Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction

Brian Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134825653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledge
Exploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literature
The work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon ( Gravity's Rainbow ), John Barth ( LETTERS, Robert Kroetsch ( What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter ( Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey ( Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.

PART I

Grasshopper Antics:
The Playhouse of Language

CHAPTER 1

Foreplay

This (therefore) will not have been a book.¹

Thomas Pynchon's story, “Entropy,” includes an exchange that introduces recurrent elements in debates about the nature of textuality, reception and meaning. In response to Mulligan's suggestion that communication breakdowns are the result of a language barrier, Saul's reply offers one version of fissures in language and the problematics of meaning construction:

“No, ace, it is not a barrier. If it is anything it's a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: ‘I love you.’ No trouble with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, that's the one you have to look out for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit.”²

But, although important, doubts about the four-letter word in the middle only begin to touch the problem, for it must also include equivocation about “I” and “you,” sender and receiver, or the language users, in this simple, yet inescapably complex, communication model, as well as consideration of conventions applicable to the exchange. What does a sender intend? What will receivers understand? In what ways are meanings of an utterance shaped not only by the linguistic system but also by cultural context? Allowing Derrida's view that speech is always already writing,³ his challenge to the prioritising which links speech with presence as a claim upon truth, the model becomes practically if not philosophically more complex as a written performance. An author's “absence,” in addition to the instability of identity, further complicates any claim (s)he has to authority over meaning; context is destabilised and attention is drawn to the reader's task of producing meaning from the text. As Barthes' figure of the divided reader suggests, “This I which approaches the text is already a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite.”⁴ Similarly, the absent “I” who produced the text is also a plurality of codes and, most fundamentally, the medium of the message, the language text itself, is loud with “noise.” This multiple disorganization in the circuit constitutes the play of signification, and the opportunities for changing engagements that deconstructionists affirm in literary discourse.⁵ Meanings are plural. They oppose attempts that seek definitive meaning by second-guessing authorial intention or by discovering the timeless answer either in textual detail or in one or another context as limit. To consider reader participation in producing this pluralism is to enter the jeu by acknowledging the instabilities not only of texts and contexts but also of language itself. By a quirky spiral both would surely appreciate, Pynchon in 1960 anticipates Baudrillard in 1987: “If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of breakup and infidelity.”⁶

Because of the metaphoric flexibility of language and the variable possibilities for meanings in language acts, “partial knowledge” is, as Geoffrey Hartman has suggested, “the normal condition, then, of living in the context of words.”⁷ Presented within his analysis of Derrida's Glas, where Derrida's process of insistent interrogation and cross-referencing demonstrates the intertextuality of texts and the uncertainty of meanings, Hartman's judgement may spell despair or delight, according to one's preferences. But the mortality of determinate codes and meanings represents not the chaotic end of communication⁸ (or of knowledge claims); on the contrary, because deprivileging the arbiters of authority upon the grounds for their claims encourages discourse. Ontological and epistemological uncertainties promote communication by recognising that words are allusive, gamesome and pluralistic, simultaneously both host and parasite⁹ in the creation of texts by writers and by readers. But although the “deconstructive” perception complicates definitions, it cannot dispense with the question of context, with the cultural formation and political nature of meanings, with relationships between text and world. Showing the influence of intersecting contexts, the meanings that we discover in texts are provisional and, however fiercely they may be asserted or acted upon, they have no final truth claim because the processes of communication that are their enabling condition are also the processes by which their instability can be demonstrated.

When T.S. Eliot wrote in 1921 that henceforth literature would have to be difficult¹⁰, he was responding to a perception of the variety and complexity of civilization, including its literature, and the effects of that complexity upon the writer's sensibility. Northrop Frye's 1957 proposal that literature is made from other literature, with each new work simultaneously shaped by and shaping its predecessors in the company of which it takes its place and finds its meanings, prescribes a vast grid of literary connection and explanation.¹¹ When, in 1967, John Barth described the “exhaustion” of literature, he defined the used-upness of certain forms and possibilities to insist on new attitudes towards returning to old things.¹² For all of their differences in these instances as cultural analyst, Jungian formalist and novelist/essayist, Eliot, Frye and Barth emphasise the intertextuality of literature and the interplay of language. They point to allusions, echoes and borrowings, to the ways in which texts depend upon one another and upon changing contexts, which are so prominent an aspect of postmodernist literature and its reception. As authors explore self-consciously the possibilities of language, the texts in turn challenge readers to enter the linguistic/cultural fields from which meanings are constructed. This formal self-consciousness is a matter of shifting emphases or fashions, as eighteenth-century fiction and the mock lament of Cervantes' Prologue to Don Quixote indicate:

I have no citations for the margins, no notes for the end. To tell the truth, I do not even know who the authors are to whom I am indebted, and so am unable to follow the example of all the others by listing them alphabetically at the beginning, starting with Aristotle and closing with Xenophon, or, perhaps, with Zoilus or Zeuxis, notwithstanding the fact that the former was a snarling critic, the latter a painter.¹³

Not exclusive to postmodernist fiction but informing its wily manoeuvres, such play with the forms of fiction, and therefore with the construction of meanings, compliments readers by challenging them to participate in that interassociation of texts and contexts which is the play of language.

In Part I, I consider play as a perspective and a practice that offers valuable ideas about cultural formations generally and about literature and its reception in particular. Chapter Two presents a critical analysis of theories of play and game to argue that play is not only endemic to culture, providing impetus for change and defences against repression, but that it is, in its various manifestations, a concept which helps to explain the nature of literary texts as constructs in terms of their divided operations in cultural contexts. Consideration of these manifestations is the major task of this study.

Chapters Three and Four focus on post-structuralist developments of play theory with attention to particular examples of reader-response theory and to deconstruction. In what ways are play, reader-response and deconstruction related? What does this interrelatedness offer to theories of textuality and to critical practice? Since I am interested in play not simply as a formal component of works of literature but as an interactive process, as it is manifest in communication between texts and readers in the act of reading, reader-response studies have specific relevance in this project. Inevitably, since they are affected by matters of preference and style, institutional constraints and attitudes towards literature and culture, reader-response theories vary considerably in the extent to which they acknowledge aspects of play. But, despite their very significant differences, it is by acknowledging the reader as figure and readings as the locus of meanings that the focus on reading processes introduces the question of how play resists finality whether finality is held to be located in the text, the reading, or an academy's institutionalisation of critical practice. Deconstruction is the critical theory and practice that makes the most significant recent contribution to our understanding of play in texts, reading and writing. At risk, always, of reducing Derrida's contributions to linguistic theory and eliding the philosophical traditions within which his writings are situated, literary theory and criticism inevitably borrow with losses. Even so, the measure is not so much a question of fidelity to “origins” as evaluation of the interest and contribution of the new work to its field of study. Influenced by borrowings, it necessarily involves displacement and change and play. Interdisciplinary activity is not only a characteristic but a value in contemporary culture in its promotion of connections, changing perspectives and new opportunities for engagement, and the impact of deconstruction upon literary studies recharges the hermeneutical enterprise.

With this focus upon play forms and practice, and with particular attention to post-structuralist developments, this study is eclectic, exploratory and incomplete. It would be a contradiction in terms to prescribe the limits; play exceeds the game. Nevertheless, definitions are possible and they help to explain the processes by which texts are constructed and acquire meanings as cultural artefacts. My procedure throughout is selective and comparative, so that practice and theory are held to be interrelated and particular examples are considered with respect to textual communication more generally.

‘“How can you learn lessons in here?’” asks Alice. “And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other and making quite a conversation of it altogether∦ .” The conversation of Part I, “Grasshopper Antics: The Playhouse of Language” is extended, first one side and then the other, suspending resolution, in the text studies of Part II, “Duplicity as Virtue: Playful Texts and Textualised Players.” Itself a definitional morass, which I consider briefly as an introduction to the Part II studies, postmodernism presents so many instances of play at work against the hegemonic settlings of habit and privilege. Its self-conscious engagement with traditional forms of public discourse and its challenge to conservative ideas about disciplines, procedures, and the nature of knowledge, create a cultural arena for playful rebellion and innovation. Postmodernist fiction is our most recent and most complex literary example of play as procedure and value, and, as I attempt to demonstrate in the analyses in Part II of this study, its range addresses the broad sphere of contemporary culture.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 3.

2. Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy,” The Kenyan Review, No. 22, 1960, 285. The story is reprinted in the collection of Pynchon's early stories, Slow Learner.

3. Derrida's assertion of the priority of writing over speech may be seen overtly in his analysis of Rousseau's work. See Of Grammatology, Part II. I discuss this matter in some detail in Chapter 3.

4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, 10.

5. Discussed in Chapter 3, particularly with respect to the work of Derrida and Barthes. Although they appear to express contrasting attitudes to the situation, there are similarities between Derrida's joy, Bloom's “anxiety” (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry) and de Man's “blindness” (Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism) as each emphasizes the disparity between sign and meaning, that condition of uncertainty which removes the epistemological supports of knowing and, against fixed knowledge, emphasizes undecidability.

6. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 153.

7. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy, 137. This is, of course, a central consequence for poststructuralist criticism, a position (or lack of a position) repeated in the theory and one that emphasizes play in language.

8. A view expressed by M.H Abrams, for example, when he accuses Derrida of reducing meaning to “a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void” (“The Deconstructive Angel,” 431). It is a view largely shared by Wayne Booth in his contribution to this discussion, ‘The Limits of Pluralism’, published in Critical Inquiry.

9. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host.”

10. T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets.” See Frank Kermode ed., Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 65.

11. Most fully expressed in his Anatomy of Criticism, Frye's thesis of influence and interpenetration echoes this aspect of Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Acknowledging influence, Bloom discusses it more as a source of pressure th...