaced with an Introduction by the 'editor' Gray in which he discusses and defends the historical accuracy of the 'document'. This is followed by "A Letter from Victoria McCandless M. D. to her eldest surviving descendant in 1974 correcting what she claims are errors in Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer by her late husband Archibald McCandless M. D. b.l857-d.l911", which was allegedly found together with the memoir, as well as "Notes Critical and Historical" by Gray, in which the different versions are again discussed and 'annotated' in mock-scholarly fashion and complemented with nineteenth-century illustrations. The effect of these various competing discourses is that the reader is left disoriented at the end, unable to decide between the different versions and narratives. However, as Marie Odile Pittin writes, "[t]he point is not to tell the 'truth' from the 'fantasy' but to enjoy the weird, totally phantasmagoric result of their being pitted against each other in a story that clamours in various ways for the supremely elusive, ironical notion of 'reality', a problem which indeed is not to be solved".21 This is clearly reminiscent of the more theoretical discussion of history, and of postmodernism in general. Moreover, the question of literature/fiction vs. history is directly addressed in the novel.22 A History Maker already signals its commitment to the same theme in its title. Although the novel is set in the future, it is again presented as an historical document, its structure bearing a striking resemblance to that of Poor Things: it is another neglected "manuscript" written by the main protagonist Wat Dryhope, and edited with a Prologue and "Notes and Glossary Explaining Obscurities" by his mother. This raises the same sort of questions about reliability, historical objectivity and the relation of fact to fiction, even if there

history/historiography have contributed to a 'tum to history' in literary studies and have been used as theoretical background for the study of literary works. 21 Pittin, "Strategy of Ambiguity", 213. 22 Cf. the following statement by the 'editor' Alasdair Gray in the Introduction: "I fear [the local historian] Michael Donnelly and I disagree about this book. He thinks it a blackly humorous fiction into which some real experiences and historical facts have been cunningly woven, a book like Scott's Old Mortality and Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I think it like Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson; a loving portrait of an astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man recorded by a friend with a memory for dialogue. [...] I also told Donnelly that I had written enough fiction to know history when I read it. He said he had written enough history to recognize fiction. To this there was only one reply - 1 had to become a historian. I did so. I am one." (Poor Things, XIII-XIV).

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is not so much contradiction between different versions of the story but rather additions of (vital) information in the Prologue and Notes, including the progress and defeat of the conspiracy that is central to the plot. Most interestingly, perhaps, the novel seems to address the thesis of the "end of history", as formulated by the 'postmodern' theoretician Francis Fukuyama in the early 1990s.23 It is difficult to avoid drawing parallels between Gray's scenario of a seemingly Utopian society in which history is "a thing of the past" (HM, 32) and Fukuyama's idea that history as we know it will come to an end in the foreseeable future because the Western capitalist system in its liberal, democratic form is being accepted and taken over on a global basis, especially if we take into account that in the novel history seems to have 'stopped' precisely around the end of the twentieth century. Significantly, though, Gray is satirically challenging the notion of the end of history rather than endorsing it. I have pointed out how ambiguous the 'utopia' of this society really is. Not surprisingly, the myth of a historyless society is also being undermined at every possible turn in the novel, for allusions to political, literary, cultural or linguistic history abound. Indeed, at one point Gray explicitly links the notion of the end of history to postmodernism in highly critical tones, when he outlines the different ideas of history of different epochs and peoples in the "Notes", one of which is labelled 'postmodernism': POSTMODERNISM happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labour unions. Like owners of earlier empires they felt that history had ended because they and their sort could now dominate the world for ever. This indifference to most people's wellbeing and taste appeared in the fashionable art of the wealthy. Critics called their period postmodern to separate it from the modem world begun by the Renaissance when most creative thinkers believed they could improve their community. Postmodernists had no interest in the future, which they expected to be an amusing rearrangement of things they already knew. Postmodernism did not survive disasters caused by "competitive exploitation of human and natural resources" in the twenty-first century. (HM, 202-03)

On the one hand, this refers back to Gray's social criticism and concern with the dispossessed mentioned earlier; on the other, it points forward to his engagement with and criticism of the more general theories of postmodernism, to which I will now - by way of conclusion - turn my attention. It should have become evident, in any case, that Gray's novels can be analysed fruitfully against the background of historiographic metafiction, and that they are thus implicated in the postmodern context.24 This does not mean an unproblematic 23 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Although Fukuyama has often been called a postmodernist, the relation of his theories to postmodernism is certainly complicated and arguably controversial. 24 Lanark can also be analysed in this context, the emphasis in this case being on the problem of the fragmented subject and the (re-)construction of personal history.

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endorsement of the more extreme postmodern positions which tend to see history as nothing but discourse, as only 'text', for Gray clearly stresses the ultimate importance of history/ies for personal as well as national identity. This leads directly to the more general conclusions concerning Gray's place within the postmodern framework.

Gray's Postmodern Thinking? - Continuities and Complications If Gray's work is, as we have seen, clearly linked to so many aspects commonly denominated as 'postmodern', why is there such a resistance on his own part and that of many critics to call him a postmodernist? As I have indicated earlier, this is clearly due to the perception of certain theoretical convictions of 'postmodernism'. This is why I would finally like to come back to the more general question of postmodernism raised at the beginning of this essay, and conclude my analysis with a closer look at some of the theoretical aspects of postmodernism in relation to Gray's work. It would be very difficult to make a list of the most important ideas of postmodern theory, if only because postmodernism can mean so many different things. There are, however, recurring themes in the literature on postmodernism25 that go some way to giving a glimpse of possible basic tenets. Thus postmodernism is widely seen as 'antifoundational' in many respects, as mounting a radical critique to established views and values (cf. e. g. Jean-Francois Lyotard's "incredulity towards metanarratives"). It is commonly regarded as undermining, questioning or problematising all kinds of concepts and positions, including the very foundations of the 'modem' worldview (often linked to the Enlightenment): such as notions of progress, the unitary subject, meaning, truth, reality, representation etc. Connected to that is postmodernism's perceived emphasis on fragmentation, multiplicity and pluralism, its focus on surface rather than depth (which is not meant as a qualitative judgement here). This is about as far as the 'consensus' goes. Even if this list remains very general and fragmentary, it does give an impression of the main character of postmodernism as well as pointing to the reasons for opposition and criticism against it. The present volume of essays is a good illustration of the variety of ideas and views connected with the concept, as well as of some of its recurring themes and concerns. It is also, crucially, an attempt to analyse the more 25 I am thinking here of general introductions to the topic, such as Walter Truett Anderson (ed.), The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London: Fontana Press, 1996), Steven Connor's Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford, Cambridge/Mass.: Blackwell, 21997), Hans Bertens's The Idea of the Postmodern, or Lawrence E. Cahoone's massive From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford, Cambridge/Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).

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problematic aspects of postmodernism and overcome the unproductive oppositional mentality that unfortunately frequently prevails among the academic 'camps' of postmodernists and anti-postmodernists. I hope that my analysis of the novels of Alasdair Gray shows that there is something to be gained if these theoretical battles are not allowed to prevent the fruitful application of 'postmodern' categories to contemporary writing. However, in recognition of the remaining problems entailed in the concept, I will not finish this essay without briefly highlighting the complications that emerge from putting Gray's work in the context of the above-mentioned 'basic tenets' of postmodernism. On the one hand, as my investigation of the three novels should have shown, Gray's work is in tune with many of these ideas: the criticism of (techno-scientific) progress, the problematisation of the unitary subject and of monolithic or essentialist explanations, the emphasis on fragmentation, multiplicity and pluralism. On the other hand, it is clear from the foregoing that 'traditional' concepts such as (liberal) Humanism, Modernism or Realism do not go along easily with a postmodern frame of mind. And yet, in the work of (British) 'postmodern' writers they are often very important. They are certainly integral to the fiction of Alasdair Gray, as can be shown by a closer analysis of his writings. Without going into details, it is certainly justified to say that Gray's work is suffused by a humanist ethos, that the modernist tradition is very important to him (he has called himself a Modernist), and that the fusion of realism and fantasy is commonly held to be one of the hallmarks of his writing. Even more problematic - and more important for Gray's fiction - is the possibility of strong political views and involvement and the question of (Scottish) nationalism.26 These are quite difficult to reconcile with most accounts of postmodernism, mainly because they seem to call for some degree of essentialism. There are two points to be made in this context. First, many if not all postmodern theorists seem to follow a more or less rigid (political) agenda themselves. It is one of the much-discussed paradoxes of postmodernism that despite the radical challenge to all kinds of theorems, it does propose an alternative view that to some is just as vulnerable to criticism as the more traditional concepts. Second, the way in which Alasdair Gray's

26 His 'polities', as I have indicated at several points, can be best described as democratic socialism, especially a concern for the disadvantaged of Western capitalist societies, coupled with Scottish nationalism. I cannot here focus on Gray's interest in Scottish national identity and how it is expressed in his works. There can be no doubt, however, that he is a Scottish nationalist in the positive sense of the word (his views are most clearly expressed in his political pamphlet Why Scots Should Rule Scotland) and that his works - Lanark, Poor Things and A History Maker in particular - are always just as much about Scottish national identity as they are about personal identity.

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political convictions and concerns are expressed in his fiction is anything but essentialist. On the contrary, his work is characterised by a permanent 'strategy of ambiguity' that stresses the provisional nature of any statement or theory and is intensely self-critical. The latter comes out almost as a moral imperative in his writing, and together with the emphasis on irreducible complexity, on the multiplicity of possible approaches and perspectives, it can be suggestive for the current debate on the 'future' of postmodernism. Central to my argument - if perhaps more implicit than explicit - in this essay is the proposition that it is possible to use literary works themselves also in a theoretical discussion such as the one on the current state of the postmodern paradigm. As I have attempted to show, the ideas to be found in the writings of Alasdair Gray seem to speak quite powerfully in this context. The focus on 'shades of grey/Gray' as opposed to black-and-white essentialism, together with an underlying set of convictions and values, should be seen as a contribution to the postmodernism debate by an ambiguously postmodern writer. In so far, it can be seen in the context of that tentative 'compromise' position I have mentioned initially, which is also apparent in Linda Hutcheon's "postmodern paradoxes" or Stephen Baker's "postmodern political fictions", to give just two examples, and which is likewise implied in several of the essays in this volume. Going beyond postmodernism in this sense involves both an attention to the specific categories and tools that postmodernism has to offer literary analysis and an awareness of its problems and limitations. Whether the result of such an exploration can still be subsumed under a modified concept of postmodernism or necessitates a completely new paradigm still remains open to question.

VICTORIA LIPINA-BEREZKINA

American Postmodernist Literature at the Turn of the Millennium: the Death and Return of the Subject Whenever we consider the nature of subjectivity in art, we first of all think of the theme of the self, the art of creating the hero's psychological world, which usually is the main criterion in aesthetic and ethical appreciations of art. However the contemporary critical debate on 'the demise of man' both as a character and as an author puts the existence of the humanistic subject and subjectivity in general at stake. It is drastically escalated by the poststucturalists: Derrida insists on the logical impossibility of self-presence; Lacan describes the subject as barred, as the sign of a lack; Barthes views the death of the author as a new mode of narrative. As a result of this escalated poststructuralist attack on the concept of subjectivity, which is seen in misreadings of postmodernist complexity, many believe that in postmodernism man disappears, the author is dead, and the art itself lacks originality and significance - thus almost everything that constitutes the humanistic subject of art, is undermined. Could this be true, or could this be a fallacy of literary criticism? The latter seems more probable. One of the reasons of this misunderstanding is connected with the application of the traditional category of subjectivity with its focus on personality, through which classical and modernist art is usually viewed, to postmodernism - the art that transcends all conventions. Elsewhere I studied the appearance of the subject nearly two centuries before the time which Foucault argues is its birthday.1 Now my focus is on what happens to it in today's literature.2 What follows is an exploration of

1

2

Victoria Lipina-Berezkina, "Historicizing Subjectivity: Self as Mind in the SeventeenthCentury English Personal Essay" in William S. Haney II, Nicholas O. Pagan (eds.), Ethics and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Studies (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 129-143. This paper is a fragment of a chapter of my book in progress on American and Russian Postmodernist literature. A part of this book has been published as a chapter ("The Problems of Studying Postmodernist Literature at the End of the Millennium") of the collective monograph: William S. Haney II, Nicholas O. Pagan (eds.), Literary Studies: Beginnings and Ends (Lanham: UP of America, 2001), 51-65. I started this research as a Woodrow Wilson scholar in 1996. At that time I had interviews with John Barth and William Gass who stimulated my research.

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possible contradictions between critical trends in conceptualizing subjectivity and the artistic subjectivity as the fiction of selfhood. The aim of this study is not to add new examples in order to confirm a theory on the decentralization, fragmentation and the death of the subject in contemporary art, a theory, which, apparently, reached its dead-end in declarations such as Baudrillard's that contemporary art was utterly worthless.3 There is no need to deny that postmodernism reconsiders and re-enacts all literary conventions and this one - the humanistic subject - in the first place. I would like to change the focus of the analysis and to investigate what happens to art when it shifts its centre, as I believe postmodernism does, from the deep level of character, typical of psychological realism and modernism, to the level beyond individual personality, which I define as a level of mentality - a complex integrity of mental and spiritual orientations of literary character, of author and of reader. Not the selfless, decentered, fragmented character of a literary hero, but the situation of Man and Humanity is the subject of this art today. In postmodernist art at the turn of the second Millennium a new emphasis is laid on the writer's authorial self-consciousness, on the notions of originality, uniqueness, universality. It is felt in John Barth's criticism of the death of the author theory, which was advocated by Roland Barthes, whose books still have a great resonance. What the French Poststructuralist believes to be only a "paper-I", 4 is full of meaning for the American writer and does not exclude the presence of the author as the subject of art. Barth, both a theoretician and a practitioner of postmodernism, in the essay with the polemical title "The Self in Fiction, or, 'That Ain't No Matter. That Is Nothing'" argues against this death verdict, this '"fall from innocence' on the part of literature which Roland Barthes seems to date from about 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in 1853 or thereabouts and which he exaggerates [...] in Writing Degree Zero",5 Here Barth analyses "the proper role" of authorial selfconsciousness from Don Quixote to postmodernist fiction and arrives at the conclusion that the authorial self-consciousness does not disappear, but, on the contrary, that it is foregrounded as a "performing authorial self' and this self "is as self-knowing, and self-controlled, perhaps, even as self-effacing, as it is self-conscious". 6 The writer differentiates between the authorial self-ascharacter and a broader phenomenon of self-consciousness, pointing out that the latter has greater provenance today. In his novel Lost in the Funhouse he playfully rejects this important dimension of art ("Oh God comma I abhor self

3 4

Jean Baudrillard, "La conjuration des imbeciles", Liberation, May 7 (1997). Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977),

5 6

John Barth, The Friday Book (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997), 208. Barth, The Friday Book, 214.

161.

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consciousness'"), demonstrating that the "innocence" of the self-conscious author is well lost and that a new type of postmodernist authorial selfconsciousness is born. We must acknowledge that many things in art are better known to the artists themselves from the inside of their creative process. The interviews with Don Barthelme, Barth, Sukenick, Federman, Dixon, or Barth's Friday book, as well as the writers' meta-literary fiction, reveal their deepest concern with the nature and destiny of art today. These are good arguments to assume that in postmodernism the authorial self-consciousness does not disappear, but on the contrary, reaches an incomparable height, becoming "an extension, an attenuation, an aftermath, an anticlimax, or an adversary reaction"8 to the former type of self-consciousness. The analysis of the works that follows will focus on the thesis that the author does not disappear from the text. What happens is that writers invent a variety of artistic techniques to make his presence invisible: but an author's involvement could always be scanned by the readers. The author's self-effacing strategy is always subtly self-conscious. The third important feature of this new mode of subjectivity is connected with a growing function of the reader in activating the humanistic strategies of contextualization and the reader's presence in the text as a site of meaning. Henry James envisaged these changes, when he equated a reader with a character: "the writer makes the readers [...] as he makes his characters".' I shall try to consider these three aspects of the new type of subjectivity more or less together, and to analyse not only the ways postmodernist literature undermines the centrality of this traditional aesthetic category of art, displaying its "used-upness",10 but first and foremost how this art problematizes it, and discovers new horizons in exploring Man and his subjectivity outside the conventional character-centre. This latter aspect of the problem is either entirely neglected in contemporary criticism or reduced to the problematics of language. In traditional literature before modernism, a literary hero is treated as a real living creature, who has his/her character, and is depicted in actions, conversations - that is from the outside - , as well as from the inside: through inner monologue, represented speech, etc. The character satisfied the critical expectations and matched the sense of external reality. Different literary conventions are typical of different literary movements: Hamlet's soliloquies, Stendhal's characterizations, that describe the secret motives of his heroes,

7

John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), 113. 8 Barth, The Friday Book, 212. 9 Henry James, Views and Reviews (Boston: Ball, 1908), 18. 10 Barth, The Friday Book, 64.

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Henry James's "house of fiction". In realism a hero is both the subject and the object of the author's observations. Postmodernist writers faced these new challenges, which John Barth outlined in his manifesto of postmodernism, "The Literature of Exhaustion": the task is to supersede both the realist and modernist predecessors." If in realistic literature 'reality' is unconnected with personality, then in modernist literature the reality is what Mrs. Brown sees and feels: Virginia Woolf in her famous essay "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown'"2 focuses on how important it is to depict Mrs. Brown herself. In her books she registers by interiorized speech the ways characters come into being. For her, "so real" meant different things, but never "so lifelike". The modernists discovered a new type of subjectivity, which is connected with the language of consciousness - "the atoms as they fall".13 It is through this language of mind, that the characters are constructed. However, this age discovered that language is not a transparent, but an opaque glass, that the truth is unattainable. The modernists began to feel dramatically that words limit artist's attempts to represent character's 'whatness'. A new generation of writers responded to this drama of modernism undramatically. They realized that almost everything had been used to achieve this goal and felt that this goal is unattainable by modernist tools, that the highest peak in this exploration of Man had been reached, the literary possibilities were exhausted. Postmodernist artists ask how this used-upness of everything can be transcended, and the answer was found. It was articulated by John Barth: "to use ultimacies against themselves" and to accomplish a "new human work".14 In "The Literature of Exhaustion" Barth ironically noted: '"Somebody ought to make a novel with scenes that pop up, like old children's books,' one says, with the implication that one isn't going to bother doing it oneself'. 15 Whom he has in mind is obvious. The absence of 'round characters', which Forster believed to be the highest artistic accomplishment of any artist,16 is not a lack of talent in postmodernism, but a sign of new artistic strategy and radical innovation. In comparison with the realistic 'round character' and the modernistic interiorized one, the postmodernist character seems depersonalized. But my main argument is that it could not be judged by the principles we apply to the analysis of classical literature, when we study the fullness of a hero's psychological presence in the text. If judged by this criterion we have to admit

11 Barth, The Friday Book, 67. 12 Virginia Woolf, A Woman's Essays (London: Penguin Books), 69-88. 13 Virginia Woolf, "Modem Fiction" in Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 155. 14 Barth, The Friday Book, 70. 15 Barth, The Friday Book, 66. 16 Ε. M. Förster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 73.

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that postmodernism destroys and banishes the humanist subject and that Eagleton et al.17 are right: the situation of crisis in the study of man has been reached by contemporary art. Man is dead and art is worthless. The panorama of contemporary American literature witnesses, however, that such concepts are false, that they simplify the complexities and neglect the creative potential of cultural practices today. Now postmodernist writers believe that any psychologically precise definition of character limits the possibility of an artist, as determinism, typical of realism, limited that art. Postmodernism undermines the very category of reality, central to realism and important for modernism, on which or through which the characters and events were projected. William Gass declares that character "is not a mirror or window onto life"." John Barth in his voluminous novel The Tidewater Tales. A Novel, introducing his hero - Peter Sagamore (whose name points to his real function in the novel: telling stories, sagas) characterizes him as follows, parodying the literary convention: "Peter Sagamore, 39 years and 8 lA months old", and his wife "Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, 39 years old and 8 V2 months pregnant"." The human situation, and not an individual human destiny is the writer's focus: "'It is a story of women and men/Like us: like us in love,' Katherine says" (TT, 22). In Barth's books, especially in Chimera; The Tidewater Tales. A Novel·, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, On with the Story. Stories, the writer starts the rediscovery of words and stories about man and humanity in general. In The Tidewater Tales the characters are retelling, reinventing, filling in the gaps of their favourite episodes from Homer's Odyssey with its elementary human situations: love, faithfulness, jealousy, seduction etc. The conventional psychological identity of a literary hero is substituted by his creativity and responsiveness to the sign of humanity - Homer's Odyssey. Nick reinvents the end of the Odyssey: in his version Odysseus and Nausicaa are united and sail to a place called "The Place Where Time Stands Still", "where East may be East and West West, but where Past and Future disappear" (TT, 207). This situation is connected not only with what Nick and Katherine aimed to do, when they escaped from the marriage ceremony on their boat called "Story", but with the possibility to live the life in the process of story-telling ("we live stories and live in them"20), and thus to overcome death and be forever young. Through this artistic connection with Homer's Odyssey, Barth's characters 17 Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism", New Left Review 152 (1985), 60-73. For a comprehensive discussion of this problem see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York, 1995), 159-178. 18 William Gass, "The Concept of Character in Fiction" in id., Fiction and Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 38. 19 John Barth, The Tidewater Tales. A Novel (London: Methuen, 1988), 20-21. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'TT'). 20 Barth, The Friday Book, 236.

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acquire a universal dimension, outside the limits of their physical, psychological and social identities, which are parodically subverted at the beginning of the novel. Barth creates the saga of lives within our culture's mode of expression. Any certain identity is undermined and blurred. Instead, a complexity of mental and spiritual orientations is created. Postmodernism finds new ways to introduce human matters, dramatizing our cultural memories. I suggest to define this phenomenon as 'depersonalized subjectivity' that rises above the personal, and aspires to the essentially human. It is based neither on the technique of psychological descriptions, introduced by the realists, nor on the stream-of-consciousness explored by the modernists. It is created by the authenticity of conversations and - what is of primary importance - by aesthetic responsiveness to Art. It confirms the theory that narrative discourse is one of the routes of the return of the subject, and that it serves rather than supplants the human subject.21 Another distinctive feature of postmodernist subjectivity is that postmodernist characters do not suffer the drama of lost identities, as the personages of existentialist novels do.22 Postmodernism seeks to reduce and subvert this problematics of lost identity as an exhausted theme. Barth ironically deconstructs this search for identity in his first novel The Floating Opera, creating a postmodernist parody. The main character Todd writes the death-Inquiry, the life-Inquiry, the self-Inquiry and finally comes to the conclusion that if there is no reason why to live, then there is no reason why to die. Thus, the dramatic search for the meaning of existence is rejected. Postmodernist poetics of subjectivity shifts its centre, focusing not on characters - there are no characters in the meaning of their full psychological presence in the text - but on human situation as the state of humanity, which is beyond the personal. I suggest that the formula 'the subject in crisis' could be accepted if understood dialectically: not as a demise of humanistic subject, but as an artistic quest for new and unexhausted ways of understanding the situation of contemporary man. In this case the concept of 'crisis' is diametrically opposite to destruction. Barth's recent works reveal the writer's involvement with the depiction of the state of humanity in the world. What Bellamy considers to be the obvious aspect of the latest realistic fiction, "the emphasis on suffering or feeling,

21 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). 22 In In the Labyrinth (1959) by Robbe-Grillet, the nameless soldier, whose friend has been killed, must deliver a parcel, left by his friend, to a father (but whose father?). The soldier has forgotten the street-name as well as the hour of appointment. The nameless man, wandering through a city without name, suggests a dramatic search for identity: namelessness here is a part of tragedy and it implies an ambiguous answer to the question about the significance of human existence.

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return to an interest in emotion [...]"23 has never been alien to postmodernism with its pluralistically opened aesthetics. What has changed now is the degree of saturation of these above mentioned elements and the growing concern with the problems of truth in art. In the centre of one of Barth's latest books On with the Story there is a story of love and loss (it is about a desperate loving couple vacationing at their "last resort") and the idea of the humanizing power of art. The book opens with a kind of prologue "Check-in", and the first chapter "Ad Infinitum: A Short Story" centres on the dramatic situation of bringing the "happiness-ending news": The news is bad indeed [...] The news is of that sort that in a stroke eliminates all agreeable plans and expectations - indeed, all prospects of real pleasure from the moment of its communication [...] All that is over now: for her already; for him and for them as soon as she relays the news to him f...].24

Nothing is described through character creation or an action-plot narrative. The tragic story is revealed through the imaginative energy of language and generative intertextuality: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is inscribed both directly and indirectly into Barth's text, which is also centred on the key problem of art: the correlation between art and life. In the process of storytelling Barth creates his version of "freeze-framing" art. But he does not obliterate life (as is usually believed to be the main postmodernist feature); what is obliterated by the force of his story-telling art is the "real life's end". In his story "the story-in-process" freezes the "happiness-ending news". A wife will never tell her husband, "her partner, lover, best friend and companion" (OS, 25) the "death verdict" of his medical examination. The whole story is recognizably human. The narration is conducted on two levels. It reveals the intensity of the psychological situation when the wife learns the truth. She sees her husband from her room while listening to the terrible news on the phone. Her feelings are not described directly: this 'distancing' (by way of fixing the familiar details which she sees from the window, by the 'intrusion'" of the narrator's commonplace remarks) reveals the desperateness of the human situation: There is, however no assimilating what she has just been told - or, if there is, that assimilation is to be measured in years, even decades, not on moments, days, weeks, months, seasons. She must now get up from her chair. Walk through their modest, pleasant house to the sundeck, cross the lawn to the daylily garden down the lake or pond, and tell him the news. She regards him for some moments longer, aware that as he proceeds with gardening, his mind is almost certainly on the phone call. (OS, 22-23)

23 Joe David Bellamy, Literary Luxuries. American Writing at the End of the Millennium (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995), 79. 24 John Barth, On with the Story. Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 22-23. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as OS').

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On the second narrative level there is her husband's reluctant awareness of the meaning of the phone call, his efforts to overcome the thoughts about it by concentration on the "intricacy and tenacity of those rhizomes": "With such reflections he distracts himself, or tries or pretends to distract himself, as she steps unhurriedly from the sundeck and begins to cross the lawn, himward" (OS, 25). Such a design of non-ending has a different function from that of metafiction. It is not an alternative method of aesthetic ordering, nor a technique of deliberate ambiguity. The artistic parallelism to Keats's idea of the power of art ("Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair"25) emphasizes an important implication of Barth's text. This story, like a Grecian urn, immortalizes life and, in the context of the facts of human existence that are realistically depicted in the story, acquires a new dimension; it is a story about the saving power of art: "Forever they'll go on closing the distance between them - as they have in effect been doing [...] since day One of their connection - yet never close it altogether: asymptotic curves that eternally approach but never meet" (OS, 27). Barth uses a rich variety of postmodernist techniques to stress new problematics. So the postmodernist poetics serves a new humanistic content, revitalizing the themes which were always important for art and artists. The postmodernist writer, like Keats, discovers the truth within the context of art itself. In Keats's ode, art and life are united by the power of poetic imagination: "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?/What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?/What pipes and timrels? What wild ecstasy?"26 John Barth re-enacts the same situation, "Where exactly on our planet are these people? What pond or lake is that beyond their pleasant lawn, its olive surface just now marbled with springtime yellow pollen? [...] What sort of telephone solicitors disturb their evidently rural peace?" (OS, 29). Reproducing the same structure of crescendoing questions, he demonstrates that story-telling is also the art capable of saving love, happiness and life: "we need only slow it, delay it, atomize it, flash back in time as the woman strolls forward in space with her terrible news" (OS, 29). Here he creates the artistic parallelism to "Ode", in which the imagination of the poet makes "Cold Pastoral" equal life. If Keats at the beginning of the nineteenth century wanted to believe that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty", then Barth at the end of the millennium, transcending his earlier postmodernist strategy of predominance of fiction over life ("Fact is Fantasy"), comes to the rediscovery of the significant truth of art, stressing with dramatic psychological intensity that art is the only saving power in the world of tragic realities. Here Barth is accentuating not so much the situation of art, as the situation humanity at large. Subject is no longer equated with an individual character. Personality becomes

25 John Keats, Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 209-210. 26 Keats, Poetical Works, 210.

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not a sign of something, but foregrounds a psychologically, ethically, and aesthetically significant moment that gives texts a human dimension. A different artistic tendency to create the subject beyond the personal is represented by the works of Stephen Dixon, unjustly neglected by serious criticism. His mode of writing receives different definitions from "realistic"27 to "magic realism".28 Dixon elaborates a new type of subjectivity - subjectivity without hero, psychologism without individualization. One of the most shocking of Dixon's experiments, which could be called 'Subjectivity Degree Zero', is his story "The Hole", with its focus on lynch mob mentality and on the crisis of humanity. The text resembles a script or a recording of authentic conversations which are centred on an act of terrorism. This immediately connects us with the reality we live in: the recent violent terrorist attacks in the USA and in a Moscow theatre. In Dixon's story some school children and their teacher are entombed under the collapsed planetarium building which is on fire. The rescue team quickly makes a hole wide enough for a child to slip out, but not enough for the teacher. The parents outside are crying and hurrying up the rescue operation. The climax of the situation reaches its apogee, when the teacher blocks the hole, not allowing the children to get out. Thus he tries to force the rescue team to dig a hole wide enough for himself. The whole situation and its moral truth is double-coded by the author. In the course of negotiations, the teacher declares: "[...] my students also learned a vital lesson about life I never could have taught them in class on how to stay alive and deal with their fellow human beings in an emergency situation".29 His speech acquires the rhetoric of political discourse: "how no person should be discriminated against because of physiognomy, ethic, political, geographical, or employment group, his or her age, colour, religion, thought, health" (S, 117). The double-coding of the whole situation becomes intensified, and turns into the test for humanity of everyone in the scene: the characters, the narrator, and the reader as the main target of this test. Everyone is supposed to experience the mental and emotional shock. At the end of the story, though everyone is safe, the mob is still wild with revenge. Being scared, the teacher disappears in the hole, and no one, even his son and a protecting policeman, can coax him up. The revengeful mob lynches his son instead: They caught the son, dragged him back, kicked at his head and body till it seemed all his limbs, ribs and face were broken, then hung him upside down by his feet

27 Barth, The Friday Book, 257. 28 Vince Passaro, "Two volumes of fiction from one of America's most prolific writers" (access for subscribers only). 29 Stephen Dixon, The Stories (New York: Holt, 1994), 117. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'S').

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from one of the tree branches [...] and beat his already unrecognizable face with their handbags [...]. (S, 125) The image both of extreme inhuman violence and of extreme human despair (women's handbags) is created by the camera-eye technique, by the absence of any comments and descriptive adjectives. But inside it there is pain and awe. Nothing is said about the father, the teacher. He was found neither dead, nor alive, but there is no other exit from the place. Was he a witness to the lynching of his son? Could the parents' act of lynching the innocent boy be justified? Could the teacher's action be justified? How to understand a policeman's approval? The openness and uncertainty, the plurality of all possible answers and moral judgements is constructed by the poetics of this text that does not provide any single perspective. Dixon creates the text which is not the mirror for understandable reality. The questions 'who is right?' and 'Why are the children the victims of terrorism?' remain unresolved for the readers, not because the answers are not in the text, but because they simply do not exist for this situation. The cognitive hesitation moves from one truth (or seeming truth) to hesitation and uncertainty in it, to a new version of truth and new hesitation. This epistemological uncertainty points to the problem of the infiniteness of meaning, and suggests that any judgement looks like a primitive simplicity. The combination of concrete human situation and 'cognitive efforts' to understand it creates an inner space of the text with its main image of disturbed certainties about the nature of the self and the role of consciousness. The author, the narrator, the character, and the reader, who also becomes a function of the text, are all involved, mentally and spiritually, into the understanding of the situation of Man and the nature of evil. The narrative dramatizes their relationships. Thus, within a small scope of the story the dynamics of implied thoughts and moral dilemma are reproduced. Does this mean that postmodernist art is antihuman if it does not pin down the truth? After the events of September 11, it was claimed that postmodernism was responsible, because it had created the climate which could lead to such violence. What was deliberately overlooked, however, is the complexity of postmodernist art: its relativism and ambiguity is an artistic strategy, but not the conviction of an artist that there are no human values worth defending. This art has its specific artistic strategies and unconventional ways for serious thoughts about the crisis of humanity in the world. "It is one thing to say 'Values are only relative'; quite another, and more thrilling, to assert 'There are relative values!'"30 - this statement of Barth's character in The Floating Opera is an illuminating explanation of this very important difference and it can be read as an answer to the critics, who should have known better the culture they are blaming. Literature may pretend to be indifferent to human

30 John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York: Appleton, 1956), 251.

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values, but its profound obsession is man and his destiny. Half a century ago Robbe-Grillet, theoretician of the nouveau roman, examined this strategy : "the function of art is never to illustrate a truth - or even interrogation - known in advance, but to bring into the world certain interrogation [...] not yet known as such to themselves".31 The postmodernist writers, realizing that the author cannot be omniscient in his knowledge of reality, that Balzac's principle of universality is naive and false, discovered new techniques to make themselves invisible. But still, the writers' positions can always be scanned by the readers. Postmodernist writers explore new ways of creating and dramatizing connections between the text and the reader, between the hero and the reader's response — connections which are not mediated by authors' explanations, but exist in the inner space of the text itself. The writers are trying to preserve human matter, challenging and reconstituting only the place of character and omniscient author as the main literary conventions. The attitude of the postmodernist writer to man and his world is serious and tragic, but without pathos and open emotionality. Selfhood, the good, and art exist as intertwined themes. Dixon's story is good proof that Stanley Fish is right in his cover article in the July issue of Harper's magazine, "Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals",32 claiming that "our warrior intellectuals" should be more considerate about the nature of postmodernism and the drama of truth. Dixon's story is a test for humanity that questions what is to be human in today's world. The principle of postmodernist subjectivity here is rooted in understanding the variety and changeability of the process of human understanding. The subjective inner space of unrealized, unspoken versions of Dixon's story displays the self as insufficient 'cogito'. The indeterminacy of the reader's response to the event and the character is the main feature of postmodernist open subjectivity. This constant combination of concrete human situations and cognitive efforts to understand them gives grounds to speak about new humanistic problematics of postmodernism at the end of the Millennium. In postmodernism author, narrator, character, and reader are all involved into understanding the human situations and their relationship is subtly dramatized. The lack of depth in the depiction of the characters (no one has names or personal features) is not a technique of dehumanisation, as it is believed to be typical of postmodernism, but the development of the discoveries made by Eliot, Huxley, Beckett, who felt a zero inner world of their 'hollow' contemporaries. In Dixon's story, "the hole" stands not only for literal 31 Alain Robbe-Grillet, "For a New Novel" in Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2000), 810. 32 Stanley Fish, "Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals", Harper's (July, 2002), 33-40.

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meaning (the father literally disappeared in the hole). It develops its inner meaning through the associative expansion: Dixon shows that the lack of depth of man is dangerous and that the hollow in his inner self could be filled with the inhuman. Postmodernist writers do not deny the complexity of human reality as the subject of art; what is new in postmodernism is the principle of approaching this reality, the ways we read character and text. Probably, this was meant by Robbe-Grillet when he argued that "man's situation in the world is no longer the same today as it was a hundred years ago, and not at all because our description is too neutral, too objective, since in fact it is not neutral at all [...]".33 At first glance postmodernist texts may seem antipsychological and anti-subjective. But that is not so. The postmodernists transcended the discoveries of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence. The core of their new artistic strategy is to install a new, trans-personal subject by subverting traditional psychological representations and by way of deepening the narrative inwardness. They challenge only the place of literary character as the main literary convention of literature, simultaneously enshrining man as author and as reader. The latter's position becomes even stronger. Dixon's mode of writing is a case in point. Dixon started experimenting with this 'Subjectivity Degree Zero' in the story "Said" (1980). This type of poetics could be called the poetics of absence: there are no characters in the traditional sense of the word, there is no plot, there are hardly any other words but the monotonous repetition of the word "said": "[...] he said, she said. She left the room he followed her. He said, she said. She locked herself in the bathroom, he slammed the door with his fists. He said. She said nothing".34 Here Dixon is probing how absolute this absence of a literary character could be and discovers other means to intimate the self. Nothing is said directly. But the reader imagines everything that is. On the background of this facelessness, human situations seem intensely and intimately psychological. The play with the quasi-homophone "said" as 'sad' intensifies this effect. Apparently, Barth had this very human matter in mind when he declared that "the self is not transcendable".35 In a much more aesthetically complex manner Dixon develops this 'said strategy' and at the same time questions it, in his recent novel 30 Pieces of a Novel (1999).36 In this very unconventional text the writer creates a multiplicity of human situations. However, he does this outside the concept of character and outside the tendency to equate it with consciousness. The main character, or surrogate narrator, is Gould Bookbinder, who is literally, compositionally, a 33 34 35 36

Allan Robbe-Grillet, "New Novel, New Man" in McKean (ed.), Theory of the Novel, 822. Stephen Dixon, "Said", Boundary 2 (1980), 99-100. Barth, The Friday Book, 52. Stephen Dixon, 30 Pieces of the Novel (New York: Holt, 1999). Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'P').

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binding means for these 30 Pieces of a Novel and he is constructed by them. This voluminous book (672 pages) opens with a statement that undermines both the convention of plot as event and the reality of character as the subject of art: There is something that comes back at moments that for the most part don't seem to have anything to do with the incidents. When he was standing in the bathroom yesterday taking a shower. Well, now that he refers to it he sees where it could sort of be explained why it came back there [...]. (P, 3)

There is an obvious disconnection between the first and the second sentence, which reproduces a stream-of-consciousness, a picture of the mind. The intonation of oral speech, the elliptical syntax signify that the beginning is the direct inner speech of Gould Bookbinder, though no inverted commas are present, no other specifications are given. This interchanging flow of narrative voices - an implied author's voice and the hero's 'indirectly direct' speech, which is transcribed as an authentic voice - represents the main artistic strategy of this text. This emphasis on "moments" of being, "incidents", perceptions, which are ungraspable with the precise word of feeling ("this is something"), this effect of the presence of the mind, reminds us of the modernists and especially of Virginia Woolf s aesthetic principle: to catch "the thing itself before it has been made anything".37 However this recognizably modernist technique, these "moments of being" - the phrase which was coined by Woolf for the life of perceptions - is deliberately subverted by Dixon. The main character Gould Bookbinder acquires a new dimension, becoming both a playful and serious binding strategy of the writer, and a learned activity of the reader, bringing together two types of texts and two types of cultures. Later in the text, when Gould Bookbinder speaks about his profession as a literature teacher, this strategy is clearly explicated: "I'm talking about teaching and understanding the subtleties and particulars of literature and making the connections and seeing its big rich" (P, 192). We may suspect that the writer wants his readers to do the same and that this is the main artistic strategy of the book and the main principle of character-creation. Dixon problematizes the concept of the subject and introduces a new 'binding' strategy of reading it. It is our cultural memory that binds and connects. This coexistence of different types of culture in the inner space of the book is different both from the literary reminiscences typical of Romantic art, and from the inscribed intertextuality typical of modernism and postmodernism. In Dixon's text this coexistence is very subtle and never explicit. It is the reader's refined subjective responsiveness and cultural knowledge that can create the situation for binding, understanding, and delight. It has nothing to do with parodic intertextuality which is usually considered to be the main characteristic 37 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 180.

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of postmodernism. Dixon's strategy manifests a subtler and a distinctly different type of heightened authorial self-consciousness, which is so unlike the "delights in replay".38 His replaying beyond the obvious is very elusive and needs more intellectual and emotional energy on the side of the readers. In this novel there are no references to Joyce's Ulysses, but what is created by Dixon is a new type of postmodernist epic about Everyman in his commonness and recognizable humanity. Gould Bookbinder is a new version of Everyman at the end of the twentieth century. The mythic archetype of human life as an eternal journey is a connecting link between Homer, Everyman, Joyce, Barth and Dixon. The life of Gould Bookbinder is humdrum and devoid of heroism, but, like Leopold Bloom's, is full of humane essences. However, the difference exists: Gould's life is never projected through his perceptions, his "moments of being". The place of Dixon's character as subject is feeble. He is only an accumulation of self-said stories with a variety of "Ends" (such is the title of the closing section of the novel), which constitutes the larger story of Life, a Story of stories, so to speak. Gould Bookbinder is Everyman: we do not know his nationality, his religion, his social surroundings. The details are very contradictory. At the beginning of the book he is a salesman, then a literature teacher, and a scholar at the end. But we could read inside his "he said", which registers both humdrum everydayness, and his never ceasing longing for love, intimacy, bonds. Though not personified and not individualized and never shown through the aesthetic immediacy of individualized perceptions (like Woolf s or Joyce's characters), Gould is not just a technical 'binding' means. In his life everything is mixed: love, despair, divorce, carnal desires. The image of life, which is created in the book, resembles so much Joyce's image of man's Odyssey, today and ever, in overcoming the burden and "mishaps" (P, 167) of everydayness. Dixon comes to the same humanistic idea, using a different artistic strategy, creating art which is able to overcome its own exhaustion, art which is not devoid of humanistic impulses. That is why there are grounds to state that American literature at the end of the century does not dehumanize the subject, but discovers a new type of humanism, a new concept of self-freedom, showing what enormous efforts are needed to endure it Unlike the works of Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, where the stream-ofconsciousness dissolves the line between the world and mind, Dixon never reveals the subjective world of his character; yet the humanistic matter does not disappear. It is an exaggeration to consider, as Vattimo does, that the postmodernist subject always searches its consciousness.39 This statement is true for modernist art: for modernist writers the subjective self is fall of meaning and is connected with consciousness. The postmodernists, realizing 38 Barth, The Friday Book, 213. 39 Gianni Vattimo, "Myths and the Fate of Secularization", Res 9 (1985), 35.

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that no level of man and his consciousness could be explored by art, turned either to play with subconsciousness, parodying the classical texts (as in Barth's The Floating Opera and Tidewater Tales), or to substitute it by the infiniteness of human situations. The characters in Barth's and Dixon's novels are made present through deliberately depersonalized speech, which is free from any conventions: quotation marks, grammatical rules. This art of creating self-telling characters, who never reveal their inner space, is the innovation of late postmodernism in the field of new artistic subjectivity. In Dixon's texts the 'said mode' renders the subject 'twice removed': first, by the pronoun "he" (not T ) , and second, by "he said", which creates the effect of refictionalization. And though the speech is reported directly ("He said [...]"), man is not an individual source of meaning, his speech is faceless, it only registers the details and actions, and it distances personal perceptions as in the piece "Eyes": Looks at his mother - sleeping, definitely: the breathing. If she weren't he'd initiate a conversation about something: that they're much better off in the shade than in the sun, don't you agree? How can people, like the ones on the grass there, lie in the sun, not just the heat and humidity but the sweating and harmful rays? (P, 275)

Dixon writes the text as if challenging Benveniste's definition of subjectivity as enunciative act of self-identification through language: "It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of 'ego' in reality, in its reality".40 The writer is targeting the Western philosophical tradition from Plato to LeviStrauss that insists that writing is an alienated form of expression, whereas in oral speech man is in full possession of himself. He shows that Gould's voice is not an intimate, spontaneous medium, on the contrary, it renders the character twice removed from the self. Thus, artistically he deconstructs the belief that the living voice "coincides" with the self.41 Dixon seems to make efforts to prevent any totalizing concept of subjectivity and develops new ways of contesting the individual subject. This "he said" is not the testimony of identity, not an individualization, as it might be expected. It only creates the objectivity of the human situation which is reported impassively. This "said" narrative strategy subverts the stability of the point of view, which has always been a guarantee of subjectivity. The subject processes as if a direct speech of a character (and never as a represented speech), and this problematizes the inscription of subjectivity, signifying the change in the subject's position: he is never an individual source of meaning. The empirical basis of the humanist 40 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971), 221. 41 The writer started experimenting with this vocalization in his story "Mac in Love", which goes through voice and voice grows into metaphor for what voice could do. His voice goes right into the apartment and then the two women start speaking (Dixon, Stories, 32-42).

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concepts of knowledge - trust in observation - is called into question by this 'he said strategy'. Thus Dixon discovers his own ways of overcoming any totalizing concept of subjectivity, any unified autonomous consciousness, and any totalizing order of narrative. The concept of an individual subject is contested and artistically transcended. What is created is a new subject as a mode of open mentality, limited neither by the inner world of consciousness, nor by the outer world of life flow. The subject is not dethroned, but enshrined as the human mind that binds and connects. Character is created as a 'speech mode': the illusion of 'oral' speech in this 'said mode' controls the narrative and does not allow it to project an individual consciousness. It projects only generic types of mentality, such as loneliness or longing, which are common to and recognizable by everyone. Dixon creates a pseudo-documentary effect that registers the details and actions without any inwardness: "She'd say, 'No, I'm okay, I can do it.' She doesn't say it; he didn't ask her or even give a look that said does she need help, but he thinks she'd say it if that's what he'd said or had given that look" (P, 245). The inner self is impersonalized through this 'said mode' of the text, and as a result the character becomes twice removed from the reader by the speech of the narrator and by Gould's directly quoted speech. The postmodernist writer creates the character as a reading strategy: it is left to the reader to connect the dots between this "said" and direct quotes and bind the decentered fragments of Gould Bookbinder into the character of Everyman. The emphasis on the personal disappears, and that which may seem personal, being shown in the 'said mode', immediately dissolves in the atmosphere of impersonality. This 'said mode' and the details which Gould sees, are all used to plug us into the character, but not from the inside, as in modernism, but from the level beyond his personal inner world. I suggest to define this art as an art of vocalized open mentality in contrast to the interiorized subjectivity of modernism. There is no monolithic unity, no story as event, but the fragments of vocalized and objectivized 'human situations'. Postmodernism approaches the problem of the subject from an absolutely new perspective, but man still remains the main subject of this art. The characters turn their experience into speech: oral, as in Barth's Chimera·, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print; Tape and Live Voice and in Dixon's texts; or written, as in Jake's case in Barth's The End of the Road. These techniques create the texts that are both audible and inaudible, but which objectify the characters on the level of speech. Dixon distorts the accepted belief that oral speech gives the impression of presence of original experience. On the contrary, by portraying the speaking voice he shows that it depersonalizes and screens the hero's inwardness behind the words. Gould Bookbinder exists in a cocoon of words. However, the breakthrough is possible, if the screening "he said" is abandoned. Dixon's novel ends like a

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humanistic myth with the belief that mutual recognition and harmony intellectual and emotional - is attainable in spite of all 'mishaps'. The final words of the 'piece' "Ends" are love, unity, and understanding: "[...] there's something very important I want to say to you that can't seem to wait. [...] you're not hearing what I'm saying so of course wouldn't hear what I think's so important to say." He thinks he forgot one of the "he says" Oh, so what. Ah, so what? Just stop it. (P, 672)

"Who is speaking thus at the end of this paragraph?" - Roland Barthes's question seems to be quite relevant here. Is it the hero's transcribed oral speech, or is it the author's, who reveals to us his subjectivity and displays his discovery, both serious and playful, which could save the "subject in crisis", implying that his artistic task is to go beyond this "said", to something it could not articulate and that his task is to restore the essences, the feelings that had drained through words? The last sentence: '"He thinks he forgot one of the 'he says - " ' , appears when his Sally is sleeping in his embrace, and Gould is happy. This sentence opens the text and the character, displaying another layer of meaning - not "said" but lived lives. "Oh, so what?" may refer to the case when pathos and emotions, which were rejected by contemporary culture, and which were deliberately removed by the distancing 'said technique', unexpectedly spring up to the surface. Dixon restores the possibility of art not "to escape the emotions". The human matter explodes and it is celebrated in this subtly hidden cultural intertextuality that challenges Eliot's famous statement. Dixon's "Oh, so what?" is not a question, but a statement by which he also restores the category of the author as the subject of art. Dixon problematizes the condition of our "said" lives, of turning personal experience into speech and shows its ineluctable contradictions: a barrier of words that hampers and alienates the understanding and self-expression. It is the writer's both serious and playful answer to the colleague at Johns Hopkins University creative writing seminar - John Barth. In The End of the Road Jake faces the dilemma: To turn experience into speech - that is to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammatize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.'*2

Barth displays the dilemma - Dixon 'situates'" a possible solution, creating an autodeconstructive text with a new case of differance, inviting to rethink the place of man in art. Dixon's Gould in the most intimate moments of love realizes that between him and this young girl there is a barrier of words that made their happiness impossible:

42 John Barth, The End of the Road (New York: Bantam, 1969), 119.

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"[...] And the truth is, too much talk too, okay?' And he said, "Listen, don't how tell me not talk or how to and then when to talk and more of the not-to-do-this stuff unless something I'm doing is physically hurting you'[...] 'So what's he's saying? He's saying nothing. Oh, he's saying little?' (P, 215)

This episode could also be read as an emblematic illustration of what Foucault diagnosed in contemporary culture: not sex but sexuality, implying the falsification of experience in the discourse. Thus Dixon made the 'said' mode of his writing not only a technique, but the main subject of the novel which is plugged into the poststructuralist debates of the century about man, speech (oral and written), about the power of discourse and the language of resistance. The writer releases the character and the author both from the limiting power of literary tradition and from the theoretical mould of postmetaphysical ontology. Now it is obvious: at the end of the twentieth century writers are not theoretically 'innocent'. This image of the writer as a refined thinker is subtly inscribed in Dixon's text and constitutes one of the main dimension of the human subject. It is he and his learned reader who respond to the intellectual battles of the age and develop new ideas in the process of creating and reading, proving that humanism is still tenable within the age of theory. In a very subtle way Dixon questions, how to convey the genuine human experience, and how to cope with the situation of the crisis of man in art. He analyzes the reason of his hero's unhappiness and the way it could be overcome. The answer of the writer is to return to love and to escape from words. At the end of the novel Gould seems to find what helps to endure the boredom of everydayness. The word he was looking for and which is known to everyone is love - and it is found and it is realized in Gould. Dixon, Barth, and Pynchon show that love and art are the last bastions of individuality, and human values are rooted in man's hope and capacity to create. However the essence of man and his indispensable quality is loneliness: in Barth's On with the Story love is tested by death, in Pynchon's Vineland it cannot last, it is always in the past, in the nostalgic 60s, in Dixon's novel the optimistic end of the book is not the end of Gould's loneliness, but only one of the possible ends ("Ends" is the title of this section) and it appears in the book in a reverted order. Thus, on the threshold of the third Millennium postmodernist writers challenge the model of subjectivity of realistic and modernist literature, and create literary character not as a hero of the text, but as a projection of the situation of Man and humanity in general. Postmodernist writers are trying to open new possibilities in the art of understanding man: how to overcome the artistic limit of the character as a concrete personality? How to create man without reproducing his emotions and perceptions, but only his voice, that never tells himself, but deals only with the 'not-I world'? It is significant that

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Dixon unquotes the narrative at the end of the novel. Thus he deconstructs, questioning the artistic validity of this vocalized 'said mode'. Postmodernist literature at the end of the twentieth century can be viewed not as the art of the destroyed subject, but as the art that has substituted the old episteme, which can be called character thinking, by a new, open mentality, and it is equal to the discovery of a new subject. Postmodernist subjectivity is a new arena of relationship between character and author, between the text and the reader's mind. Mind, perception, aesthetic responsiveness to the signs of culture - all human matters — work together to establish this sense of human self that is beyond the personal. It is a new direction in the process of the recuperation of subjectivity in the mode of open mentality. The contemporary situation of 'subject in crisis' could be viewed not as a Thanatos of the human soul, but as a dialectical process of transcending the subject as an individual ego in the direction of discovering either the commonly human, or the essentially humanistic. Today it is clear that to speak about postmodernist character in a traditional way is impossible. What is the personal identity of Todd from Barth's first novel The Floating Opera, or Peter Sagamore and {Catherine's from Tidewater Tales, or a husband and a wife's from On with the Story, or Zoyd's from Pynchon's Vineland, or Gould's. Man is opaque not only to the other, but first of all to himself. He is free and his actions are unexpected and more unexplainable to himself than to others (Todd's desire to blow up a show-boat, for example). The question why is irrelevant, the answer is unknown, it is beyond logical explanation. The analysis of American postmodernist literature reveals that this shift in the centrality of values from the identity of the psychological character, characteristic of modernism, to the search for general human identity, started by postmodernism, is the result of radical experiments in the sphere of mentality as the primary focus of new art. Postmodernist writers realized that the old conventional concept of character no longer fits the fiction, that today it is impossible to depict the subjective world of man as his individual consciousness. That is why they expanded the concept of subjectivity in art, foregrounded it, including the authorial critical self-consciousness, and the reader's interpretative capacity. Thus, the character-centric mode of literature is substituted by a humano-centric one. Robbe-Grillet half a century ago envisaged a new direction of art, calling it "total subjectivity".43 The tendency of aesthetic and critical reconsideration of the place of Man as the subject of art is the main characteristic of the cultural climate at the end of the second Millennium, and it is typical not only of American literature. We witness a similar process in Russian literature today, where it manifests even

43 Robbe-Grillet, "New Novel, New Man", 822.

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more critical and personal involvement of the writers. In the novels by Vladimir Sorokin the self as the subject of art is defiantly undermined, and this is more obvious than the desire to reconstitute it, typical of American postmodernism. It can be explained by the peculiarity of Russian cultural tradition. The writers perceive the Great Tradition of the Russian realistic novel, with its teleology of the good, as moral and aesthetic tyranny. Besides, they have a fresh memory of and a strong nausea towards the ideal hero, typical of socialist realism. Thus, Pelevin in Chapaev and Void" challenges the image of the national hero of Socialist Realism. The aesthetics of negation, the tendency to challenge and contest the 'ideal' subject of socialist realism is serious and deeply personal. In Sorokin's novel Roman43 this critical debate on the death of Man, both a hero and an author, is inscribed as the main subject of the book. What is created is a phantasmagoria on this current poststructuralist debate. The whole text is subtly double-coded: the word 'roman', which is the title of the novel, has two meanings in Russian - it means 'a novel' and a male proper name. The first part of the novel is a stylization of the nineteenth-century Russian novel (Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky), with extensive descriptions of nature, environment, and psychological characterization. Here Sorokin parodies the possibility to construct a new subject of art. The hero of the novel, Roman, a lawyer, abandons the city in search of freedom and goes to live in a village. In the second part of the book he becomes a killer. He kills almost everybody in the village, including his newly married wife, and dies. Sorokin double-codes the text, inviting to read it as a literal inscription of the debate on the death of man, as an author and a character. The former finds it impossible to overcome the Great Tradition, the tyranny of which is destructive. The first part of the novel is its direct stylization. The second part of the novel is a collage of episodes from horror literature with slaughter, blood, black mass etc. Here the text starts an auto-deconstruction, the recording of what happens when literature is exhausted and the author dies. The concept of the hero undergoes the same changes. In the first part of the book, Roman is a controlling subject. Roman, both the character and the genre, is in search of harmony and freedom. In the second part of the novel the hero is emancipated from the author and destroys everything that can be described by an author, and himself as the subject of this art. This novel could be read as a subtle ironic response of the writer, a refined thinker, to the idea of the demise of the human subject, which he views as another, in this case a theoretical, tyranny. In his version the subject's disappearance means only one thing - the death of art. Sorokin demonstrates that when the subject disappears, the object disappears too. Roman as a 44 Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow: Vagrius, 1996). 45 Vladimir Sorokin, Roman (Moscow, 1994).

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character is dead, the author is dead and what is produced is not art at all. Such is an ironic and phantasmagorical problematization of the situation - 'subject in crisis'. However, Sorokin, the real writer, who responds and deconstructs, is still the thinking subject of this book, who is questioning, whether the subject could be dead and Art be still alive. Its presence and absence are both questioned. This tendency to deconstruct and auto-deconstruct reveals the self and the humano-centric concepts at the heart of the text. Man, as a 'thinking thing', is persistently present in the writer's and reader's strategies of writing and reading. The latest event - Sorokin's case in the Russian Federation Court - demonstrates that the author is more than simply alive. He disturbs and provokes. One thing that is common to American and Russian writers is this new freedom of authors as the subject of their texts, their freedom to violate a taboo in all spheres of life. And this freedom in Russian literature is incomparable with that of American writers, who hardly ever suffered similar ideological restrictions, political censorship and trials. That is why in Russian literature the tendency to challenge and contest is more passionately personal and less playful and optimistic. What we witness in the literary process at the end of the Millennium is a variety of situations that challenge the image of the self as a self-sufficient cogito, and the search for new possibilities to re-enact self as subject in literature - be it the vocalized illusion of character, the authorial selfconsciousness, or the reader's intelligence and imagination. Writers use a variety of techniques in order to speak on behalf of the self. Each of these authors lives as a conscious subject. Postmodernist writers are, in fact, doing what Foucault wanted to be the goal of contemporary thought, i. e. "to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of individuality, which has been imposed on us for several centuries".46 If 'fin-de-siecle' is usually conceptualized as the peculiar historico-cultural situation at the turn of the century which is marked by the dramatic realization of the crisis of all prevailing values as well as by the urgent search for new horizons in art and literature, then, accordingly, 'fin-de-millennium', with its utterly heightened sense of ending, the understanding of complex transformations in all spheres of life is characterized by even more drastic aesthetic changes, by an astonishing new turnaround in all kinds of literature, and by even more critically self-conscious and deconstructive art. The most striking feature of contemporary literature is the artistically-critical response of the leading writers to the theoretical debates of the age on crucial issues of art: the destiny of man, art and humanity. These changes in postmodernist poetics are the result of the further development of the inner possibilities of this art 46 Michel Foucault, "Afterword: the Subject and Power" in Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 208-12,212.

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the art of pluralistic openness and creative re-enaction. These features are usually screened by more conspicuous and more overtly experimentalist tendencies in this art. Through the dramatic quest for Truth in art, through the step by step realization of dramatic interconnectedness between art and reality, the writers come to a new content, which is defined by John Barth as "the experiencing of human experience".47 They show that 'reality' is a human concept, and it can never be depicted without man — character, author, reader. The writers challenge Ortega y Gasset's concept that art will survive by dehumanizing itself, that for the artist aesthetic pleasure derives from a triumph over human matter. For them the treasure of art is in that it "refreshes, ennobles and expands our spirit along the painful way".48 Postmodernist writers responded to the theory of the death of the subject, newly discovering a concept of subjectivity and a new form of humanism. It is possible to doubt whether these artistic concerns represent a new alternative phenomenon in art - a new postcontemporary art - or if they are features of transformed postmodernism. Art is not a theoretical construct but a dynamic mode that is constantly being shaped. What these new books prove is that the epoch of creativity has not ended and the aesthetic desire for Truth, that still "teases us out of thought",49 outlines the current tendency in art. It seems that the process of recuperation of the Subject has started and the day has come when postmodernism can truly be called "the literature of replenishment" as was predicted by Barth in his essay of the same title. Thus, the subject, being deconstructed, returns at another place. Postmodernist art is already integrated into the world literature with its 'classics' (Barth, Don Barthelme, Coover, Gass, Pynchon et al.), and the vision of postmodernism as chaos and destruction of the human subject reveals that literary criticism substantially lags behind the real life of letters.

47 Barth, The Friday Book, 364. 48 John Barth, Chimera (New York, Random House, 1972), 17. 49 Keats, Poetical Works, 210.

SUSANNE PETERS

The Anglo-Irish Playwright Martin McDonagh: Postmodernist Zeitgeist as Cliche and a (Re)turn to the Voice of Common Sense Introduction There is a now famous bon mot by Groucho Marx who said he would never join a club that would accept him as a member. In the case of the Anglo-Irish playwright and enfant terrible Martin McDonagh, this might hold true for the opinion he has in store for the postmodernist spirit. Like the famous American comedian, McDonagh would probably never agree to being called a postmodernist if we (i. e. literary critics and theatre reviewers) were prepared to call him that. In this paper, I will attempt to answer the question of how McDonagh's plays escape such categorization and perhaps even catch a glimpse of a new Zeitgeist beyond postmodernism. Most of the papers in this volume deal with narrative fiction and invented realities that remain bound between the two covers of the book. But in drama, we move closer to concepts of reality because we are physically presented with "action", something happening in front of our eyes on the stage. This peculiar characteristic of drama to resemble reality perhaps helps us strengthen the hypothesis that has been formulated in a number of other contributions to this volume: in order to overcome postmodernism, is there something happening comparable to a return to traditional and/or realistic narration? It appears that Christophe Den Tandt - and to a large extent also Klaus Stierstorfer - write in a similar vein as they observe a converging of voices, a circling around some truth or reality, a gathering of contingent particles of solid ground. But they have also commented upon a remarkable retort to cliche1 or - simply - Kitsch

1

Anton Zijderveld defines the nature of cliches as tired forms of expression, that still stimulate some form of reaction: "A clichd can be defined as a traditional form of human expression (in words, emotions, gestures, acts) which - due to repetitive use in social life - has lost its original, often ingenious, heuristic power. Although it thus fails to contribute meaning to social interactions and communication, it does function socially, since it manages to stimulate behaviour (i. e. cognition, emotion, volition, action), while it avoids reflection on meaning."

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by authors of narrative fiction. This may argue a cautious return to humanist ideals while still preserving a "wobbly ground", namely a nostalgic depiction of a world that-would-be. The plays by the Anglo-Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh are a good example to examine such possible post-postmodernist issues from a different angle: that of the theatre. The plays by the new shooting-star of the nineties on London's theatre stages2 have not received unanimously positive reactions from critics and theatregoers. Due to explicit physical violence on stage, cruelty to humans and animals, viewers sometimes walk out, or, if they can stomach it, they enjoy the plays' "hilarious" and "funny" excesses. 3 McDonagh's plays generate strong feelings in either way, as characters are tortured and have their skulls split.4 I will concentrate on a group of plays, published as The Leenane-Trilogy, featuring "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" (1996), "A Skull in Connemara" (1997), and "The Lonesome West" (1997). 5 The characters in these plays are connected by family or communal relationships, which the playwright focuses on to explore their destructive potential. Although McDonagh uses traditional themes and issues such as national stereotypes and idiomatic language as his plays are set in rural Ireland, his dramatic art perhaps offers a new Zeitgeist. This can be described as a cautious return to human values, that is informed by irony, Kitsch, and surrealistic, fragmented forms of existence, grotesque experiences of everyday life. Before I move on to describe this innovative voice, I will briefly outline some of the intertextual relations that form the basis of McDonagh's dramatic technique and enhance the plays' precarious communicative structures.

2

3

4

5

Cf. his valuable article "On the Nature and Function of Cliches" in Günter Blaicher (ed.), Erstarrtes Denken (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), 26-40,26. Among the many awards he has received up to now are the Writers's Guild Award, and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The Plays moved on to the U. S. (Broadway, Los Angeles, Philadelphia) after successful runs in London's West End. At the time of going to press McDonagh is resident playwright at the Royal National Theatre in London. A few examples of violent action: in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane", Maureen tortures her mother by pouring hot oil over her hands and later on in the play kills her with an iron poker, in "A Skull in Connemara" characters appear with large cracks in their heads and covered in blood, and in "The Lonesome West" the Connor brothers argue over a pair of dog's ears that had been cut off by one of them. On the back cover of the edition of the Leenane Trilogy used here (London: Methuen, 1999), there is an appropriate quote from the Daily Telegraph: "The play combines manic energy and physical violence in a way that is both hilarious and viscerally exciting." Samples of recent online reviews can be consulted at the following web sites: (16.6.2003) (, , or . "The Cripple of Inishmaan" (1996), "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" (1995), and "The Banshees of Inisheer" (no publication date available) make up the second trilogy, which has been announced by Methuen, but has not yet appeared.

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Intertextual References The plays relate to at least as many as four different types of sub-genre, integrating a multitude of issues and employing a variety of dramatic devices. There are intertextual relations to melodrama, as the plays feature mostly black and white, emotionally overcharged protagonists. The themes of the plays almost exclusively focus on malevolent intrigue. The action is always violent and at the same time sentimental, allowing the viewers very mixed feelings towards the plays. McDonagh's plays also refer to the well-made play, in that they have easy-to-follow plots and moments of denouement. One is also reminded of the 'kitchen-sink' or domestic drama of the 1950s, because the personal squabbles are mostly carried out indoors, very often indeed in kitchens. And lastly, they refer to more or less specific film and television genres, as the depicted action has much in common with the genre of the road movie of the 1990s, celebrating violence and sentimentality, and even soapoperas, that feature mainly family splits and lovers' reunions. References to authors and specific texts can be traced for example to James Joyce's "Eveline", one of the stories from the Dubliners collection. Here we recognize clusters of similar motifs such as the wish to leave Ireland for good, the idea of emigration to America - still so attractive to actors in real life as well as on stage. There are also specific references to films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho·. "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" ends with a scene which shows Maureen's mother dead, sitting in a rocking chair. Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs is alluded to, and likewise Tony Scott's True Romance (for which Tarantino wrote the screenplay), each depicting similar naivety towards violent action and sentimental feelings - even trash. These films McDonagh himself claims to have been influenced by never really question the necessity of violence, they merely assert it. But in McDonagh's case, depicted acts of violence are counterbalanced by a humane voice of common sense, however vulnerable and susceptible to destruction this may be. The themes and issues the plays deal with cluster around violent and cruel personal relationships. "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" features Maureen in a love-and-hate relationship with her mother, who is tortured and killed by her, the act barely disguised as an accident. Maureen is in love with Pato, who finds himself unable to have a sexual relationship with her. "The Lonesome West" is about two brothers, who have communally killed their father and equally enjoy a hateful, violent relationship. This play also features Girleen, hopelessly in love with a priest who drowns himself in a lake. The language is mostly Irish idiom, people speak rural speech, non-elaborate codes. Images of nature, countryside and rural life, and those of Ireland as a nation are doubly and stereotypically connotated as truthful home and priest-ridden country. They are mixed with images of exile and, most persistently, religion.

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McDonagh seems to be well aware of how to kindle an academic as well as a non-academic interest in his work - "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" was allegedly written within only one week.6 Perhaps with Joyce in mind (though he would never admit as much), who said he wrote his books to keep the professors busy for a hundred years, McDonagh claims never to have read more than a dozen plays in all his life - which is probably just as sure a way as Joyce's to incite interest in one's work. The variety of intertextual references and thematic clusters alone attests to McDonagh's sensibility to recognize and address what drama is about: the immediacy of vivid presentations of character and "action" on stage. This vivacity is then juxtaposed against one of the most prominent dramatic devices the playwright retorts to: letter scenes.

Dramatic Technique McDonagh uses references to traditional issues of drama by merging them with all kinds of grotesque and sentimental elements. We recognize traces of trash and tradition, forms of cliche and even (often religious) Kitsch, popular and high culture, real and surreal elements. The perhaps unusual variety of applicable terms that describe the nature of the plays complements a deliberate strategy on the playwright's side to confront his audience with at least two opposing perspectives on the stage action. Although the terms and dichotomies we employ here may seem sufficient to characterize the plays as postmodern, it is equally valid to argue that there is yet another quality to the plays that offer a post-postmodern perspective. This seems to be an underlying human voice of common sense, arguing a (re)turn to human and social values. In McDonagh's plays, there is an agreement between author and audience that the excesses of violence and cruelty are not only fictitious and temporal, but more importantly, to be superseded by humane thoughts and actions. Thus the plays intersect two worlds: that of trash (unmotivated and unjustified excesses of cruelty) and that of tradition (commonsensical, realistic attitudes towards others and, generally, life). The originality of McDonagh's dramatic technique rests on a twofold procedure: firstly, he uses traditional elements of drama, such as plot, character, and action including references to the well-made play, kitchen-sink drama, road movie, thriller, soap-operas, and themes and motifs such as

6

In Joseph Feeney, "Martin McDonagh: Dramatist of the West", Studies 87 (1998), 24-32, McDonagh is quoted as having said: "I'm coming to the theatre with a disrespect for it. I'm coming from a film fan's perspective on theatre" (28). Huber claims to be able to trace Beckett, Pinter, Synge, and Mamet as writers who influenced McDonagh. Cf. Werner Huber, "The Plays of Martin McDonagh" in Jürgen Kamm (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama in English (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999), 555-571, 557.

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violence, personal relationships, language, imagery of nature in general and more specifically of Ireland, and of course religion. Secondly, he offers his audience both a sentimental perspective focussed by idiomatic, rural language, and a grotesque or surreal one focussed by action. Sentimentality dominates the plays in places, and where it does that it approaches cliche and emotionally overcharged forms of Kitsch. Girleen's heart on a chain she orders for the priest in "The Lonesome West" may serve as an example here. Her disappointment is particularly characteristic of McDonagh's humour, since the audience already knows that the priest has committed suicide: Girleen I did order him this heart on a chain out of me mam's Freeman's catalogue. Only this morning it came. I asked him to be writing to me with his new address last night, so I could send it to him. I'd've never've got up the courage to be giving it him to his face. I'd've blushed the heart out of me. Four months I've been saving up to buy it him. All me poteen money. (Crying.) All me poteen money gone. I should've skittered it away [on; S.P.] the boys in Carraroe, and not go pinning me hopes on a feck I knew full well I'd never have, (scene 6, 176)

Where the grotesque is foregrounded, it becomes trash. Interestingly, while cliche is mainly derived from references to literature, i. e. the treatment of national stereotypes and overused topics such as the failed emigration to America, the generation conflict, treason, missed relations, etc., trash quality clearly proceeds from film: because of a deliberate lack of philosophy, or because of quotes taken from specific films without integrating them into some larger pattern. Where cliche and trash are merged, we end up with a sentimentalization of the grotesque. Such a fractured perspective on the action on stage makes it difficult for the viewer to react coherently. In this context, letter scenes - prominently featured by almost all of McDonagh's plays so far perhaps present an escape route. I will now turn to this dramatic technique and attempt to explain the post-postmodern effects it procures in more detail. Stage Letters: Competition of Oral and Written Discourse Stage letters are a peculiar thing: characters apparently read from texts or apparently write texts on stage or do something with texts - totally obliterating or specifically highlighting the differences between oral and written language, translating writing into speech and translating speech back into writing.7 In 7

This last aspect - covering the act of reading in the theatre - is discussed by Julian Hilton, "Reading Letters in Plays. Short Courses in Practical Epistemology?" in Hanna Scolnicov, Peter Holland (eds.), Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 140-160. Hilton is concerned about "the way letter scenes offer practical guidance to readers about the act of reading and extracting knowledge from texts. This guidance is of more general significance in that the plays themselves are texts and have the pseudo-status of letters to their readers", 140.

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fact, letters on stage always produce very powerful effects, because on the one hand they are historically attached to truth and authority, and on the other, letters are stage property. Their effects rest as much on their materiality as on their mobility in space and in time, and hence in 'context'. As our attention is focussed on the function of forms of writing in oral texts,8 we need to differentiate between two types of speech found in stage letters. These 'texts' signify written as well as oral language, they combine a dichotomy of proximity, which is signified by oral aspects of the language used, and of distance, which is signified by aspects of writing. Together with the dramatic context they are embedded in, they create a very special type of text: stylized, artificial orality, doubly based on writing.9 Letters in plays then combine the two types of speech in a text that is just as well characterized by planning, coherence, complexity and a somewhat larger amount of information as by aspects of distance, of production, reception, sparseness of information, expressiveness and affectedness.10 Because letters in plays feature two types of speech, they can be recognized as a peculiarly realistic element on the stage: they need to be interpreted within the world of the stage, but they also closely resemble a real type of text, as they use language most commonly recognized as that generally used in letters, i. e. the address at the beginning, as in "Dear Maureen [...]", or the ending, as in "Yours sincerely, Pato Dooley". The reference to some form of reality is even more obvious if we consider the voice of the letters: an appeal for a lovers' reunion, an appeal to return to brotherly love, all balance the ongoing violence and cruelty. McDonagh develops these features of stage letters to introduce an altogether different voice in his plays, and it is precisely here, where he moves away from a depiction of a postmodern experience of fragmentation into some 'new'

8

9

Since the mid 1980s Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft has supported general research on the relations between orality and literacy. E. g. Paul Goetsch, "Fingierte Mündlichkeit in der Erzählkunst entwickelter Schriftkulturen", Poetica 17 (1985), 202-218. However, most attention has hitherto been paid to oral aspects of written texts and not, as in our case, aspects of writing in an oral genre. Cp. Peter Koch, Wulf Österreicher, "Sprache der Nähe - Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte", Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985), 12-43, 24: "Was die Versprachlichungsstrategien angeht, so stoßen wir in literarischer Schriftlichkeit natürlich auch auf fragmentarisch, desintegriert und ungeplant wirkende Texte (vgl. etwa die Nachzeichnung des Bewußtseinsstroms in Romanen). Aber auch hier gilt, daß Sprache und Textaufbau, die, oberflächlich betrachtet, nähesprachlichen Gestaltungen gleichen, hergestellt sind und ganz anders funktionieren und anders interpretiert werden als entsprechende Mündlichkeit; diese Texte wollen oft zu einer konzentrierten Rezeption zwingen und damit Phantasie und Kreativität des Rezipienten herausfordern."

10 Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher developed a very practical scheme that aptly describes these most obvious differences between oral and written types of language, cf. "Sprache der Nähe-Sprache der Distanz".

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territory. Hence it is not surprising that nearly all of the plays feature letter scenes. They are all written in a similar style, mimicking oral speech. Remarkably, the letters are never read by their recipients - sometimes they do not even reach them - but recited by their writers, similar to a monologue in a soliloquy which serves to highlight the issues expressed in the letters. Without recipients, it is possible to argue that the audience is the true recipient of these letters: the author speaking and appealing to the audience directly through a character who does not seem to address anybody present on stage. As a special type of communication in plays, the letters focus on and address important themes and issues. However, most of these are satirized, like language, relationships, or religion, and written communication is not exempt from that. But read on another level, written communication - contrary to dialogue - seems to offer a way out of the necessity of continuously having to deconstruct existing moral as well as aesthetic values, because of the attachment of writing to truth. It is the uncorrupted human voice of the letters that we listen to in the theatre, the fact that it is presented in such a peculiar fashion that makes it impossible to argue about contents. As narratives, they additionally benefit from a tightly knit texture and consistency that the characters' fragmented dialogue lacks. The attachment of the letters' contents to the voice of human kindness is then brought forward in a twofold procedure: the voice speaks true humanity, and it is fixed in writing. Neither is it submitted to dialogue, as the following excerpts from the rather lengthy letter in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" show: Most of the stage is in darkness apart from a spotlight or some such on Pato sitting at the table as if in a bedsit in England, reciting a letter he has written to Maureen. Pato Dear Maureen, it is Pato Dooley and I'm writing from London, and I'm sorry it's taken so long to write to you but to be honest I didn't know whether you wanted me to one way or the other, so I have taken it upon myself to try and see. There are a lot of things I want to say but I am no letter-writer but I will try to say them if I can. Well, Maureen, there is no major news here, except a Wexford man on the site a day ago, a rake of bricks fell on him from the scaffold and forty stitches he did have in his head and was lucky to be alive at all, he was an old fella, or fifty-odd anyways, but apart from that there is no major news. [...] Well, Maureen, I am 'beating around the bush' as they say, because it is you and me I do want to be talking about, if there is such a thing now as 'you and me', I don't know the state of play. What I thought I thought we were getting on royally, at the goodbye to the Yanks and the part after when we did talk and went to yours. [...] Which leads me on to my other thing, unless you still haven't forgiven me, in which case we should just forget about it and part as friends, but if you have forgiven me it leads me on to my other thing which I was lying to you before when I said I had no news because I do have news. What the news is I have been in touch with me uncle in Boston and the incident with the Wexford man with the bricks was just the final straw. You'd be lucky to get away with your life the building sites in England, let alone the bad money and the 'You oul Irish this-and-that', and I have been in touch with me uncle in Boston and a job he has offered me there, and I am going to

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Because of their specific textuality and coherence, the letters introduce an altogether different voice - a humanistic, commonsensical attitude towards the world - that could not have been presented with equally compelling effect by less consistent, less 'fixed' dialogue. But textuality does not necessarily produce coherence on its own - this must be enforced by its enclosure within the oral genre, juxtaposed to the characters' dialogue. Two things (re)presented by the letter scenes then argue the case for a possible move away from postmodernism's fragmentation of perspectives and character. One is the way these scenes are presented: they are being recited in monologue, apparently read from paper as premeditated language. The other is that the voice we hear speaks of the possibility of a positive evaluation and experience of social relations. Whether this remains ultimately unrealistic, is another point in question. Here, we hear the voice pronouncing what is written, and what is written is also true. In this context it is perhaps fair to say that we are being confronted with a kind of 'foothold' in our 'wobbly' postmodernist existence. We are being offered a glimpse of the wish for healthy social relations. This alone is of course no clear-cut difference from postmodernism as we know it, but looking at what happens to the letters may perhaps give us a further clue to the true value of the text. Stage Property and Symbol of Vulnerability In most of the plays the letters eventually go up in flames or are at least threatened with destruction by fire: truth and sentiment, as expressed and documented by them, are easily effaced, as is the case in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "A Skull in Connemara", where a written confession of a murder gets burned before anyone gets the chance to read and/or publish it. "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" in particular highlights the function of letters in the technical context of the intensification of tension and anticipation in the last part of Pato's letter scene: Dear Raymond, how are you? I'm enclosing a bunch of letters I don't want different people snooping in on. Will you hand them out for me and don't be reading them, I know you won't be. The one to Mick Dowd you can wait till he comes out of hospital. Let me know how he is or have they arrested the lass who belted him. The one to poor Girleen you can give to her any time you see her, it is only to tell her stop falling in love with priests. But the one to Maureen Folan I want you to go over there the day you get this and put it in her hand. This is important now, in her hand put it. Not much other news here. I'll fill you in on more of the America details nearer the time. Yes, it's a great thing. Good luck to you, Raymond, and P.S. Remember now, in Maureen's hand put it. Goodbye, (scene 5, 36)

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Several times Raymond is reminded to put the letter into Maureen's hands only: a sure sign that this will not happen. Instead, the little brother becomes sidetracked and leaves the letter on the kitchen table, where it is confiscated by Maureen's mother. She hides it, then reads it, and finally burns it without ever telling her daughter about its arrival. At the end of the play, this turns out to be her death sentence. Maureen kills her mother when she finds out what she had done to her letter - and, by extension, to her story that-was-not-to-be. There is also one instance where a letter has a narrow escape and 'survives' on stage to serve as a symbolic reminder of the validity of social and religious values such as truth, brotherly love, compassion, and honesty, as in the tableau-ending of "The Lonesome West": Valene He'd've fecking shot me too. He'd've shot his own fecking brother! On top of his dad! On top of me stove! He tosses the gun and cartridge away, rips Father Welsh's letter off the cross, knocking Girleen's chain onto the floor, brings the letter back to the table and takes out a box of matches. And you, you whiny fecking priest. Do I need your soul hovering o'er me the rest of me fecking life? How could anybody be getting on with that feck? He strikes a match and lights the letter, which he glances over as he holds up. After a couple of seconds, the letter barely singed, Valene blows the flames out and looks at it on the table, sighing. {Quietly.) I'm too fecking kind-hearted is my fecking trouble. He returns to the cross and pins the chain and letter back onto it, smoothing the letter out, and letting the chain swing in front of it like a pendulum. He puts on his jacket, checks it for loose change and goes to the front door. Well I won't be buying the fecker a pint anyways. I'll tell you that for nothing, Father Welsh Walsh Welsh. Valene glances back at the letter a second, sadly, looks down at the floor, then exits. Lights fade, with one light lingering on the crucifix and letter a half second longer that the others, (scene 7, 196)

The generic vulnerability of the stage letter is not only marked by the threat of physical destruction, it is also in danger of being destroyed metaphorically: by becoming the object of derision. In this respect, Irish idiom and humanistic issue of the letters are treated as cliche in all of the plays, stripped of their original sentiment and in exchange supplied with sentimentality. In this sense the letters can be read as parodies of love letters or of religious sermons. The stage letters are as vulnerable as the human voice we listen to in both a material and metaphorical sense.

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Historical Attachment of Writing to Truth and Authority Written communication is traditionally attached to the documentation of facts. This authority of the written word has its source in its historic attachment to truth. What was written on paper in early literate communities guaranteed whatever it said. For Plato and Aristotle, the voice was the real thing. Writing was thought as secondary to the voice, because the voice speaks of that which is in the soul of man, whereas writing refers only to the voice. Writing was regarded as the fixed representative of the spoken word, precluding the necessity of individual forms of perception. Until Saussure's structuralism this line of thought - writing as a supplement to the spoken word - remained with us. Writing was also thought to be a mere instrument, a technical device without power, a derivation from the true word of God. Thinking about the features of writing as outlined here, we may, however, be tempted to weaken the strength of these arguments. Writing in drama is such a valuable device, because of its durability, its iterability, and because it features in multiple contexts. Its technical advantages are numerous, especially when we think about the alliance of writing with authority of all kinds: hence writing is more than a commodity, as historical tasks of written communication are to be found in traditions of economy, cult, religion and law." Writing also - and most prominently so on stage - (re)constitutes private and public spheres. Often stage letters are read/recited not for the benefit of their addressees, but for the information of the audience and the creation of suspense. Here, perhaps most clearly the author himself is to be perceived as speaker of the humane voice. This is quite a significant characteristic of the way letter scenes function in McDonagh's plays, where the dramatist exploits the powerful features of the written word to meet his own purpose. The letters in his plays represent and fix a humanitarian attitude towards the world of the plays and the characters' relationships, although they are emotionally overcharged. These relationships will most likely be shared by the audience, if they feel commonsensical enough to enter that line of communication. In fact, one may even point out that the letters not only de-scribe the spectators' view, but even pre-scribe it. As they capture moments of truth, faith, and love, they seem to counterbalance the surreal and the grotesque inherent in dialogue and in action. Yet it is precisely this ability of the letters to keep the ongoing violence for moments at bar, that accounts for their susceptibility to effacement.

11 Discussions of these issues and arguments abound. Most famously, perhaps, Jacques Denida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), where he extensively discusses Saussure, Rousseau, and Levi-Strauss, and, more recently, Jonathan Goldberg's valuable book Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990).

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Icons of Zeitgeist ·. Picturesque Intersections of Truth and Trash In McDonagh's plays, letters represent a chance to reflect and return to traditional human values, but their claim remains arguably defenceless. They keep the grotesque and the surreal at bar, diminish the fear that they cause, and thus open a way out of the destructiveness of human relationships. Yet the option to return to common sense remains a visible appeal to put the grotesque experience of the world behind and to build upon human decency, however delicate and fragile such a construction may be. 12 If counterpoised against violence and brutality, sentimentality may ultimately not be such a bad attitude towards the world. Still, because of its illusory and deceiving nature, sentimentality has its own dangerous pitfalls - and these are also addressed in the plays, as this final excerpt from Father Welsh's letter in "The Lonesome West" shows: Stage in darkness apart from Welsh, who recites his letter rapidly. Welsh Dear Valene and Coleman, it is Father Welsh here. I am leaving Leenane for good tonight and I wanted to be saying a few words to you, but I won't be preaching at you for why would I be? It has never worked in the past and it won't work now. All I want to do is be pleading with you as a fella concerned about ye and ye're lives, both in this world and the next, and the next won't be too long away for ye's if ye keep going on as mad as ye fecking have been. Coleman, I will not be speaking here about your murdering of your dad, although obviously it does concern me, both as a priest and as a person with even the vaguest moral sense, but that is a matter for your own conscience, although I hope some day you will realise what you have done and go seeking forgiveness for it, because let me tell you this, getting your hairstyle insulted is no just cause to go murdering someone, in fact it's the worst cause I ever did hear. But I will leave it at that although the same goes for you, Valene, for your part in your dad's murdering, and don't go saying you had no part because you did have a part and a big part. Going lying that it was an accident just to get your father's money is just as dark a deed as Coleman's deed, if not more dark, for Coleman's deed was done out of temper and spite, whereas your deed was done out of being nothing but a moneygrubbing fecking miser with no heart at all, but I said I would not be preaching at you and be starting a new paragraph, (scene 5,169) The new Zeitgeist we may glimpse at here may then be described as a cautious return to humanity - albeit informed by the experience of the surreal and the grotesque on the one hand, and threatened by Kitsch on the other. The voice of humanity expressed in the stage letter is, although it keeps the surreal

12 McDonagh's 'purpose' is addressed by Fintan O'Toole in his introduction to the LeenaneTrilogy: "And what matters in the end is that McDonagh is more than just a very clever theatrical stylist. His tricks and turns have a purpose. They are bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunted and frustrated lives. Moments of love and loss, of yearning and even of faith catch the light now and then. That they cannot abide long in such a blighted world seems somehow less remarkable than the fact that they arise at all." Fintan O'Toole, "Introduction", Martin McDonagh: Plays / , 9-17, 17.

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experience of life for moments at a distance, subjected to sentimentalization. As specific subgenres such as the love letter or the religious sermon are 'deconstructed', the written word is likewise liable to lose its original power. Though such terms as I have employed here - Kitsch, cliche, the grotesque and the surreal - may of course be discussed as true postmodernist terms, the stage letters function to overcome postmodern fragmentation, because they seem to embrace both sides of the same coin, thus iconizing a new Zeitgeist that is informed by its potential destruction. The attitude expressed in them, commenting upon the violent action on stage and appealing to the characters to return to some kind of 'normality', is after all more sane and more coherent than fragmentation. The dramatist's retort to the traditional dramatic device of the stage letter is also a return to traditional authorial practices. The letters form a cluster of traditional values around the bewildering and violent experience of the postmodern world, holding it together by an appeal to remember simple moral values of love and respect, fixed in writing. In this way common sense may be seen to supersede postmodernism - but it has its wings cut and its tail clipped like the dove in classical Greek mythology that flew through the symplegades to guarantee the "Argo" (and all the ships that were ever to follow her) a safe passage.

LAURENZ VOLKMANN

Extension of the Battle Zone: Ian McEwan's Cult Novel The Cement Garden One of the greatest promises of the postmodern era has utterly failed. Admittedly, we may be living in a world devoid of the restrictions of metanarratives and former self-imposed delusions. All boundaries between elitist and popular culture may well have been transgressed and the self may be free to pick and choose in the supermarket of lifestyle options, forever refashioning him or herself with the help of ever-new "identi-kits" (Zygmunt Bauman). However, there is one important domain which has suffered irreparable blows. 'Liberated' from its former exile or concealment, exposed to the harsh limelight of both popular and academic interest, one of the 'most human' aspects of existence has proved to be the discomforting, excruciatingly recalcitrant clog in the system of postmodern theories. It constantly rebukes all concepts of mere representation and flies in the face of those expostulating 'the constructedness of all things'. As in the case of death, it is the body and its functions which just cannot be deconstructed out of existence. Even more so, one of the body's major functions or 'extensions' has turned against postmodern attempts to form it into a lustful tool to be utilized by its possessor at his or her beck and call. On the contrary, the rediscovery of the body's sexuality, the envisioned sexual liberation has unleashed its own demons body and sexuality are back, but the return of the repressed appears almost exclusively in its warped and darker guises. In postmodern literature and films, bodies are either mangled, dissected and torn asunder; or they are used as fetishized objects in grotesque amplifications of all theories of commodification as expounded by cultural theorists of a Marxist or feminist ilk. To illustrate the above statement on the state of the body and sexuality in postmodern writings, let me briefly focus on what two cultural critics have published on the topic. They could not be more antagonistic than the avowed Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, an outspoken opponent of postmodernism as the last phase of consumer capitalism on the one hand, and on the other the French romancier and intellectual maverick Michael Houellebecq, who explores exactly this state of mindless consumerism. In his all-out attack on The Illusions of Postmodernism, Eagleton stretches the point that something went wrong with postmodern concepts of the body and sexuality. It all started out

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with high hopes: "Sexuality, as Philip Larkin announced, began in the 1960s, partly as an extension of radical politics into regions they had lamentably neglected".1 The private, including all private parts, was deemed to be part of a political agenda of emancipation and liberation, with the transmogrifying perspective of creating a better society free of suppression and exploitation. Sexual liberation, for some of its prophets, seemed to be at the heart of such a progressive project.2 But what was intended to reverse the bourgeois "fiasco of sexual morality",3 to prevent and break up sexual repression and promised a more lustful approach to life has backfired. With the return of the body and sexuality, new problems arose. The above mentioned poet Philip Larkin himself ominously saw the writing on the wall of total sexual liberation as total sexualization. In one of his poems, "High Windows" from 1967, the persona of an old onlooker expresses his sentiments of unfulfilled voyeurism, of envy for a sexually liberated younger generation and, finally, of a yearning for a form of sexuality which transcends the sexual act - for, as we may call it, 'organic eroticism'. Here are the first and last stanzas of the poem: When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise [...] Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.4

If Philip Larkin foregrounded the bleaker aspects of the return of the body, Eagleton draws his readers' attention to the fact that the ubiquitous representation of bodies in the postmodern age is not accompanied by a sense of liberation or a newly experienced euphoria.5 On the contrary, images of dissolution, incompleteness and fragmentation emerge:

1 2

3 4 5

Teny Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (London: Blackwell, 1996), 69. One of the most influential ideological sources of this emancipatory project was Wilhelm Reich's The Sexual Revolution [English copyright 1945, 1962; originally published in different form under the title Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (Kopenhagen: Sexpol, 1936)]. See the first chapter of Reich, The Sexual Revolution. Philip Larkin, "High Windows", in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: The Marvell Press, 1989), 165,11. 1-4, 17-20. Compare the euphoric concluding remarks of a study on sexuality in literature from the early 1980s [Maurice Chamey, Sexual Fiction (London/New York: Methuen, 1981), 169]: "Sex is so deeply invested with feeling in our culture that it is an admirable vehicle to convey insights of the most searing kind of truth. Sexual fiction could resurrect the novel as a vital and lively form, because sexuality is capable of providing convincing images of life. Our sexual fiction needs no apology. If it is not always attractive, it is at least always true."

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The postmodern subject, unlike its Cartesian ancestor, is one whose body is integral to its identity. Indeed from Bakhtin to the Body Shop, Lyotard to leotards, the body has become one of the most recurrent preoccupations of postmodern thought. Mangled members, tormented torsos, bodies emblazoned or incarcerated, disciplined or desirous: the bookshops are strewn with such phenomena [...].'

The increased interest in or the fetishization of the body and sexuality from the 1970s to the 1990s has not only resulted in a preoccupation with violent engagements with the body, both in popular films as well as in fiction, which I will delineate below; it has also been accompanied by a cynical, demystifying attitude towards sexuality in a world inundated with sex as a marketable commodity. One of the most unromantic and controversial commentators of postmodernism's sexual scene is Michael Houellebecq. In his bleak novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, sadly translated into English as What You Will,1 the bete noire of French literature describes sexuality as "un systeme de hierarchie sociale"* His unfeeling, utterly disenchanted 30-year-old protagonist views sexual relations in the age of total liberation as just another extension of neo-liberal struggles to subordinate all components of the human existence to the nexus of commodity value and social achievement. En systeme sexuel parfaitement liberal, certains ont une vie erotique variee et excitante; d'autres sont reduits ä la masturbation et la solitude. Le liberalisme economique, c'est Γ extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension ä tous les ages de la vie et ä toutes les classes de la societe. De meme, le liberalisme sexuel, c'est 1'extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension ä tous les äges de la vie et ä toutes les classes de la societe.9

Human relationships are thus reduced to a mutual exchange of hierarchybound, de-romanticized signals of status, with those in possession of the best social position, the most beautiful looks or the most attractive body enjoying the privileged position of allegedly having the most fun and pleasure. As the protagonist of Extension du domaine de la lutte reflects, this new (postmodern) world calls for a new style, a new approach to literature: Cet effacement progressif des relations humaines n'est pas sans poser certains problemes au roman. Comment en effet entreprendrait-on la narration de ces passions fougueuses, s'etalant sur plusieurs annees, faisant parfois sentir leurs effets sur plusieurs gen6rations? [...] La forme romanesque n'est pas confue pour peindre Γ indifference, ni le neant; il faudrait inventer une articulation plus plate, plus concise et plus morne.10

6 7

Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 69. Michael Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte (Paris: Editions J' ai lu, 2000 [1994]). Cf. also Michael Houellebecq, Les particules elementaires (Paris: ßditions J' ai lu, 1998). 8 Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte, 93. 9 Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte, 108. 10 Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte, 42.

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It is exactly this "effacement progressif des relations humaines" which found its congenial expression in the text I will focus on in this article, Ian McEwan's first novel The Cement Garden, published in 1978. In it, as I will delineate below, this "proto-post-postmodernist" worldview is presented as McEwan finely attunes his readers to a disturbing and skewed view of sexuality and violence - rendering all post-1968 hopes of constructing a better, more humane society by eliminating all former restrictions and inhibitions to be mere chimera. While the novel's nightmarish experiment of a world without parental or societal repression fails, its panorama of bleakness leaves little space for visions of improvement, let alone liberation.

1

Today, Ian McEwan is one of the most celebrated British authors, part of the literary establishment. His beginnings as a writer were rather those of an iconoclastic enfant terrible. His first short story collections, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), were celebrated for their cool, seemingly unemotional accounts of child-molestation, murder, sexual deviance, masturbation, regression to infancy and incest - in short, anything which had shock value. What seemed to have been McEwan's obsessions with the macabre, the grotesque and bleaker aspects of the human condition in his early work apparently found its distillation in his first novel, The Cement Garden. It has generally been considered to mark the end of McEwan's first phase of "a shock into literature",11 to be consecutively superseded by thematic foci on social questions and artistic integrity, beginning with The Child In Time (1987). If McEwan consciously intended to repel and undermine his reader's moral certainties in his first fictions, the author has been considered to have "grown up" - "out of an 'adolescent' desire to shock into a mature concern with broader subjects". 12 According to this widely held critical view, The Cement Garden as an unsensational account of a sensational incident marks a watershed between the early, "immature" McEwan and the more committed, serious older author. This is best illustrated by Malcolm Bradbury's remarks on his former student's early career as an author: McEwan's work explored the fictional boundaries of the perverse and uncanny, shifting the levels, breaking the frame, admitting the forbidden. [...] McEwan's second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets (1978), contained more views of perverse sexuality and psychic extremity; now, though, there were growing hints that the 'shocking' material was under the control of something like 11 Jack Slay Jr., Ian McEwan, Twayne's English Authors Series (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 9. 12 Merritt Moseley, "Ian McEwan", in id. (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. Second Series (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998), 209.

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reticence, that the author was a recorder of a world of an increasing disintegration that could provoke only alienation, nausea and 'desolate couplings'. [...] McEwan's first novel The Cement Garden (1978) is a grimly Gothic tale, told from the child's-eye viewpoint, of a household where the parents die and are buried in the garden, leaving the children to a world of incest, transvestism and regression. McEwan's concern, emphasized by his use of the child's-eye view, is with the way innocence is lost, the sense of initiation as darkness comes; these too would be themes in his later fiction.13

Given the nasty quality of its content, it is small wonder that over the years The Cement Garden has achieved cult status as a novel. For instance, it has

become one of the established set texts at German grammar schools, with a number of classroom-oriented interpretations and an (unabridged) studentedition with annotations available.14 It is exactly this status as cult fiction which is of interest here in our focus on 'the extension of the battle zone' of postmodern fiction. Defined in a recent study as the literature "of the young and disaffected",15 cult novels by authors such as Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Nick Hornby and Ian McEwan (to name but a few) exude the much soughtafter aura of authenticity and deviance.16 To attempt a definition, cult fiction is literature from the margins and extremes. It is usually a work that is written by or about, or gives voice to or imagines a section of society that is different (deviates/transgresses) from the mainstream, and therefore offering a different angle and social reality. 17

A s the authors of Cult Fiction: A Reader's

Guide concede, this very act of

pushing (sexual) limits, this "idea of deviance becomes just another marketing tool".18 13 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modem English Novel (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1994), 390 f. 14 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, "Growing Up: Darstellung der Adoleszenz im englischen Roman der Gegenwart", fremdsprachenunterricht 38/47, 3 (1994): 212-17, esp. 215; Heinz Antor, "Sozialisation zwischen Norm und Tabubruch: Ian McEwans Roman The Cement Garden als Lektüre im Leistungskurs Englisch", Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30 (1997): 26786; Hans-Christoph Ramm, "Gefährliche Geborgenheit. McEwans Roman The Cement Garden in einem Englischkurs der Sekundarstufe II", Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 49 (2002): 127-37; Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000). 15 Andrew Culcatt, Richard Shephard, Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide (Lincolnwood, 111.: Contemporary Books, 1999), x. 16 Cf. also William Simon's remark [in his Postmodern Sexualities (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 60] on adolescence, sexuality and fiction: "Adolescent sexuality, ironically, being an almost obsessive societal concern, appears in social science discourses in extremely abstract language. Its language migrates between an almost inarticulate behaviourism and quest for meaning that focus on origins of infancy or childhood or anticipations of adulthood and almost never deals with adolescence as a range of experiences in its own right. As a result, there are very few aspects of the human experience more dependent upon the enriched language of literary writing and pop culture for mirroring representations." 17 Culcatt, Shephard, Cult Fiction, x. 18 Culcatt, Shephard, Cult Fiction, xvii.

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To connect the several strands presented so far: as I would like to show in my interpretation of The Cement Garden, sexuality and violence are incorporated in the novel in a uniquely shocking and appalling way. This is done in a seemingly unemotional rendering of how social taboos are broken, which on the one hand transgresses earlier modes of dealing with the topic; on the other hand, simultaneously by means of the novel's becoming a cult novel due to its graphic and seemingly tasteless descriptions of sex and violence, it turns these transgressions into 'marketable' assets. In the ensuing discussion of The Cement Garden, the focus will be on two interrelated aspects. Their gist can be presented beforehand in the following two statements. First, the novel develops a sombre counter-foil to earlier concepts of benign childhood and nature, as - for instance - promoted by Rousseau and Romanticism. Playfully it subverts former cliches of traditionally positive images of both nature and childhood. Second, as an inversion of the story of initiation - or story of growing up to maturity - it highlights adolescent angst. By means of indirection, by exposing the failure of an anything-goes stance when it comes to social values and norms, it establishes the necessity of a meaningful education - projecting the inescapability not only of educational but also of ethical guidelines.

2 Something new, unusual and alien strikes the reader of The Cement Garden. No celebration of liberated sexuality is staged here, nor is violence presented as an emancipatory act (as is often the case in postmodern texts). Rather, the reader's impression is quite contrary. In a sober, dry and distanced style the novel's first-person narrator, fifteen-(later sixteen)-year-old Jack, reflects on himself, his family and the maelstrom of events whose abnormality or impropriety he never seems to be aware of. He never uses a four-letter word; the interlocutor never gets carried away in moments of (verbal) ecstasy. On the contrary, throughout his tale he uses the same, seemingly unimpressed and detached tone, whether he relates banalities or gross perversions. What is new about this novel is, indeed, this trivialization, this de-aestheticizing of sex and violence, which does not tally at all with our modes of perception as they are formed by the constant exposure to sex and violence in the media. Here the novel asks us to develop a new, different way of looking at these phenomena, which could, in turn, help to sharpen and focus our perception of the visual media. What literature can achieve in contrast to the medium film can be illustrated by referring to the film based on the novel, directed by Andrew

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Birkin19 - an art movie, which won critical acclaim. Although this congenial film version presents a sensitive translation of the book and its "strange model family of the post-industrial age",20 the novel's disenchanting trivialization of sexuality and violence cannot be transposed. Too overpowering is the suggestive impetus of celluloid pictures, too much of a shaping force is the aesthetic of the medium, which prefigures the semiotic perception of its images. This is often the case in films which intend to speak out against violence and war. Frequently any kind of intentionally repellent or revolting violence on film remains ambivalent; graphic depictions of rape, for instance, are occasionally interpreted by their younger male audience as an act of virility and male self-affirmation. The prime example of this ambiguous phenomenon is the character Alex in the film A Clockwork Orange (1971), by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess. When the male delinquent, the anti-hero of Burgess's novel, seeks dissipation and amusement by gratuitous violence and occasional rapes, this is to be understood as the individual reacting in accordance with and against a violent social context.21 Kubrick's film version, on the other hand, presented an all-too-masculine Alex, who contrary to the director's and the novelist's intentions, has received the status of a teenage cult hero of sorts.22 The film The Cement Garden clearly reveals some of the complexities that arise when the screen fills in the blanks or indeterminacies of literary texts. This is demonstrated by an excerpt from a film review which zooms in on a typical scene of the movie: Andrew Birkin, the director, establishes the links between the cinema and growing up in this personal film: the magic of first steps, the shock of the new, the other. Charlotte Gainsbourg's [i. e. Julie's] legs, when she is lying in her bathing suit in the cement garden, are so beautiful that one is bound to think one has never before seen a girl's legs.23

Even if the reviewer elegantly and with great empathy acknowledges that works of art can change our perception of reality or rather, as is the case here, open our eyes to reality, he still makes clear what the film cannot achieve. The ambivalent nature of the events narrated here - oscillating between the perceived beauty of a young girl's body and the horror of the narrator's incestuous gaze - is being shifted by the fatal attraction of the pictorial 19 The Cement Garden. Director Andrew Birkin, producer Bemd Eichinger, copyright 1994. 20 Cf. the review by Hans Schifferle, "Verbotene Spiele. 'Der Zementgarten', ein seltsam schöner Ferienfilm von Andrew Birkin", Süddeutsche Zeitung August 14/15 (1993), 13 (translation L.°V). 21 A similar protagonist is presented in Peter Shaffer's drama Equus (1973) - which offers similar explanations for socially induced individual violence. 22 Cf. Morris Beja, Film and Literature: An Introduction (New York/London: Longman, 1979), 293-296. 23 Schifferle, "Verbotene Spiele", 13 (translation L.°V).

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presentation towards the aesthetic side - a limitation of the novel's multifacetted rendering of this scene. By means of comparison, here are two passages from the novel which present similar scenes. First there is the part where Jack's sixteenth birthday is being celebrated. Clearly, his limited first-person point of view reveals to the reader the sexually enticing perception of what his sister Julie does: Without a word Julie launched herself into the space cleared for Tom's cartwheels and suddenly her body was upside down, supported only by her hands, taut and lean and perfectly still. Her skirt fell down over her head. Her knickers showed a brilliant white against the pale-brown skin of her legs and I could see how the material bunched in little pleats around the elastic that clung to her flat, muscular belly. A few black hairs curled out from the white crotch. Her legs, which were together at first, now moved slowly apart like giant arms. Julie brought her legs together again and dropping them to the floor, stood up. In a confused, wild moment, I found myself on my feet singing 'Greensleeves' in a trembling, passionate tenor. When I finished they all clapped and Julie squeezed my hand. Mother was smiling drowsily. Everything was cleared away quickly; Julie lifted Tom out of the bed, Sue carried away the plates and the remains of the cake, and I took the chairs. 24

In the novel, the sexual awakening described here is constitutive of its overall theme: problems of growing up. Different from the nostalgic, 'adult' perspective taken by the movie camera as described in the quote above, this period in the protagonists' lives does not appear as a hopeful period of transition but rather as a most problematic time during which most unusual, hitherto unknown emerging drives, in the form of both physical and mental pressures, have to be dealt with - "confused" surely is the key term in the quote above. In this passage, as frequently in the novel, this happens by referring back to conventional patterns of behaviour - a mechanically learned English folk song from the Renaissance is hastily performed, followed by the communal rite of cleaning up and, literally, getting things in order. Still, parental authority exists, albeit in a weak form, in mother's utterly helpless passivity. At the end of the novel, the children are left to their own devices; the following excerpt after the death of their educators is apparently very close to the one described in the film review: Julie lay on a bright-blue towel and ignored Tom. Her skin was so dark I thought it would only be another day before it was black. There were several wasps in the kitchen feeding off rubbish that had spilled across the floor. Outside there was a cloud of flies round the overflowing dustbins which had not been emptied for weeks. (CG, 112)

In this tableau of increasing domestic decay and deterioration, the aesthetic of the human body is eclipsed by the description of how its man-made 24 Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (London: Picador, 1980), 36. Further page references in the text (abbreviated as 'CG').

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environment is dissolving. In accordance with this, throughout the novel sexuality is perceived as something dark, inexplicable, intricate and most confounding. In this respect, literature, as opposed to film, can hint at the interlocutor Jack's confusion in all its multifarious aspects. Essential narrative components of the novel's setting or scenario are obviously reminiscent of the genre of island novels. 25 The novel ties in with the tradition of tales of desert island experiences, especially by adolescents as described in the famous Victorian novel by R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island from 1857. In this tale of bravery, young British men demonstrate that far from their parents and civilization, Western values such as order and discipline can be maintained. Grace under pressure is revealed when even in primitive surroundings a little England can be constructed. Famously, this model of civilization as paradise was turned into a nightmarish version in William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954). Again, a test case situation proves that if public school boys are stranded on a solitary island the law of the jungle prevails, with British boys reverting to atavistic tribal rituals, killing each other in the most barbaric manner. In Golding's novel, former assumptions of the pacifying and benevolent nature of culture are mocked, even refuted when the boys are 'saved' in the nick of time by a British naval officer. 26 For he saves them for a world in which civilized states are attempting to exterminate each other in a nuclear war. It is this pattern of double negativity which is taken up in The Cement Garden - though not in the traditional exotic island situation but in the desolate, isolated topography of the modern urban waste-land. In McEwan's novel there is only a sham salvation of the adolescents from themselves in the last scene. In fact, what we have here is an extension of the desolate microcosm through this step of sham salvation into the wider macrocosmic world - which is also devoid of meaning, a cement world. This is revealed in the last sentences of the novel. They show the intrusion of the outside world in a closed community whose members are unable to judge whether their parentless commune was a Utopia or dystopia. It was the sound of two or three cars pulling up outside, the slam of doors and the hurried footsteps of several people coming up our front path that woke Tom. Through a chink in the curtain a revolving blue light made a spinning pattern on the wall. Tom sat up and stared at it, blinking. We crowded round the cot and Julie bent down and kissed him. 'There!' she said, 'wasn't that a lovely sleep.' (CG, 127)

25 Cf. Slay, Ian McEwan, 36-38. 26 As the officer remarks: "I should have thought that a pack of British boys - you are British aren't you? - would have been able to put up a better show than that - I mean - . " William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber & Faber, 1973 [1954]), 222.

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We know from an authorial comment that The Cement Garden was conceived from the beginning as the study of a period in life where children are free from parental and societal control: I was trying to set up a situation where suddenly there were no social controls. Suddenly, children find themselves in the house - there are no teachers, no parents, no figures of authority, they have total freedom - and yet they are completely paralysed.27 This, then, is the initial scenario of the novel, in the tradition of Rousseau and Romanticism. Alone, without social restrictions, as we glean from Rousseau's writings, the child would grow, like nature, as best it can. Similarly, William Wordsworth plumbed the special relationship of the child with unspoiled nature. He lamented the loss of the child's naivety and the rupture with mythical feelings of oneness with nature caused by the process of growing older and becoming aware of the self. In programmatic poems such as "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1805) and "Tintern Abbey" (1798), the poet mourned the loss of childhood and regretted the process of maturation as a constant, inexorable adapting to patterns of thought and behaviour as imposed by society. Growing up, according to Rousseau and Wordsworth, equals increasing loneliness, a bitter victory of cold rationalism. It was in children and simple people, untainted yet by the "fickle tastes" of urban civilization, 28 that Wordsworth discovered true human emotions. This he intended to convey to his readers, ordinary situations as transcended by the radiance of good poetry. The humanizing of nature and the concept of childhood as (progressively less) integrated in nature, as it was intrinsic to Romanticism, was refuted by Victorianism. What remained was the idea of childhood as a paradise later lost; however, this was accompanied by a turn against a one-dimensional emotional attitude towards nature. Ruskin coined the phrase "pathetic fallacy" in rejecting how Romantics would attribute human qualities to nature, for example in the case of the daffodils of Wordsworth's famous poem, which are "[t]ossing their heads in sprightly dance". 29 Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century,30 Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence accused the Romantics of having focused solely on a benign concept of nature. Thus D. H. Lawrence conveyed an image of nature which had nothing in common with the Wordsworthian "gemiithlichkeit, the prettiness, the cozy sublimities of

27 See Christopher Ricks, "Adolescence and After - An Interview with Ian McEwan", The Listener. April 12 (1979), 526. 28 "Preface to [...] 'Lyrical Ballads'", in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. ed. (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 735. 29 William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud", in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, 149, I. 1 2 .

30 For an overview see John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence, (New York: Columbia UP, 2 1980).

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the Lake District".31 Lawrence fashioned nature as the dark, inconceivable, reticent Other - reverting to images of nature which could be found in the writings of late Romantics such as Lord Byron. Lawrence deemed to have discovered this ambivalent nature and its (again) child-like creatures on his numerous journeys to remote areas of Italy, to Australia and Mexico. Without a doubt, authors such as Lawrence changed the image of nature and its 'children' - towards a multi-facetted one, which cannot be grasped and is beyond human understanding. However, the personification of nature remained a topos with Lawrence, by attributing darker, hostile, evolutionary 'earlier' and more 'primitive' aspects to nature and its indigenous people.

3 Obviously, Ian McEwan was greatly influenced by this new, post-romantic image of nature as propounded by D. H. Lawrence. Yet, McEwan went one step further in The Cement Garden. Anthropomorphic aspects of nature have vanished completely; nature, including human nature, is imbued with a uniqueness which goes beyond human moral assumptions of good and bad. It is a view of nature marked by an inherent drive in nature to expand - to evolve and to preserve its species indifferent to human morality. Indeed, this is the last turn of the screw of Darwin's evolutionism as limited to biologism. In The Cement Garden, nature emerges and expands, it kills and evolves, all according to its own laws, without any moral norms. This unemotional, almost 'cynical' attitude towards nature was shared by McEwan's literary colleague Ted Hughes, especially in his earlier poetry. For instance, the poem "Hawk Roosting" (1960) has been interpreted by some critics as a glorifying homage to a "fascist" predator, in spite of the author's intention to fashion the bird of prey as a savage animal in its own right. The bird states bluntly: I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

[...] I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - 2

31 Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics" in id., Do What You Will (Plainview, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1975 [lstpubl. 1928/29]), 123. 32 Ted Hughes, "Hawk Roosting", in id., Selected Poems 1957 -1981 (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 43,11. 1-4,14-16.

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When it observes its surroundings the fictional hawk is simply beyond human categories of good and bad. There is no hypocrisy, no pretending, no dissimulation, no justification whatsoever, the bird's purpose is unswerving the savage dealing of death. It is just a perfect killing organism without any qualms whatsoever.33 In McEwan's novel, nature's alterity finds its correlative in the symbolism of the cement garden. It is constructed as a last, abortive effort to halt the constant proliferation of weeds. On the level of the protagonists, this is mirrored by their efforts to prevent the slide towards atavistic behaviour by means of establishing rituals. However, these barriers against total disintegration prove to be hollow rites devoid of meaning. Gradually civilization destroys itself by means of its cancer-like growth. Symbolically, the parents' house, which apparently used to be organically integrated into a patterned settlement, remains almost the last human habitat in an urban wasteland - "collateral damage" of urban planning. Other old buildings had been demolished to make space for a motorway never to be built. The hasty, superficial rebuilding of pre-fabricated houses remains a mere episode during the novel's events the last pre-fab is torn down.34 Nature, in the form of destructive fires and weeding nettles, reclaims its lost territory. Only two gigantic, threatening 24-storey tower blocks remain as the last stronghold of civilisation - unreal and already deteriorating. At the beginning of the novel, the father, being the head of the family, endeavours, in desperation bordering on the psychotic, to tame nature and to channel it into structured patterns. His first effort to control nature means reconstructing the garden as if following a blueprint of symmetry and order. Flowers are relegated to a strictly defined plot of earth within a stone garden. However, his attempt fails. As the last straw, the ailing father reverts to the radical, seemingly carefree method of smothering the garden in cement. Then his heart fails and he dies, while his son, instead of helping him, masturbates for the first time in the bathroom. Allusions to the Oedipal complex are all too

33 Cf. Ian Currie, "Ted Hughes" in John Blackburn (ed.), Hardy to Heaney: Twentieth Century Poets. Introductions and Explanations (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1986), 96-103. 34 As we know in the meantime, many of these fast erected high-rise blocks of flats have been declared as "unfit for human habitation". The novel was written and published at a time when the debate about this inhuman way of building met with much rejection. In the cause of statesupported urban planning after World War II, "low-cost rapidly-erected mass-housing" had been implemented which led to numerous problems from the end of the 1960s on: humidity, insufficient heating, decay and mould. In 1968, a gas explosion destroyed several floors of a pre-fab block at Ronan Point in the South of London. This catastrophe is generally considered to have caused the shift away from mass architecture. In this sense, The Cement Garden can be read as a fictional comment on urban planning in post-war Britain. Source: Joseph Rykwert, "Architecture" in Boris Ford (ed.), The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain. Vol. 9: Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 257-277,271.

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obvious. Jack has to take over his father's role. Without parental guidance, with their mother's health also deteriorating, the children let themselves go; they "grow like nature", devoid of ethics, without an apparent goal. Like the nettles constantly breaking through the cement's surface, the children's budding sexuality outgrows all former restrictions. It is only with random gestures towards cleanliness that Jack washes himself. The children's moral disintegration runs parallel to the increasing destruction of the cement garden by nature's unrestricted growth. Regarding The Cement Garden as anti-romantic, anti-utopian, we can furthermore consider the novel's constitutive structural elements as belonging to the stoiy of initiation.35 Also, in its lengthy form of the story of growing up, as the story of education or the Bildungsroman, this fictional genre has been popular since the Romantic Age. Again, McEwan's novel inverts the form of this genre, to achieve a negative, abortive tale of maturation. Traditionally, the narrative genre deals with the pain, anguish and detours necessary to find transformation from childhood or adolescence to adulthood; in shorter fictional tales often a deeply formative episode in the life of the protagonist(s) is foregrounded. As the usual pattern goes, disenchantment, disillusionment and meaningful experiences revolving around the complexities of life have to be encountered. They present the dynamic rite of passage from childhood innocence to a consciousness which incorporates an adult approach to contemporary society's complexities. In fiction, this 'educational' objective has been presented in two antithetical ways. On the one hand, David Copperfield in Charles Dickens' eponymous fictional autobiography (1850/51) experiences his growing up as complete integration into Victorian society. In the happy ending, the rewards of both private happiness with a loving wife and public success as a cultural pillar of his society are reaped. David has undergone a "change of heart" and a sometimes painful process of maturation. On the other hand, James Joyce's protagonist Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914/15) declares his process of self-fulfilment as a deliberate severing from his conservative catholic and Irish upbringing. Leaving behind all spiritual, relational or spatial ties with his Irish motherland, he turns towards the uncertain future of an expatriate - faced with various challenges in his self-imposed exile. As these two versions of the story of growing up reveal, fictional accounts of this process of maturation can vacillate between the two poles of affirmative acceptance of conventional assumptions and the rebellious quest for alternative meanings. In the case of The Cement Garden the protagonists are caught paralyzed between these two poles, caught in a self-perpetuating vortex of initiation rites which are bereft of meaning. What used to be decisive steps towards adulthood - first sexual

35 Cf., for example, Peter Freese, Die Initiationreise (Tübingen: Staufenberg, 1998 [1971]).

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contact, solving the ties with one's parents, taking over their roles - has degenerated into an end game of perversion. The period of transgression from childhood to adulthood has been described by psychologists as a "task" which has to be mastered by means of "coping" - the aim being social integration and self-realization.36 Lotte Schenk-Danzinger delineates the major aspects of this task in her standard monograph on growing up. They are pertinent to an interpretation of The Cement Garden. The adolescent is to come to terms with his or her evolving sexual drive - especially with her first period, his first ejection of semen and with masturbation, which is wide-spread in puberty. During this process of "coping", it is the adolescent's "task" to reach a more integrated level of sexuality. Similarly, after a phase of experimentation, the young adult has to find new values and models, which is closely linked with his or her emancipation from parental influence. The aim is to find oneself, to achieve social integration into the new role of the adult. Of course, turning to the novel, we can discern an abrupt severing of the cord with the parents; however, the phase of experimenting with new roles, gendered identities, sexuality and morality gets stuck, as noticed above, in the endless game of puberty. It can only be stopped by interference from outside. Why, then, do Jack and his brother and sister fail? Why are they stuck in this experimental phase of their "task" to grow up? First of all, an obvious answer to these questions is that emancipation from family ties cannot be achieved since the family itself never was an intact family which would have fulfilled its social role of offering values and norms. Part of this is that Jack never had an adult role model. Little is told about his father, who appears as a distanced petty-bourgeois seeking to establish parental authority by means of ritualized gestures. Brandishing his pipe, he makes an effort to give significance to his utterings. The pipe's symbolic function as a penis substitute clearly underscores the yearnings of the semi-invalid to attain authority. Jack turns against this caricature of a father figure. In scenes of closeness between Jack and his mother, the above-mentioned Oedipal motive is vaguely expanded on. In Jack's masturbation parallel to his father's lethal heart attack, partly brought about by the son's unwillingness to be of help in cementing the garden, the motive comes to its fruition. The parents' marriage, too, is marked by a lack of communication, an underlying feeling of frustration and aggression. The domestic atmosphere is tense and one of isolation right from the beginning; isolated individuals live side by side. Separated from his (social) environment, without contact to nonfamily members, Jack does not develop any social ties with the outside world. Towards the end of the novel, Julie's would-be boyfriend Derek enters Jack's 36 See Lotte Schenk-Danzinger, Entwicklungspsychologie lag, 1993), esp. 464ff.

(Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesver-

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world as a possible surrogate father. He, too, lives alone with his mother at an age of twenty-three and has found his ersatz family in his snooker club. Although his projected success story could establish the sports car driver and snooker star as a potential new authority for the remaining members of the family, he remains an intruder into the family cocoon. Finally, he is dislodged as an alien organism as the family draws together. Thus, the sole remaining role model for Jack is a fictitious hero, Captain Hunt, the dashing, disciplined warrior of a science-fiction comic book. His deeds trigger daydreams in Jack. The astronaut's mission to discharge the toxic corpse of a mutated space monster in order to save planet earth is grotesquely reflected in Jack's disposal of his mother's dead body in a container full of cement in the cellar. This, of course, is an ironic remark on the reciprocity of fact and fiction - Captain Hunt educates himself during his adventures in space by reading great works of world literature. The lack of true role models which could offer guidance to the adolescents of the novel turns, as already mentioned, the initiation rites of the novel into a stagnant experiment without direction and without an end. The giddiness which sets in after the parents' demise and which finds its first expression in a sense of euphoria, seeing offered the chance to take over the parental role by the siblings, disintegrates into a sneaking sense of insecurity. Little brother Tom, the object of educational experiments by Julie and Jack, withdraws from psychological stress by means of retardation - dressed up like a girl, he behaves in an effeminate manner; finally he becomes a thumb-sucking toddler. Apart from this inadequate behaviour, moral uncertainties are expressed in Jack's irascible, unbalanced appearance, in his daydreaming and in his continuing nightmares. The scenes of increasing loss of values culminate in the novel's final episode. In imitation of their parents, Jack and Julie push their birds-and-bees games and petting experiments beyond socially acceptable boundaries by engaging in incestuous intercourse. This happens with their younger brother Tom acting like a retarded baby in the cot beside their bed. Following the inner logic of the novel, Wolfgang Wicht has interpreted this final scene as an act of liberation, as a "symbolic image of desires for true partners" and as a "final confirmation of the precarious idyll" of this child commune.37 The rejected surrogate father Derek demolishes the cement casket of their mother with a sledgehammer and leads police officers as providers of an outside order to the children's house. Accordingly, the novel's ending again focuses on the questions raised in the narrative, questions about a binding set of values. It becomes clear that this very absence of values and norms, of role models and guidance results in the 37 Wolfgang Wicht, "Von David Copperfield zu Ian McEwans The Cement Garden: Veränderungen im Diskurs der Ich-Erzähler", Zeitschrift fiir Anglistik und Amerikanistik 36/4 (1988), 314 (translation L.°V.).

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breaking up of the adolescent protagonists. Ironically, they experience the most intimate and erotic moments in an act which society discards as its most pernicious perversion - the act of incest. The Cement Garden is a novel written with the deliberate aim to provoke. Ian McEwan may not completely be acquitted of charges of having used a modish morbidity and in-your-face breaking of taboos to achieve a cleverly calculated literary scandal. Together with authors such as the American Edward Albee or the Briton Edward Bond, who deliberately insert shock elements in their writings in order to unsettle socially conditioned modes of perception in their audiences, McEwan remains open to two strands of criticism. First, it may be argued that his critique of contemporary society offers little explanation for the moral indifference of the ethical waste-land of his novel. This entails the fact that there seems to be little room left for improvement in this hopeless scenario. Second, one could criticize that the novel in its total debunking of traditional values and of generic conventions withholds from its readers visions of a better, more humane world. In destroying all former conventions, McEwan only obliquely or ex negativo hints at the significance of commonly shared value systems. This, though, by far goes beyond the anything-goes stance of postmodernism. By "unseating] our moral certainties",38 McEwan asks his readers to reflect on this absence of commonly shared values. This in itself may be the first step 'beyond postmodernism'.

38 Ryan, Ian McEwan, 5.

Contributors DIETMAR BÖHNKE teaches British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He studied British and Hispanic Studies at the universities of Leipzig, Glasgow (UK) and Seville (Spain), taking an M.A. degree at Leipzig. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 2002. His research interests include Scottish literature, culture, history and politics, especially of the twentieth century, as well as nationalism and national identities in the British Isles. He has published a book on the contemporary Scottish author James Kelman (Kelman Writes Back: Literary Politics in the Work of a Contemporary Scottish Writer, Berlin: Galda und Wilch, 1999) and is currently preparing a volume on Alasdair Gray (Shades of Gray, forthcoming). He also occasionally works as a literary translator. CHRISTOPHE DEN TANDT teaches English and American literatures as well as literary theory at the Free University of Brussels. He is the author of The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Illinois, 1998) and of articles on postmodern culture (literature, film, video). IHAB HASSAN is Emeritus Vilas Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He is the author of many books, including The Dismemberment of Orpheus·, Paracriticisms; The Postmodern Turn\ Selves at Risk, and the memoir, Out of Egypt. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala and Glessen. Currently, he is at work on Coming to the Antipodes: A Spiritual Memoir. BERND KLÄHN studied Theoretical Physics, Philosophy and English Philology (Dipl. Phys.; M.A.; Dr. phil.; 'Habilitation'). He is Associate Professor ("Privatdozent") at the University of Bochum (Germany) and Guest Lecturer at the University of Dortmund (Germany), teaching English Philology and American Studies. His book publications include Materialistic Theories of Art and Dialectical Models (Köln 1984) and Postmodernist Prose (Munich 1999). He has published a number of articles and essays in the field of postmodernism, aesthetic, literary theory, and history of science and is focusing his attention on interdisciplinary studies, including literature and ethics, postmodernism, ecocriticism, and narrative constructions of nature.

320

Contributors

VICTORIA LIPINA-BEREZKINA is Visiting Professor of English and American Literature at Baskent University, Ankara. She holds the degree of candidate of philological sciences (1976) and a doctoral degree of philological sciences (1990) from Moscow Lomonosov University. She is a Full Professor of English and Comparative Literature, founder and the first chair of the Department of English and Comparative Philological Studies at Dnepropetrovsk University, Ukraine. She was Woodrow Wilson Alumna in 1996, has so far published five monographs and more than 100 articles in English and Russian; among them: Russian Essays on Shakespeare (Delaware Press, 1989), Beginnings and Ends (UP of America, 2001), Power and Culture (Salamanka: University of Salamanka Press, 2001), Ethics and Subjectivity (Frankfurt a.o.: Peter Lang, 2002), Short Fiction (Salzburg 2002), J AST, No 10. She is currently completing a book on The Return of the Subject: New Trends in Contemporary Literature. PETER MORTENSEN was born 1969 and educated in Denmark and the USA He is Associate Professor of English at Aarhus University, Denmark, author of several articles on modern British and American literature, and of a monograph, entitled British Romanticism and Continental Influences (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming 2003). CHRISTOPHER NORRIS is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff, University in Wales. He is the author of many books on aspects of philosophy and critical theory, including (most recently) Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism·,Minding the Gap: Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions', Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-realism and Response-Dependence, and Hilary Putnam: Realism, Reason, and the Uses of Uncertainty. VERA NÜNNING studied English literature, history, and education in Cologne and graduated with a dissertation on Virginia Woolfs aesthetics. Her postdoctoral thesis deals with Catherine Macaulay and the political culture of English radicalism. From 2000-2002 she held a chair for English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and has been professor for English Literature at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg since 2002. She has published widely on British and American history as well as on English literature and culture from the 18th-20lh centuries. Among her works are Die Ästhetik Virginia Woolfs (1990), Catherine Macaulay und die politische Kultur des englischen Radikalismus, 1760-1790 (1998), Englische Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (with Ansgar Nünning, 1998), Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (2000), Grundkurs anglistisch-amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft (with Ansgar Nünning, 2001), und Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär (ed. with Ansgar Nünning, 2002).

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SUSANNE PETERS studied English and German at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Glessen and taught English Literature at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf as assistant professor. She published a study on James Joyce in 1995 (Wahrnehmung als Gestaltungsprinzip im Werk von James Joyce, Trier: WVT), and completed her post-doctoral thesis on the function of written communication in English drama (Erscheinungsformen und Funktionswandel schriftlicher Kommunikation im Drama: Von der Shakespeare-Zeit bis zur Gegenwart, forthcoming). She co-edited a collection of essays on The Humanities in the New Millennium (Tübingen: Francke, 2000) and another interdisciplinary volume on Sinneswahrnehmung: Perception and the Senses. Her articles include studies on narrative theory, Jamey Joyce and Robert Musil, modern and postmodern drama, as well as postcolonial literature. LENA PETROVIC was born in 1951 in Nis, Serbia. She obtained her M A in

English literature from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, and her PhD in comparative literature from the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis, where she is currently employed as Associate Professor for Medieval and Renaissance English Literature and Modern Anglo-American Literature. She is also teaching a post-graduate course on twentieth-century literary theory and criticism. Her publications include a comparative study In Search for the Lost Garden: Pagan Traditions in the Novels by J. M. Coetzee, D. M. Thomas and B. Pekic and Quest Myth in Medieval English Literature. PETER PAUL SCHNIERER holds a chair of English Literature at the University of Heidelberg; he previously taught at the Universities of Tübingen (Germany), Greenwich (UK), Buckingham (UK), Northern Arizona (USA), Maryland (USA) and Vienna (Austria). His research beyond postmodernism addresses Renaissance and 20th century drama, Irish literature, and the history of demonization and censorship as well as a growing interest in anglophone literatures. KLAUS STIERSTORFER is Professor of English at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. His publications include John Oxenford (1812-1877) as Farceur and Critic of Comedy (Frankfurt a.o.: Lang, 1996); with Heinz Antor (eds), English Literatures in International Contexts (Heidelberg: Heidelberg UP, 2000); (ed., introd., annot.), London Assurance and Other Victorian Comedies. Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Konstruktion literarischer Vergangenheit: Die englische Literaturgeschichtsschreibung von Warton bis Courthope und Ward (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001), also forthcoming, in an extended and revised version, with OUP in 2004; with Ahrens, Parker and Tam (eds), Anglophone Cultures in Southeast Asia: Appropriations, Continuities, Contexts (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), and with Monika Gomille, Xenophobic Memories (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003).

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Contributors

DORIS TESKE currently teaches British Literature and Culture and its Teaching at Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg. Her Ph.D. on discourses of the urban and on the development of London in the 20th century was published in 1999, her introduction to Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies: GB, was published with Cornelsen Verlag in 2002. At the moment, her research focuses on virtual ethnic identities in the context of migration and on the development of virtual communities on the Internet. PHILIP TEW is English Subject Leader and Reader in English & Aesthetics at the University of Central England in Birmingham. Currently he is Director of the London Network for Modern Fiction Studies. Manchester University Press published his first monograph, B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading, in 2001; another study on Jim Crace for MUP is in preparation. Recent publications also include Contemporary British Fiction (Polity, 2003), "B. S. Johnson" in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (22:1, Spring 2002), "Reconsidering Literary Interpretation" in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (Athlone Press, 2001), and "Philosophical adjacency: Beckett's Prose Fragments via Jürgen Habermas," in Beckett and Philosophy (Macmillan/St. Martins 2002). Among forthcoming publications is a study of major themes and contexts in contemporary British fiction (Athlone/Continuum, 2004). Dr. Tew has lectured internationally on contemporary fiction and theory, delivering papers in Albania, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the U.S.. He is an honorary Reader in English & Aesthetics at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. HELGA THALHOFER has studied Comparative Literature in Munich and Oxford on a scholarship, and graduated in Oxford with the Master of Studies in European Literature. She is currently doing postgraduate research at the University of Munich for her doctorate on the role of metaphor in the constitution of imagi-native reality in English and German Romantic poetry. LAURENZ VOLKMANN received his Ph.D. from Erlangen University, but also studied at Miami University of Ohio. He went through teacher's training and taught at several schools. He has taught at the Universities of Manchester, Würzburg, Bielefeld and Hanover and is currently Professor of English Literature, Cultural Studies and EFL Teaching at Paderborn University. His recent publication (Habilitation) is a lengthy study of homo oeconomicus in English literature from the middle ages to the 18th century (forthcoming with Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg). As the co-editor of several publications on literary theory and the teaching of literature he has also published on a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare in the EFL classroom to Madonna as an icon of postmodernism.

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323

PETER V. ZIMA, born in Prague in 1946, studied Sociology and Politics at Edinburgh University from 1965 to 1969. He defended his first thesis on Marcel Proust at the University of Paris IV in 1971 and his second thesis ("Doctorat d'Etat") on Proust, Musil and Kafka at the University of Paris I in 1979. He was assistant lecturer in sociology at the University of Bielefeld (1972-1975) and senior lecturer at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) from 1976 to 1983. In 1983, he was appointed full professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). He has been head of the Department of General and Comparative Literature ever since. He was offered a chair in the Sociology of Literature at the Catholic University of Tilburg (now Catholic University of Brabant) in 1980 and a chair in Comparative Literature at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) in 1991. In 1998, he became corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His publications include: The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory, London, Athlone, 1999; Deconstruction and Critical Theory (transl. R. Emig), London, Continuum, 2002.

Index Abiram 213 Ackroyd, Peter 245, 248 Adorno, Theodor W. 21-2,25,53, 180,229 Albee, Edward 318 Althusser, Louis 25,229 Amis, Martin 237,249-53,307 Anaxagoras 153 Aristotle 143,147, 151-52,299 Arnold, Matthew 34-5,215 Arrighi, Giovanni 229 Artaud, Antonin 72 Auerbach, Erich 207 Aurelius, Marcus 38 Austen, Jane 201 Auster, Paul 307 Austin, J. L. 143 Bachelard, Gaston 45, 152-53 Bacon, Francis 78,218-20 Baker, Stephen 255, 267 Bakhtin, Mikhail Μ. 15, 17, 123-24, 132-33, 305 Ballantyne, R. Μ. 311 Balzac, Honore de 279 Barilli, Renato 40-43 Barnes, Julian 8,246-49 Baroja, Ρίο 17 Barth, John 8-9,269-78,280, 282-87, 290 Barthelme, Don 9, 271, 290 Barthes, Roland 23, 56, 165, 168, 170, 172-73,230, 269-70, 285

Bataille, Georges 37 Baudelaire, Charles 15-17 Baudrillard, Jean 22,45, 54, 65, 7071, 73-74,128,145,182-84, 270 Bauman, Zygmunt 31-32, 74, 303 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de 231 Beck, Ulrich 183 Beckett, Samuel 129, 208, 231,279, 294 Beethoven, Ludwig van 248 Bell, Charles 66, 123 Bellamy, Joe David 274-75 Bellow, Saul 208,210 Benjamin, Walter 15, 229 Benn, Gottfried 17 Benveniste, Emile 283 Bernstein, Stephen 259 Bertens, Hans 1, 3,200,255-57,265 Bettelheim, Bruno 60, 68 Bhabha, Homi 102 Bhaskar, Roy 4, 30, 32, 34, 37,4142,44-50 Birkin, Andrew 309 Bizet, Georges 248 Blake, William 58, 75 Blau, Herbert 7 Bobbio, Norberto 229 Bolter, Jay David 112 Bond, Edward 62-63, 318 Bonner, Frances 109 Bosanquet, Bernard 55 Bourdieu, Pierre 43-4

326 Boyle, Τ. Coraghessan 127 Bradbury, Malcolm 1-2, 7,213, 22834, 249, 306 Brecht, Bertolt 157,173,177 Brookmyre, Christopher 242 Brooks, Cleanth 168 Bruegel, Pieter 132 Brustein, Robert 71 Buchanan, James 57 Buell, Lawrence 182-3, 189 Burgess, Anthony 309 Burke, Kenneth 61,137 Butler, Judith 174 Butor, Michel 23 Byatt, Antonia S. 245 Byron, George Gordon 313 Cage, John 130, 209 Camus, Albert 13, 24 Canetti, Elias 203 Carpentier, Alejo 123, 125 Carver, Raymond 131 Cassirer, Ernst 33 Castells, Manuel 104 Catherine the Great 228 Chateaubriand, Franfois-Rene de 14 Chekhov, Anton 67 Cholodenko, Lisa 123 Chomsky, Noam 52-55, 57, 68, 166, 168, 173 Christian, Peter 95 Cobain, Kurt 244 Coetzee, J. M. 51, 62, 64 Coleridge, Samuel T. 168 Comte, Auguste 16 Conrad, Joseph 58,60-62 Conway, Martha 112 Coover, Robert 81, 87-88, 290 Copola, Francis 62 Coupe, Lawrence 184 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan 109-10

Index

D'Annunzio, Gabriele 17 Dathan 213 de Man, Paul 6, 157-73, 176-78, 229 Debord, Guy 229 Defoe, Daniel 124 Deleuze, Giles 128,229 DeLillo, Don 6,121-22, 126-27, 13037, 139-40, 189 Derrida, Jaques 6, 36,40,44, 51, 54, 72, 128, 132, 143-55, 178, 182, 204, 206, 209, 229, 269, 300 Descartes, Rene 79-80,143, 230 Dewey, Joseph 55, 127 Dickens, Charles 80,124, 315 Dickinson, Emily 208-9 Diderot, Denis 228-31 Dilthey, Wilhelm 167 Dixon, Stephen 8, 271, 277-87 Donahue, Phil 189 Dostoevsky, Fjodor 15, 17, 51, 288 Douglas, Jane Yellowlees 92 Dreiser, Theodor 80 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 175-76 Ducrot, Oswald 166 Dürkheim, Emile 18 Eagleton, Terry 39,47, 273,303-5 Earnshaw, Stephen 257 Eco, Umberto 23-24, 52, 65 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 80, 100, 279, 285 Eliot, George 54 Ellroy, James 6, 121, 122, 124, 12627,130, 132-37, 139, 140 Ellroy, Geneva Hilliker 137 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 46-7, 211 Eschenbach, Wolfram von 23 Estes, Richard 123 Faulkner, William 193 Federman, Raymond 271 Feuerbach, Ludwig 15

Index

Fish, Stanley 279 Flores, Angel 123 Forster, Ε. M. 193, 272 Foucault, Michel 6,30-31, 54, 58, 64-65, 70, 73, 102, 126, 138-40, 157-59, 171-78, 182, 201,262, 269,286, 289 Fowler, Alastair 98 Fowles, John 23-24, 249, 257 Frank, Manfred 26 Frayn, Michael 237,241 Freud, Sigmund 18-20 Fromm, Ernst 53, 55, 71, 75 Fry, Stephen 241, 245 Frye, Northrop 59, 60 Fukuyama, Francis 53, 63-65, 146, 264 Gablik, Suzi 7 Galilei, Galileo 78 Gasche, Rodolphe 158, 162-63, 169 Gass, William 9,269,273,290 Gates, Bill 105 Gehry, Frank 200 Genette, Gerard 164-65 Gibbons, Dave 123 Gibson, William 109-10, 123 Giddens, Anthony 18 Gide, Andre 17, 21 Gifford, Terry 185, 190 Ginzburg, Carlo 229 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 218 Godwin, William 259 Golding, William 311 Gombrich, Ernst 207 Gorz, Andre 229 Gray, Alasdair 8, 255, 257-67 Green, Τ. H. 55-56 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 165 Guevara, Che 229 Haack, Susan 206

327

Habermas, Jürgen 144, 147, 229 Hassan, Ihab 1, 2, 7, 21-23, 61, 108, 122, 124, 129-30,219 Hautzinger, Nina 92 Hawkes, John 5,82, 85-87 Heaney, Seamus 92, 210 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 11, 13-16,20-22,29, 35, 39-42,46, 79, 88, 143, 151,204 Heidegger, Martin 181,184 Heine, Heinrich 14 Hemingway, Ernest 135-36 Heraclitus 153 Higdon, David Leon 224 Hitchcock, Alfred 293 Hölderlin, Friedrich 21 Homer 273, 282 Hoover, J. Edgar 132 Hope, Christopher 245 Hopkins, Gerard Manly 215 Horkheimer, Max 22, 180 Hornby, Nick 235, 240-42, 245, 307 Houellebecq, Michel 303, 305 Hughes, Ted 313 Hugo, Victor 14 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 55 Huntington, Samuel P. 203 Husserl, Edmund 143, 147, 150-51, 153 Hutcheon, Linda 1, 34-35, 39, 41,4546, 157, 175, 262, 267, 273 Huxley, Aldous 261, 279, 312-13 Huysmans, Joris Karl 21, 23, 25 Ibsen, Henrik 74 Ignatieff, Michael 202 Ishiguro, Kazuo 245, 250 Isozaki, Arata 200 Jakobson, Roman 165-66 James, Henry 271-72 James, William 139, 204-6, 209

328 Jameson, Fredric 22, 39, 59-60, 111, 128-30,181, 184,187 Jencks, Charles 207 John Paul II200 Johnson, B. S. 249 Johnson, Mark 36 Joyce, James 21, 27, 81, 129, 207, 231,280, 282, 293-94,315 Joyce, Michael 112 Kac, Eduardo 93 Kafka, Franz 15, 17, 23-24, 27, 208 Kant, Immanuel 31,48, 77, 143, 147, 154, 168, 174-75, 201,214 Keats, John 182, 208,275-76,290 Kierkegaard, S0ren 24, 152 Kingston, Maxine Hong 6, 121-24, 126-27, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140 Korah 213 Kristeva, Julia 128,132,209 Kubrick, Stanley 309 Kuhn, Thomas 153 Lacan, Jacques 25,128, 269 Laclau, Ernesto 127 Laing, Ronald David 19 Lakoff, George 36 Lamartine, Alphonse de 14 Landow, George P. 96, 100 Larkin, Philip 304 Lawrence, D. H. 15, 21, 56, 59, 19293, 280, 282,312-13 Leavis, F. R. 38-39, 55 Lee, Alison 255 Lee, Spike 123 Lefebvre, Henri 32,40, 102 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 214 Lessing, Doris 249 Levinas, Emmanuel 47 Levi-Strauss, Claude 166,283, 300 Lichtenstein, Roy 123

Index

Lodge, David 249 Lopez, Jose 2,9 Luhmann, Niklas 25, 177-78 Lukacs, Georg 39, 134-36 Lynch, David 123 Lyotard, Jean-Fran?ois 13,16, 22, 25, 52, 54, 57,128, 133, 145-46, 153,155, 179-80, 182, 265, 305 Maalouf, Amin 202-3, 208 Macedo, Donaldo 52-54, 57 Madonna 65,200, 203 Mallarme, Stephane 21, 24 Malouf, David 208,212 Malraux, Andre 25 Mamet, David 294 Mandel, Ernest 22, 229 Mann, Thomas 17,21,25, 193 Marcuse, Herbert 53, 55, 58, 72-73, 229 Marlowe, Christopher 65 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 123, 125, 208, 229 Marx, Groucho 291 Marx, Karl 13, 16, 18, 39, 55, 64, 66 McDaid, John 113 McDonagh, Martin 8,291-96, 300, 301 McDougall, Ashton Raggatt 200 McEwan, Ian 8, 303, 306-7, 310-318 McHale, Brian 3, 125-26, 235, 255, 260 McKibben, Bill 181, 183 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall 52 Melville, Herman 80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 32 Michelangelo 200 Mill, John Stuart 55 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 213 Miller, Frank 123 Mitchell, Joni 243 Monteverdi, Claudio 218

Index

Morin, Edgar 209 Morrison, Jim 69 Morrison, Toni 123 Mouffe, Chantal 127 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 231, 248 Müller, Heiner 51, 58, 60, 62 Musil, Robert 13, 15, 17, 19, 21-23 Nabokov, Vladimir 231 Nelke, Roger 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15-17,19-20, 52, 56, 70-72, 143, 158-59,16265, 170, 178,200, 206,209 Nixon, Richard 87 Norris, Christopher 3, 6, 30-31, 3436 Norris, Frank 80 Novalis (Friedrich v. Hardenberg) 14 O'Brien, Flann 259 Oates, Joyce Carol 127 Ockham, William of 70 Olsen, Lance 1 Ondaatje, Michael 208 Orpheus 217-20,233 Ortega y Gasset, Jose 290 Orwell, George 261 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 217 Paglia, Camille 59 Parker, David 7,213, 221-26,233234 Parmenides 70, 153 Pelevin, Victor 8,288 Perloff, Maijorie 92 Piercy, Marge 27 Pinker, Steven 205 Pinter, Harold 294 Pirandello, Luigi 17 Pittin, Marie Odile 259, 263

329

Plato 27, 70, 78, 143, 147, 150-52, 283, 299 Poliziano, Angelo 218 Pols, Edward 4, 30, 35, 37,42-44 Pope, Alexander 214 Potter, Garry 2, 9 Pound, Ezra 17, 178 Powers, Richard 127 Priest, Graham 150 Proust, Marcel 17, 19, 21-24, 81, 129, 193,231,280 Pynchon, Thomas 5, 81-85, 87, 111, 286-87, 290 Queneau, Raymond 93 Quick, William Thomas 110 Rabelais, Fran?ois 201 Rabinow, Paul 175-76 Rau, Anja 113 Ravenhill, Mark 64-66,72-75 Rheingold, Howard 105-6, 108 Richter, Jean-Paul 21 Ricceur, Paul 26,209 Ridley, Matt 205 Riffaterre, Michael 167 Rilke, Rainer Maria 21 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 24-25,274, 279-80,287 Roche, Maurice 23 Rorty, Richard 31,123, 139-40, 14647, 152, 171, 175, 204,274 Rose, Margaret A. 234 Rossi, Luigi 218 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio 231 Roth, Philip 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 143, 147-51, 300, 308,312 Roy, Arundhati 179,185-95 Rüge, Arnold 15-6 Rushdie, Salman 7,208, 213,216-21, 225,233-34, 257

330 Ruskin, John 312 Russell, Bertrand 55, 154 Saldivar, Jose David 123, 125 Sartre, Jean-Paul 24, 135, 173-74, 229 Sarup, Madan 52, 66 Sauerberg, Lars Ole 250, 253 Saussure, Ferdinand de 143, 150-51, 300 Scary, Elaine 207 Schechner, Richard 7 Schenk-Danzinger, Lotte 316 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, and Friedrich von 21 Schnitzler, Arthur 19-20 Scott, Tony 293 Searle, John 127, 134, 143, 152 Seeley, John R. 249 Seidelman, Susan 123 Seif, Will 235, 237 Serres, Michel 180, 182 Seth, Vikram 240 Shakespeare, William 58, 208, 245 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 14, 245 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft 259, 261 Sheppard, Richard 41 Shiner, Lewis 109 Shirley, John 109 Simmel, Georg 18 Simon, Claude 23-24 Sisyphus 227 Skinner, Quentin 55, 57, 64, 72 Slusser, George 109-111 Smith, Adam 55 Smith, Sarah 114 Smith, Zadie 235-36 Soja, Edward 103-4 Sokal, Alan 256 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 206 Soper, Kate 182-84

Index

Sorokin, Vladimir 8,288 Spielberg, Stephen 124 Spretnak, Charlene 180,195 Steiner, Wendy 207 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 271 Stephenson, Neal 123 Sterling, Bruce 109 Sterne, Lawrence 201,230 Stirner, Max 15 Stix, Bettina 158, 170 Stramm, August 51 Sukenick, Ronald 271 Süskind, Patrick 24 Svevo, Italo 17, 19,22,27 Swanwick, Michael 110 Swift, Graham 7, 213, 224-27, 23234,236, 245 Syal.Meera 236-37,240-41 Synge, John Millington 294 Tallis, Raymond 70 Tarantino, Quentin 293 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 215 Thorpe, Adam 241, 245 Todorov, Tzvetan 157, 165-66, 16869,176 Tolstoy, Leo 51,288 Tönnies, Ferdinand 19 Touraine, Alain 26 Trilling, Lionel 55, 58 Truss, Lynne 245 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich 288 Turkle, Sherry 105-6,108 Twain, Mark 80 Tyler, Anne 127 Tzara, Tristan 93, 100 Updike, John 186,208 Valdes, Mario J. 32-33 Valery, Paul 21 van der Rohe, Mies 200

Index

Vargas Llosa, Mario 208 Veal, Mark 112 Virilio, Paul 180, 182, 229 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 15-16 Voltaire 214,220 Vonnegut, Kurt 201,259 Wagner, Richard 248 Walby, Sylvia 36 Wallace, Gavin 257 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 199 Warhol, Andy 123 Weber, Max 18-19,229 Weldon, Fay 250 Wells, H. G. 261 Welsh, Irvine 242,245 Wheeler, Wendy 232 White, Hayden 145, 172, 174,262 White, Patrick 211 Wicht, Wolfgang 317 Williamson, Eric Miles 9 Wilson, E. O. 203,205,211 Winkels, Hubert 242 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 151-52 Woolf, Virginia 13, 17, 19,23,37, 46, 81, 129, 193,207-8, 232, 241, 245, 272, 280-82 Wordsworth, William 182, 312-13 Yeats, William Butler 21, 160-61, 164, 204,214-15 Yeltsin, Boris 228 Zeno 153 Zima, Peter V. 1, 3-4, 108,232,236 Zizek, Slavoj 40 Zola, Emile 124

331