Constructing Postmodernism

Brian McHale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780367474881
• eBook ISBN: 9781135083632
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Brian McHale provides a series of readings of a wide range of postmodernist fiction, from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to the works of cyberpunk science-fiction, relating the works to aspects of postmodern popular culture.

Part 1

Narrating Literary Histories

Chapter 1

Telling Postmodernist Stories

The First Story: “Post-Modernism”

In quest of a theory of postmodernism, we might turn to a short text by Max Apple with the likely-sounding title of “Post-Modernism” (from Free Agents, 1984; see Appendix 1.1). We would be disappointed, for instead of a theory – or at least a manifesto or polemic from which an implicit theory might be inferred – we get a story. Not much of a story, granted, and one that starts out rather like an essay (“It’s always safe to mention Aristotle in literate company”) before settling down into the narrative mode: “having no theory to tell, I will show you a little post-modernism” (Apple 1984:135). This is only the first of a series of disorienting reversals in the relative roles of theory (or “analysis,” Apple’s other term for it, 137) and story in the course of this text. Indeed, this opening reversal already contains another reversal in it: Apple will not “tell” a theory but will “show” a little postmodernism; but surely one “tells” a story, not a theory, and in any case the sample of postmodernism he “shows” us takes the form of a little story.

Incredulity Toward Metanarratives

In this disorienting reversibility of story and analysis, as well as its manifest dissatisfaction with theorizing, Apple’s text justifies its title after all. For Apple’s “Post-Modernism” shares these features with the “postmodernism” of J.-F. Lyotard’s influential account (1979; English trans. 1984b). Lyotard, of course, has defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1984b:xxiv). Scientific (analytical, theoretical) knowledge, he argues, arose in opposition to “traditional” narrative knowledge. Yet because scientific knowledge is incapable of legitimating itself, of lifting itself up by its own epistemological bootstraps, it has always had to resort for legitimation to certain “grand narratives” about knowledge – the Enlightenment narrative of human liberation through knowledge, the Hegelian narrative of the dialectical self-realization of Spirit, the Marxist narrative of revolution and the founding of a classless society, and so on. In our time, according to Lyotard, faith in these and other grand or metanarratives has ebbed, so that knowledge has had to seek its legitimation locally rather than universally, in terms of limited language-games and institutions, through what Lyotard calls “little narratives” (1984b:60). Unlike scientific knowledge, “little” or first-order narratives are self-legitimating. They construct their own pragmatics: they assign the participant roles in the circulation of knowledge (addressor, addressee, narrative protagonist), and found the social bond among these participants. They “define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do” (1984b:23).¹

Lyotard is not alone in discrediting metanarratives and endorsing self-legitimating “little narratives.” For example, we also find Richard Rorty distinguishing in analogous terms between the two ways in which “reflective human beings” give sense to their lives. One is “to describe themselves in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality,” i.e., to aspire to objectivity, or scientific knowledge in Lyotard’s sense; while the other involves “telling the story of their contribution to a community,” i.e. solidarity, or Lyotard’s narrative knowledge (Rorty 1985:3).² Similarly, Hayden White has recently undertaken the “redemption of narrative” in historiography (White 1987). White vindicates narrative history on the grounds that it serves to test our culture’s “systems of meaning production” – systems which, to the embarrassment of “scientific” historians, narrative history shares with myth and literature – against real-world events:

The historical narrative does not, as narrative, dispel false beliefs about the past, human life, the nature of the community, and so on; what it does is test the capacity of a culture’s fictions to endow real events with the kinds of meaning that literature displays to consciousness through its fashioning of patterns of “imaginary” events.

(White 1987:45)

In other words, where Lyotard sees narrative as self-legitimating because of its deep complicity with our culture’s social construction of reality, White sees it, for precisely the same reason, as critical and self-critical. Finally, Jerome Bruner has recently sought to confer legitimacy on narrative as a “mode of thought” on a par, epistemologically and ontologically, with the empirico-logical mode of science (Bruner 1986). It is with these and similar developments in mind that Christopher Norris (1985), surveying the intellectual landscape, has claimed to discern a general “narrative turn” of postmodern thought analogous to, but also in some ways undoing, the “linguistic turn” of modern thought earlier in this century. “As the idea gains ground that all theory is a species of sublimated narrative, so doubts emerge about the very possibility of knowledge as distinct from the various forms of narrative gratification” (Norris 1985:23). This is where Max Apple comes in. Sharing the postmodernist incredulity toward analysis and its legitimating metanarratives which also characterizes Lyotard, Rorty, White, Bruner and others, Apple conspicuously opts for the gratifications of “little narratives” about postmodernism in lieu of theories of it.

This is not yet the whole story of Apple’s “Post-Modernism,” however. There is, after all, “a bit of analysis” (1984:137) in Apple’s text, some theorizing amid the storytelling. Despite his suspicion of theorizing, Apple actually does undertake to define the “‘post-modern’ attitude” which his little story, he says, demonstrates: “Maybe you would characterize this attitude as a mixture of world weariness and cleverness, an attempt to make you think that I’m half kidding, though you’re not quite sure about what” (1984:137). In other words, Apple defines the “postmodern attitude” in terms of what Alan Wilde (1981) has called “suspensive irony.” Where the characteristic “disjunctive irony” of modernism sought to master the world’s messy contingency from a position above and outside it, postmodernist suspensive irony takes for granted “the ironist’s immanence in the world he describes” (Wilde 1981:166) and, far from aspiring to master disorder, simply accepts it. When the writer in Apple’s little exemplary story, pondering the likelihood of error in an ad for a $6.97 pocket calculator (battery included), observes that the situation leaves “plenty of room for paranoia and ambiguity, always among the top ten in literary circles” (1984:136), he is naming characteristically modernist forms of closure; paranoia and ambiguity are forms of disjunctive irony. But in making this remark about paranoia and ambiguity ranking among the literary top ten, the attitude which Apple’s narrator displays is characteristically postmodernist and suspensive – the attitude of someone who is half kidding, though we are not quite sure about what.

Apple’s postmodernist suspensiveness is also evident in the flood of inconsequential detail which all but overwhelms his little story: Target Stores and Woolco and K-Mart and Sears and Penney’s and Ward’s; a calculator originally priced $49.95, then $9.97, now $6.97; Col. Qaddafi and weight-lifting accidents and Vietnamese wet-nurses and the National Enquirer; and so on and so on. Wilde writes, about another postmodernist writer,

Like the pop artists, [he] puts aside the central modernist preoccupation with epistemology, and it may be the absence of questions about how we know that has operated most strongly to “defamiliarize” his (and their) work. [His] concerns are, rather, ontological in their acceptance of a world that is, willy-nilly, a given of experience.

(Wilde 1981:173)

Or, as Max Apple succinctly puts it in the final sentence of “Post-Modernism”: “Everything is the way it is” (1984:139). Wilde is actually talking about Donald Barthelme in the passage I have quoted, but he might as well be talking about Max Apple, and in fact does talk about Apple in strikingly similar terms elsewhere in the same book (Wilde 1981:132–3, 161–7).

The Postmodern Breakthrough

But if, as appears to be the case, Wilde and Apple are theorizing and/or telling stories about the same postmodernism, then after all there is a metanarrative lurking behind Apple’s little story. For Wilde’s theory of postmodernism is explicitly inscribed within a metanarrative of change and innovation, the story which Gerald Graff has called “the myth of the postmodern breakthrough” (1979). Once upon a time, so Wilde’s story runs, there was modernism, a period style characterized by disjunctive irony and reflecting a crisis of consciousness, the modernists’ painful sense of the irreducible gap between their need for order and the disorderliness of reality. Then came “a space of transition” (Wilde 1981:120) – rather less abrupt in Wilde’s account than in other versions of the breakthrough myth – which Wilde calls late-modernism, and which he associates with the writing of Christopher Isherwood and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Beyond this threshold lies a strange new world of suspensive irony, in which the pathos of the modernist hunger for order has been attenuated, “turned down” to a less anxious acceptance of the world as “manageably chaotic” (1981:44), and where the new literary emotions are low-key, understated ones. What especially characterizes Donald Barthelme’s postmodernist writing, Wilde tells us, is

the articulation not of the larger, more dramatic emotions to which modernist fiction is keyed but of an extraordinary range of minor, banal dissatisfactions … Barthelme’s stories express not anomie or accidie or dread but a muted series of irritations, frustrations, and bafflements.

(Wilde 1981:170)

This is precisely the emotional tone of Apple’s “Post-Modernism”:

In her own life Joyce Carol is undeluded by romantic conventions. Her stories may be formulaic but she knows that the shortness of life, the quirks of fate, the vagaries of love are always the subjects of literature.

Sometimes her word processor seems less useful than a 19-cent pen. Sometimes she feels like drowning herself in a mud puddle.

Still she is neither depressed nor morose.

(Apple 1984:138–9)

Wilde’s (and presumably Apple’s) version of this story differs from other versions of the breakthrough myth in the strangely muted, minor-key character of its brave new world, neither heroically Utopian nor tragically dystopian,³ and, as I have already noted, in the relative gradualness of the transition. Nevertheless, it has much in common with the other versions of this metanarrative, all of which in turn have something in common, as Dominick LaCapra has observed, with the “traditional apocalyptic paradigm.” In LaCapra’s retelling of it, that metanarrative runs something like this:

an all but inscrutable (magical, hermetic, religious, archaic, pre-Socratic, savage, medieval, pre-Renaissance – in any event, totally “other”) discourse of the past was disrupted at some time by the rise of a scientific, secular, analytic, reductive, referential, logicist … discourse that dominates modernity; all we have at present are faint glimmerings of another global turning point in the history of discourse that will give content and meaning to what must be for us a blankly utopian future.

(LaCapra 1985:104)

Versions of this metanarrative have been told, for instance, by T.S. Eliot, where it takes the form of a story about the dissociation of sensibility and its imminent re-association; by Michel Foucault, where it occurs as the story of the emergence and disappearance of the category “Man”; and more recently by Timothy Reiss (1982) and Francis Barker (1984), who in their different ways tell a similar story of the emergence in the seventeenth century of the entire complex of bourgeois subjectivity, textuality, representation, and the Cartesian “mind.” Barker’s version of the story differs from the others in its literal apocalypticism: threatened with annihilation, bourgeois discourse will, Barker fears, contrive to bring the whole world down with it in a real, not discursive, nuclear apocalypse.⁴

So pervasive is this apocalyptic metanarrative of the postmodernist breakthrough that few who address the issue of postmodernism have wholly escaped its influence, including those who are skeptical of it or indifferent to it.⁵ Gerald Graff, who gave currency to the phrase “myth of the postmodern breakthrough,” is of course one of the skeptics; by calling it a “myth” he implies that it is a delusion, so much mystification. But by attacking the breakthrough story he testifies to its existence as a myth in our culture – in other words, as a legitimating metanarrative.

Both David Lodge (1977, 1981) and Christine Brooke-Rose (1981) have proposed accounts of postmodernist writing radically at odds with the breakthrough narrative, construing postmodernism as essentially parasitic on earlier modes; nevertheless, the breakthrough scenario seems to insinuate itself into their discourses anyway, as if against their wills. For Lodge, postmodernism is essentially rule-breaking art, and thus ultimately dependent on the persistence of the rules that it sets out to break, as a figure depends upon the ground against which it defines itself. But postmodernist writing breaks the rules of metaphoric and metonymic writing alike, and thus stands outside and apart from the pendulum-like alternation of metaphoric and metonymic modes which, according to Lodge, constitutes the history of twentieth-century writing. Lodge’s discourse thus conforms to the postmodernist breakthrough narrative without apparently meaning to.

Similarly, Brooke-Rose seems unable to accommodate postmodernism to her narrative about the varieties of fantastic and quasi-fantastic fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pursuing her story as far as the nouveau roman and contemporary science fiction and fantasy, she abandons it abruptly when she comes to (American) postmodernism. Postmodernist fiction, it would appear, does not continue the historical sequence of fictional modes, but rather is parasitic on earlier modes, and so requires a new model for its description, one based not on the principle of hesitation (the underlying principle of fantastic fiction and kindred modes) but on principles of parody and stylization. Ironically, by substituting one model for another in this way and changing her story just at the denouement, Brooke-Rose testifies, if only inadvertently, to postmodernism’s radical discontinuity with earlier modes – the breakthrough narrative once again (see McHale 1982.)

In the Key of “as if”

Do not suppose, however, that by associating Wilde’s and (by implication) Apple’s postmodernist stories with this pervasive breakthrough metanarrative I am seeking in some sense to unmask or denounce or deconstruct their discourses. Far from it. I would insist that there is nothing wrong with the so-called myth of the postmodernist breakthrough, including Wilde’s and Apple’s versions – it makes quite a satisfying story, in fact – but just so long as we divest it of its authority as metanarrative. To escape the general postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives it is only necessary that we regard our own metanarrative incredulously, in a certain sense, proffering it tentatively or provisionally, as no more (but no less) than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing constructing
• Part 1: Narrating literary histories
• Part 2: (Mis)reading Pynchon
• Part 3: Reading postmodernists
• Part 4: At the interface
• Notes
• References
• Index