Postmodern Counternarratives

Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien

Christopher Donovan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135875220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of realism, postmodernism, literary theory and popular fiction before focusing on the careers of four prominent novelists. Despite wildly contrasting ambitions and agendas, all four grow progressively more sympathetic to the expectations of a mainstream literary audience, noting the increasingly neglected yet archetypal need for strong explanatory narrative even while remaining wary of its limitations, presumptions, and potential abuses. Exploring novels that manage to bridge the gap between accessible storytelling and literary theory, this book shows how contemporary authors reconcile values of posmodern literary experimentation and traditional realism.

Chapter One

Postmodernism, Liberal Ironism, and Contemporary Storytelling

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty observes that “poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of private obsession with public need.”¹ In the process, he nimbly equates all fields of intellectual study and all avenues of creative pursuit, regardless of any pretensions of objective fact, isolated aesthetic craftsmanship, or national teleology, as nothing more or less than fertile sources of imaginative narratives, narratives hierarchical on the basis of imaginative potency rather than truth or accuracy. The absolutist tenets we habitually rely on—scientific principles, religious systems, versions of the past we cherish as true history—are transient constructs, shifting with the times, with the moods of the populace, with the whim of chance. Accordingly, Rorty celebrates a most romantic vision of iconoclastic genius, in which grandness of inspiration is what counts, ultimately, in our most potent philosophers, scientists, and novelists (poets all, to his eye); he is particularly drawn to those thinkers, those poets, who “try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as quasi-divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance.”²

To many thinkers, such a relativist outlook might seem destined to result in a moral vacuum, but even as he posits these theories Rorty dedicates his own narrative to the fervent encouragement of those thinkers who “include among [their] ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.”³ Although by his own philosophy liberalism’s program in which “cruelty is the worst thing we do” can be nothing more than one in a spectrum of compelling and competing narratives, he is adamant that it nevertheless is or should be an inarguable tenet of civilized life. Pain and causality, he insists, are non-linguistic truths, a statement denying virtually every sentiment of modern critical theory, including, especially, his own.

Rorty is well aware that in this he seems to be committing himself to a grievous contradiction in terms, but he remains unruffled by charges of schizophrenia. Indeed, an embrace of contradiction is at the heart of his philosophy; simultaneously elitist and populist, theoretic and pragmatic, ironic and sincere, poetic and political, he represents a middle space, an unique equipoise, built upon his Quixotic desire to prove that in a world in which contingency and irony rule, the advocating of solidarity remains feasible and viable. Dedicated to substantiating his claim through art, specifically literature, he practices dexterous evasions and subterfuges in his readings designed to uncover conscience even where only aestheticism and isolationism seem apparent. The moral onus lies, finally, on the reader, to the point that it hardly seems to matter whether the strong poet in question writes solely for himself, toward some personal theory of art, or whether he aspires to galvanize readers by addressing those contemporary social issues and structures that concern him most deeply. Thus it is that Rorty’s paradigmatic authors, Nabokov and Orwell, fulfill his ideal but represent polar oppositions, Nabokov’s work suggesting self-absorption and Orwell’s, certainly, social-absorption, even didacticism. Rorty does not examine, however, the poet who occupies the precarious position in which many of our most vital and conscientious novelists find themselves, both extolling ironism like Nabokov and encouraging solidarity like Orwell; Rorty serves as an illuminating model for these writers, though, because he himself fills this role, because the embrace of paradox he labels liberal ironism is the challenge increasingly taken up by writers like Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O’Brien.

Like Rorty, the contemporary novelist faces a new world of contingency and irony, inheriting a medium decisively wrenched from its realistic or pragmatic mooring by the exploratory literature of the sixties and seventies and the influx of much European thought on linguistics, semiotics, and ideology (both comprising the entrenchment of what is generally labeled postmodern fiction and postmodern theory, though Rorty dismisses that identifier as “rendered almost meaningless by being used to mean so many different things”⁴). Novelists like Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Vonnegut and Reed have fostered upon us the realization that the novel is the blandest of conventions, laying bare the malleability of the human mind in its easy mastery of the reader, its capacity to infiltrate our dreams and craft our attitudes. In their terms, our celebration of “realistic” writers like Updike, McGuane, Stone, Tyler, Carver, Irving, Bellow, Ford and Malamud represents a mute acceptance of the logocentric authority against which Rorty cautions. But postmodern indulgences of form, plot, and self-consciousness threaten an irreconcilable schism in contemporary fiction between non-ambitious mainstream writing that remains largely traditional or mimetic in form and more profoundly observant work that is nevertheless self-absorbed, elitist, and erudite to distraction. Where Rorty’s liberal ironist reader must establish a middle ground in his interpretations between values of genius and values of social utility, the liberal ironist novelist must maintain a middle ground in his writings between realism and antirealism, edification and esoterica.

For more than three decades, theorists retaining traditionalist or moralist leanings have attempted to identify writers who mediate in this fashion between “conventional” and postmodern values of the novel. Alan Wilde’s Middle Grounds, perhaps the representative example, asserts the increasing prominence of “mid-fiction,” referring to the work of Stanley Elkin, Thomas Berger, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley and Pynchon (The Crying Of Lot 49 only) which rejects both “the oppositional extremes of realism on the one hand and a world-denying reflexivity on the other, and that invites us instead to perceive the moral, as well as the epistemological perplexities of inhabiting and coming to terms with a world that is itself ontologically contingent and problematic.”⁵ Dissatisfied with the “moral catatonia” found in much-acclaimed minimalist fiction by Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, Wilde labors to find in his authors parabolic examples of “how to deal with the world,” a successful equipoise, like Rorty’s, amid the flux of perception, a willingness to “live with and in the untidiness of existence.”⁶ Wilde’s plea is for humanist fiction, defined as featuring not only an eternally inquisitive mind but a valuing of the individual and an insistence on tolerance; yet in practice he often seems to be grafting moral significance onto texts which lack the wherewithal to maintain it. Thomas Berger’s Who Is Teddy Villanova?, for example, is, like Auster’s early “City Of Glass,” a satire of the language and structure of the hard-boiled detective novel, gleefully rooting out convention until the effects on the reader parallel those wrought on its hero by villain Washburn: “to remove the sense of wonder is often tantamount to emasculation.”⁷

Most of the other works Wilde describes do not move beyond a philosophic or linguistic understanding of contingency to address its frequent eruptions into political, social, and religious issues. Instead, there is a very self-absorbed whimsy in many of these works; though Wilde bases his reading of Barthelme on the “background of daily life”⁸ found in his writing, there is little in the seminal The Dead Father, or the somewhat misleadingly titled collection City Life, akin to the wide-reaching depiction of such life in Tom Wolfe’s realist-throwback The Bonfire Of The Vanities, or, on the postmodern end, in the roving thematic exploration of the far more textually challenging Gravity’s Rainbow.

Unlike Wilde’s authors, Auster, DeLillo, Johnson and O’Brien clearly evolve away from the extremes of authorship represented by Pynchon and Wolfe. DeLillo and Auster are initially much nearer the postmodern end, DeLillo especially, as he is drawn to the benchmarks of postmodern writing—excess, play, and a Derridean exposure of the unreliability of language. Auster, more influenced by French poetry and existentialist writing than by postmodernists like Pynchon or Coover, gravitates toward “white spaces” (what Roland Barthes calls “writing degree zero”), in which what is unsaid is more important than what is. Even more than DeLillo, he is interested in the way language functions (or hardly functions), and, correspondingly, in the mechanics of literary expression, specifically the question of what transpires in the gray area between the writing and the final interpretation of the text by the audience. While this last interest would seem to represent a stronger awareness of the readers role than is present in DeLillo’s early approach, which expressly admits its disdain for the audience, Auster’s defamiliarization of the story process in his early novels is so complete that narrative as narrative, as opposed to the idea of narrative, is enervated to the point that it can no longer “move” his readers. Yet Auster’s 1999 novel Mr. Vertigo is, while fantastic in nature, a far more conventional narrative than his earlier and very self-reflexive New York Trilogy (1985–1987), just as DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece Underworld, though a long and challenging text, is nowhere near as dauntingly self-conscious as his earlier metanovel Ratner’s Star.

Johnson and O’Brien, on the other hand, are public-oriented from the start. Johnson posits an ethnic voice to counter the hegemonic (white) voice of American fiction, a gesture that could be seen as mischievous, as disruption, as play, but he is determined to make comprehensible and constructive statements about racial consciousness in this country, aspiring to a “philosophic fiction” with specific lessons to be learned, specific values to be uncovered, a systematic broadening of the mind of his readers. O’Brien firmly grounds himself in the war narrative tradition, his voice an amalgam of the straightforward style of Hemingway and an adamantly moral tone increasingly rare in the modern novel. In his first book, the autobiographical If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, he declares his intention to “expose the brutality and injustice and stupidity and annoyance of wars and those who fight them…when I was released, I would find other wars; I would work to discover if they were just and necessary, and if I found they were not, I would have another crusade.”⁹ O’Brien stresses that this is the immaturity of a young soldier speaking, but nevertheless such sentiment is vastly different from any expressed in Auster’s and DeLillo’s early work—and the fire and conviction, if not necessarily the idealism, still persist in the older, battle-scarred O’Brien. But both writers find, according to pattern, that the novel is a more contingent entity than they had foreseen, that they cannot easily re-center what the postmodernists have de-centered, and thus in the spirit of Rortyian compromise they engage this contingency to tell their stories more effectively.

In this they are joined by DeLillo and Auster, overcoming their reluctance to address the audience, overcoming a maxim much taken to heart by contemporary novelists: only the misunderstood work survives. H.R.Jauss, using the initially controversial but unpopular Madame Bovary as an example, believes that the greatest works confound the assumptions of their initial audience, their lasting value resting in an “aesthetic distance” he defines as “the disparity between the given layer of expectations and the appearance of a new work, whose reception can result in a ‘change of horizons’ through negation of familiar experiences or through raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness.”¹⁰ Jauss implicitly suggests a writer’s mandate: write for the future; write the novel that will stultify the masses; take comfort in the fact that later in history such works will be cherished for their innovation. As Peter Aaron, the narrator of Auster’s Leviathan, explains: “books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they’re written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”¹¹

Yet a sense of responsibility toward contemporary readers continues to haunt these writers, as epitomized by the fact that they all, as we will see, share a very prominent motif in the storyteller’s journey, in which the storyteller enacts the circle more customarily carried out by his hero: a self-banishment from the tribe; an accumulation by trial of knowledge and experience; an eventual return bearing power and insight. A typical example can be found in DeLillo’s Mao II, in which the work of noted and reclusive writer Bill Gray reflects, in the eyes of his assistant Scott, “people’s need to make mysteries and legends.” His novels “made Scott think of the great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and staging messianic returns.”¹² Such a conflation of modern artist, ancient storyteller, and mythic hero is nothing new; of the tribal storyteller, Freud writes: “he goes and relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented. At the bottom this hero is no one but himself.”¹³ John Gardner describes how the Romantics “took upon themselves” various mythic roles including both the “heroic mode” and “the singer of the hero’s deeds.”¹⁴ But the contemporary manifestation of this mythic alter ego is as doubt-wracked as he is powerful, either repulsed by images of primitive tribesman cowering in caves or menaced by images of brutish Neanderthals huddled ominously around a fire, a poet-priest trepidaciously debating the cost of his journey, the worth of story, even as the fate of his tribe hangs in the balance.

Modern texts that repeatedly reference the primeval storyteller are referencing our primal need for narrative and our primal capacity to understand it; as such, they focus on rudiments of narrative such as plot progression and character development, building blocks of the novel that have often seemed opposed to the style and self-awareness that is also essential to its art. The novelist has always struggled with this primacy of story; it was only with great reluctance that E.M.Forster admitted that “the novel tells a story. That is its fundamental aspect without which it could not exist…and I wish that it were not so, that it could be something different—melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.”¹⁵ John Barth suggests, though, that we have finally evolved beyond this low form. Unlike Joseph Campbell, who asserts that myth is alive wherever the reader of fiction can find in art constants relating to the human condition—” what, then, is both grave and constant, irreducible and inevitable, in this scene of conflict and death?”¹⁶—Barth insists that our ties to the world of myth have been severed and can be re-experienced only through ironic recapitulation, imitation, or satire; the culprits are an era of diffuse literary experimentation and the infringement of advanced technology on the modern consciousness. Barth “deplores” those who ignore “the whole modernist enterprise” and the influence of “Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions…and now nuclear weaponry and television and microchip technology…. There’s no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens and company except on nostalgia trips.”¹⁷ Such shallow readers, he argues, are clinging to “middle class realism.”

Realism has long been the central precept of the Novel’s unique variety of myth-making, according to Ian Watt, who matter-of-factly identifies a form “under an obligation to satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned [and] the particulars of times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms.”¹⁸ But this precept, in the eyes of writers like Barth, cannot conceal the “fact” that, as Tzvetan Todorov observes, the novel is “sheer distortion. What exists first and foremost is the text itself, and nothing but the text…. Novels do not imitate reality, they create it.”¹⁹

Such writers are unbothered by the fact that the ultimate distancing from readers is a dismissal of the world, their world, its realistic core. Even Rorty, flamboyant subjectivist that he is, feels it is necessary to remind his reader that there is an objective reality, a world “out there,” even if there is no truth “out there:” “to say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space or time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states.”²⁰ Brian McHale, on the other hand, wants little to do with “common sense,” rejoicing in the postmodern “plurality of universes,” in which ontological exploration “is not necessary to seek some grounding for our universe; it might just as appropriately involve describing other universes, including ‘possible’ or even ‘impossible’ universes.”²¹ William Burroughs, in accordance with McHale’s theories, does not conceal the world as much as eliminate it altogether. According to Ihab Hassan, the postmodernists emulate Burroughs’s trailblazing, his “complex desire to dissolve the world—or at least to recognize its dissolution—and to remake it as absurd or decaying or parodic or private.”²²

Burroughs’s approach in Naked Lunch is to unleash a stream-of-consciousness barrage of grotesqueries, horrors, and sexual abuses, all presumably reflective of the “copulating rhythm of the universe.”²³ Frank Kermode, insisting that “there is still a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to [the world],”²⁴ finds no such “human” structure—no structure, moral or otherwise—in Burroughs’s “avante garde” novel, which to his eyes is “unified only by the persistence in its satirical fantasies of outrage and obscenity.”²⁵ Yet theorists like Sontag discover in it instead a pattern and a harmony, a cohesion found not in theme but in “the principles of (and balance between) variety and redundancy.”²⁶ We rec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Postmodernism, Liberal Ironism, and Contemporary Storytelling
• Chapter Two: Social Realism in the Postmodern Age
• Chapter Three: “Middle Class Realism” and the Acceptance of the Reader
• Chapter Four: Morality and Solidarity in the Ironic Novel
• Chapter Five: “Evil is the Movement toward Void”: Self-Absorption, Play, and the Ambiguous Gift of Genre in the Early Novels of Don DeLillo
• Chapter Six: “Entropy and Efflorescence”: To and From the Zero in the Early Novels of Paul Auster
• Chapter Seven: “Nobody Would Believe a Word”: Sincerity amid Terror in the Early Novels of Tim O’Brien
• Chapter Eight: “Father’s Gift of Mythopoesis and Love”: Conflicted Voices in the Early Charles Johnson
• Chapter Nine: “The Days of Being a Shadow Are Over”: The Ironic Narrative in Practice
• Chapter Ten: “Others First”: Approaching Solidarity
• Afterword: “Create the Counternarrative”: Writings in a New Century
• Notes
• Bibliography