Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Ursinus College Myrin Library call number: 809.3/M18.
Brian McHale is a Senior Lecturer in Poetics at Tel-Aviv University. [From the back cover.]
[Professor McHale e-mailed me on 17 August 2001 to say that he is now Eberly Family Distinguished Professor at West Virginia University. bmchale@wvu.edu]
A University Paperbacks publication. Cover illustration: Michael Graves, detail of the south elevation of the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge (1977). It is effective in suggesting the complex structures of postmodern thought and expression.
Except for copious notes and a standard index, McHale does not provide a separate bibliography.
McHale gives a very detailed contents page. Below we list the main parts and selected sub-categories, not all.
Part One: Preliminaries
1. From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant. (M discusses Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Fuentes, Nabokov, Coover, Pynchon.) p.3.
2. Some ontologies of fiction. (M. discusses heterocosm, "the old analogy between Author and God," possible worlds, the social construction of [un]reality. p. 26.)
Part Two: Worlds
3. In the zone. (Includes how to build a zone, Ohio, Oz, intertextual zones.) p. 43.
4. Worlds in collision. (Includes parallel lines [of sci-fi and p.m. fiction development.]) p. 59.
5. A world next door. p. 73.
6. Real, compared to what? p. 84.
Part Three: Construction
7. Worlds under erasure. p. 99.
8. Chinese-box worlds. p. 112.
Part Four: Words
9. Tropological worlds. p. 133.
10. Styled worlds. (Includes letters and machines.) p. 148.
11. Worlds of discourse. p. 162.
Part Five: Groundings
12. Worlds on paper. (Includes concrete prose, the schizoid text.) p. 179.
13. Authors: dead and posthumous. (Includes the dead author, auto-bio-graphy, roman-a-clef, authority, short-circuit). p. 197.
Part Six: How I learned to stop worrying and love postmodernism
14. Love and death in the post-modernist novel. p. 219.
This is a one-thesis book. McHale sees postmodernist fiction EMERGING from modernist fiction with "historical consequentiality." (p.5) It emerges from "the dominant" of modernism--which is the preoccupation with the grounds of knowledge, or epistemology. The "dominant" of postmodernism turns away from an interest in epistemology and becomes a preoccupation with the grounds of being, or ontology.
M. says, "postmodernist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues." (p. xii)
The modernist dominant led to the endless quest to know what was happening in the world we think we know. The postmodernist dominant instead seeks to know "which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?" (p. 10).
For his key critical instrument, M. borrows the Russian formalist concept of the "dominant." He uses Roman Jakobson's definition, which dates back to 1935: "The dominant [is] the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure....a poetic work [is] a structured system, a regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices. Poetic evolution is a shift in this hierarchy...." [Ladislav Metejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 105-110.] p. 6 in M.
M. refers to the practice of treating postmodernist poetics as heterogeneous catalogs of features, what Jakobson calls "membra disjecta." Hassan does this, for example. M. argues that his use of "the dominant" helps to "elicit the systems underlying these heterogeneous catalogues." (p.7) He thus pries out the essential difference between the dominant modernist note of epistemology and the postmodernist note of ontology.
GENRES: "Science fiction...is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence)...." (p. 16). That is, it is examining worlds of being. Detective fiction, like modernist fiction, is trying to learn what the real situation is in the world that is given.
GENRES: HISTORICAL NOVELS: They "involve some violation of ontological boundaries." (p. 16) The projected world of the novel and the real life world of the historical subject/character are distinct. The novelist seeking verisimilitude will seek to make the meeting of those boundaries as invisible as possible. But in postmodernist mood, writers make the boundaries more pronounced because they do not try to make the seams between the two worlds invisible. (p. 17). [This provides insight into the selective use of historical referents, as in Doctorow's Ragtime.]
ONTOLOGY DEFINED: "An ontology...is a theoretical description of a universe." (p. 27) That is, it is not a description of THE universe.
POSSIBLE WORLDS: M. examines the "otherness" of the fictional world and relates it to the "real" world. "Fictional possible worlds and the real world inevitably overlap to some extent." (p. 34) In cases of "transworld" identities, however, "between real prototypes and their fictional replicas, the relation between the worlds is one of *asymmetrical* accessibility. The fictional world is accessible to our real world, but the real world is not accessible to the world of the fiction...." (p. 35)
M. usefully describes the dual ontological "landscape" of traditional Western culture, the profane and the sacred: "In such cultures, the two levels typically 'fuse' at certain prescribed places and times,--temples, festivals, and so on." (p. 36)
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF (UN)REALITY: For this concept M. refers to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality. Reality is for them "a kind of collective fiction, constructed and sustained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, and everyday social interaction, especially through the medium of language." (p. 37)
With such a reality in postmodernity, McHale, leaning on Thomas Pavel, finds "ontological stress." (p. 37) A key symptom of ontological stress "is anarchism, the refusal either to accept or to reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders. This [M. maintains]...is precisely the postmodernist condition: an anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural." (p. 37) [NOTE: McHale here echoes Harvey. He reinforces our analysis of the postmodern condition as a "best-we-can-do" response to extreme sense of threat. The fact that the reality (or realities) in question are socially constructed underscores the human fragility of the effort.]
POSTMODERN FICTION AS MIMESIS OR IMITATION: "Postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form. 'The shape of American experience, the 'discontinous drama': what postmodernist fiction imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures." (p. 38) [NOTE: Again, we underscore that the purpose of this mimetic enterprise is to meet a felt need in the culture, which is caused by the conditions of disorientation in postmodernity.]
THE SCHEME OF HIS WHOLE BOOK: M. tells the structure of his book on p. 39: He attempts "to describe the repertoire of strategies upon which postmodernist fiction draws in order to foreground the ontological structure of text and world (or worlds in the plural)." He adapts Hrushovski's three-dimensional model of semiotic objects: (a) "the reconstructed world ('Worlds'); (b) the text continuum ('Words');" and "the dimension of 'construction.'" The last is an adaptation of the Hrushovskian dimension of speakers, voices, and positions; it emphasizes the flickering effect intervening "between the text-continuum (the language and style of the text) and the reader's reconstruction of its world." (p. 39). Note that the parts of the contents follow these dimensions.
PART TWO
IN THE ZONE:
HETEROTOPIA: M. adopts Foucault's concept of heterotopia, as contrasted to a U-topia, a single space. (p. 44) Note the foregrounding of a SPATIAL concept. Heterotopian space is not a "world" but a "zone." Zones are "located nowhere but in the written text itself." (p. 45).
SCIENCE FICTION AND POSTMODERNIST FICTION: They both have as their "dominant" an "ontological poetics." But each developed separately on parallel lines. (p. 62). Postmodern writers have "absorbed" or "borrowed" motifs and topoi from sci-fi. See p. 65 for a catalog of motifs. P.M. fiction prefers borrowing sci-fi's "'temporal displacement" rather than "spatial [interplanetary] displacements." (p. 66). P.M emphasizes "social and institutional innovations" rather than technological innovations." (p. 66). Many p.m. writers prefer the topos of "future history" or "premembering." They can return to history's "forkings" or crossroads and write the history that would have occurred if the other road had been taken. (p. 68) [NOTE: Note the kindred thought in Michael Andre Bernstein, linked below.]
A WORLD NEXT DOOR
M. differentiates the traits of fiction that presents a "dual ontology" divided by a contested boundary. This is a rather technical section. He differentiates the traits of "hesitation," "banality," "resistance" in the operation of the fiction. (see pages 75-78). He shows a kinship of p.m. fiction with the Gothic story, which likewise is governed by an ontological dominant. The details here are not needed for THE PROGRAMME's present purposes.
REAL, COMPARED TO WHAT?
This section deals with the characteristics of historical fiction in the postmodern mode. M. is very useful here, in a period when we are pondering what Oliver Stone is and is not doing in the film, Nixon. He borrows (a good borrower of concepts he is) the concept of the "realeme" from Itamar Even-Zohar. (p.86) This gives him a tool for contrasting traditional historical fiction's use of "realemes" with the use made of them by postmodern historical fiction.
REALEMES: A "realeme" is a neologism coined by Even-Zohar for "things as signified in a system of signification" (p.86) which are or not admissible into a class of text in a given culture. Admissibility is a function of the culture and the genres which it spawns.
This is a useful way to set off the admissible practices of traditional historical fiction and the wider-ranging practices in postmodernism. Realemes meet tests of the accurate historical record, of the entire culture of official record (a constraint on ANACHRONISM), and of non-realistic fantastic events. (See p. 88 for a full account of these tests.)
The point is that postmodern historical fiction jarringly violates these norms and it becomes "apocryphal history." It yields "creative anachronism." (p. 93)
PART THREE: CONSTRUCTION
WORLDS UNDER ERASURE: M. explains in this second of his three major divisions (worlds and words are the other) that alternative ontologies can be created in p.m. fiction because the worlds that are created are purely TEXTUAL, subject TO ERASURE and contradiction and multiple endings and non-endings. (See pp. 101-111.)
CHINESE BOX WORLDS: (or Russian *babushka* dolls). M. here deals with "nesting" or "embedding" a narrative (from one ontology) in the narrative (of another ontology). This strategy can multiply worlds in a "recursive structure." (p. 112) M. again borrows a key critical concept, this one of embedding from Gerard Genette, "Discours du recit," in Figures III (Paris, Seuil, 1972, esp. 238-43. He introduces the following vocabulary: "diegesis" is a projection of a primary world. A story within the primary story projects a "hypodiegetic world" one level "down." Characters in the hypodiegetic world" can enter a "hypo-hypodiegetic world" another level down, and so on ad infinitum. (p. 113.)
"Each change of narrative level in a recursive structure also involves a change of ontological level, a change of world." (p. 113) See Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941, for an early example of alternative ontologies.(p. 114)
TROMPE-L'OEIL: P.M. texts tend deliberately "to mislead the reader into regarding an embedded, secondary world as the primary, diegetic world. (p. 115) These are a "disorienting transgression of narrative logic." (p. 119).
McHale discusses a particular trompe-l'oeil device, in which a nested "still" representation "is transformed before our eyes into an 'animated' sequence with every appearance of belonging to first-order reality. Undoubtedly the best-known example of this type of transparent deception is the etching of the 'Defeat of Reichenfels' near the beginning of Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe (1959). Here a still representation of a bar-room scene is described in implausibly fine and verisimilar detail, gradually acquiring movement and 'liveliness' to the point that it becomes an apparently independent episode." (pp. 117/118.)
STRANGE LOOPS: Moving through a hierarchical system, you can find yourself back where you started unexpectedly. This is "metalepsis" and foregrounds the "ontological dimension of recursive bedding." (p. 120)
PART FOUR: WORDS
In this part M. identifies tropes and strategies of the text as it constructs ontologies. See the chapter headings above for particular issues. The following quotes and notes contain the main points he makes in a nutshell.
TROPOLOGICAL WORLDS:
Regarding METAPHOR, "All metaphor hesitates between a literal function (in a secondary frame of reference) and a metaphorical function (in a 'real' frame of reference; postmodernist texts often prolong this hesitation as a means of foregrounding ontological structures." (p. 134)
THE FANTASTIC: In a fantastic text, metaphoric tropes can become literal and can go back again to a metaphoric function. This mixes the ontologies. (p. 135)
HYPERTROPHY: A metaphor becomes so extended that it "approaches the status of an independent fictional world of its own" without leaving the original bed of text. (p. 138) When the metaphor loses its mooring in the text and becomes separate, it turns into ALLEGORY. (p.140) M. identifies the founding texts of postmodern allegorical practice: Kafka, Beckett, Joyce in Finnegans Wake. He discusses the elusive character of postmodern allegory. (p. 141). Because postmodern writers do not sustain a stable relation between the metaphorical and the literal, the hierarchies of their worlds "oscillate," "opalesce," even become "mock-allegories" (p. 144) and parodies of allegory. (p. 145) All this oscillating conveys an ontological tension.
[NOTE: We ask why bother as an author to go through this? We answer with M.'s notion of the mimetic quality of p.m. fiction. The p.m. writer seems in quest of "representing" the world we have won, in which realities "flicker" back and forth, in which destabilization is the norm. In modernism and earlier realism, authors tried to convey a sense of the lived life; they represented the heightened sense of drama and emotion surrrounding great or small events and characters the reader could recognize from their actual experiences. McHale's insight is that postmodern writers are mimicking the actual experiences of readers in the postmodern period of history. That leads them to the ontological strategies of text explained by M. That experience, it turns out, is characterized by instability, simulacra, fragmentation, schizophrenia, etc. So the literature here is seen as the creative expression of the sensibility of the society. That sensibility, if we accept David Harvey's and others' views, comes from the shift in the capital/economic process. M. returns to this mimetic use of p.m. fiction on p. 219.]
STYLED WORLDS
M. identifies several p.m. strategies for "foregrounding" style: "lexical exhibitionism," "the catalogue," "'back-broke' and invertebrate sentences," the use of letters of the alphabet, and the machine-like use of words to start the narrative engine. (pp 148-160).
WORLDS OF DISCOURSE: M. says these stylistic strategies do not create discourse. They create "heterotopias," zones or worlds that evoke their opposites. Thus, they lead to "heteroglossia." This is the "plurality of discourse" in the fiction which allows world-views to conflict. (p. 166)
Part Five: Groundings
In general, M. here explores the authorial function in p.m. fiction. In essence, the various p.m. views of the author (as dead, as an institution, etc.,) mainly provide "another tool for the exploration and exploitation of ontology." (p. 202)
Part Six: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Postmodernism
LOVE AND DEATH IN THE POSTMODERNIST NOVEL: M. in this final chapter argues that the p.m novel is not guilty of the charge of being morally bad art. The charge is represented here by Gerald Graff and John Gardner. (p. 219) It holds that p.m. fiction celebrates the coercive unreality of our commodified (not their term or M.'s) culture. It does so mimetically and uncritically. Critics like G and G require that "fiction should project the 'air or reality,' the 'illusion of life.'" (p. 220)
M. argues that this is an esthetic insistence not an ethical one. (p. 221)
He then demonstrates the ethical/moral value of p.m. fiction. It does, indeed, as the G.G. critics say, break the illusion of an imagined world. But this is not immoral; it is a way of awakening the reader to the reality of life--love and death. He then examines the way in which p.m. textual strategies foreground these two profound moral/ethical issues of life (pp. 222-232). They do so in ways that are opposed to the "illusionist" goals of modernist fiction; that is, they shatter the illusion of the narrative in order to confront the reality of existence itself rather than existence in the narrative.
M. points out the correlation in p.m. fiction between DEATH and WRITING: "Foregrounding ontological boundaries is a means of foregrounding death, of making death, the unthinkable, available to the imagination." (p.23)
TRANSITION FROM MODERN TO POSTMODERN: McHale lends support to our notion that postmodernist sensibility emerged as the universalist implications of modernism ceased to bring forth interesting reference; we explore this notion in The Engine of Theory, an essay in THE PROGRAMME. "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability; push epistemological questions far enough and they 'tip over' into ontological questions." (p. 11)
M. is careful not to succumb to an oversimplistic division between epistemology and ontology. One raises questions of the other, he acknowledges. By his use of the notion of "the dominant," he means to give privilege to one over the other, not to ban it from the discussion. (p.11).
POSTMODERNISM AS CRISIS: McHale describes the postmodernist condition as "an anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural." (p.37) This is a symptom of our ontological stress, our shocked refusal to accept or reject "any of a plurality of ontological orders." (p.37) This analysis of postmodernism fits with our finding of a tone of "bitterness" in postmodern expression. We discuss this in a TABLE TALK and there refer to a couple of examples.
AGAINST APOCALYPTIC HISTORY: The "dominant" of postmodern fiction, in McHale's view, is that it explores ontologies. With the emphasis on the plural, he links his critical approach to that of Michael Andre Bernstein. Bernstein emphasizes that the worlds that did not come into being at the fork in the road, when a decision was made, have an existence as "sideshadows." Both McHale and Bernstein are deliberating on ontological issues, one in creative expression and the other in history.
GENERATIONAL SENSIBILITY: We grew up and gained our literary tastes before the flowering of postmodern fiction. We still feel right in the presence of a high modern book. But we also feel the anachronism of it, now that a new fiction has come after it. McHale helps us deal with this generational feeling by contrasting the familiar models of our youth with the products that appeared in our mature years. We do not recollect reading Gravity's Rainbow with the same pleasure that we felt when we first read, say, A Farewell to Arms. But we read it with an intuitive sense of its importance that may not have attached to Hemingway's book. McHale's value to us is that he (very belatedly) analyzes and explains what in 1973 was only a hunch about Pynchon's importance. That importance did and does have to do with the ethical/moral problem of living well in postmodernity, as McHale argues at the end of his book. We see G.R. better as a result. But seeing that postmodern novel better does not alter very much the relative pleasures involved on first encountering Hemingway and later Pynchon. That is a result of the generational sensibility that came with the time we grew up.
THE TYRANNY OF A THEORY: Finally, we register a discomfort with McHale's main idea, that modernist fiction is epistemological and postmodernist ontological. By the end of the book, we feel the too-steady beat in one note. Many of the tropes that he finds emerging from postmodernity's preoccupation with ontological issues are to be found throughout past literature in some measure. It does not take an ontological dominant to allow hypertrophy, say. The classical allusion familiar from Homer takes on a life of its own within the text. We know that McHale is delimiting the postmodern to a time, "periodizing" it, as Fredric Jameson says. We approve of that historical boundary-making. Nevertheless, we would wish, if time permitted, to do a thorough study of the major emergent novels of the late fifties and the sixties to show a more complicated evolution. We might want to show that the shift from epistemological to ontological preoccupations arose because of the shifts in sensibility identified by Jameson. In particular, we would want to link those texts to Jameson's idea of the "waning of affect," the loss of depth psychologies, the flattening and surfacing of felt experience. McHale's catch-all tag, "ontological," in true modernist-traditional fashion, over-defines and over-subscribes what is going on in postmodern novels, we suspect. But we would have to do a lot of work to document this hunch.
12 January 1996; updated 27 May 1997