A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot

Abstract

There is perhaps likely to be a general quickening of interest in the concepts of time and history towards the end of a millennium. Stephen Hawking's best-seller, A Brief History of Time (1988), which explains to the non-specialist the complex physics of time and space, is a manifestation of this interest. Without attempting to trace in any detail connections between scientific theories of time and those in the wider cultural context, Hawking was working on a theory which posited the dissolution of the time boundaries of the universe (its beginning and end) in the 1970s, the time that literary theorists were deconstructing the idea of linear time and novelists dramatizing this chronological confusion.[1] Postmodern fiction is often and appropriately characterized by a concern with ontological categories, an exploration of the boundaries between fact and fiction, the world and the text. Lyotard makes the basic or commonplace distinction 'between the time it takes the painter to paint the picture (time of production), the time required to look at and understand the work (time of consumption), the time to which the work refers (a moment, a scene, a situation, a sequence of events: the time of the diegetic referent, of the story told by the picture)', stating: 'This principle, childish as its ambitions may be, should allow us to isolate different sites of time.'[2] Childish or not, postmodern theorists are often too credulous of postmodern literature's ability to disturb the reader's ontological categories, including the distinction between real time and time in a parallel fictional world, because they fail to put themselves in the position of the 'naive' (non-academic or recreational) reader whose literary 'competence' facilitates the absorption of metafictive elements into the fictional world. The novels discussed below deconstruct linear time through thematic and/or plot devices, but it will be argued that where postmodern plot disrupts causality and coherence to a significant extent, the 'story' (here meaning both the temporal-causal chain of events and 'yarn') will suffer as will its potential to disrupt ontological-chronological categories. The concept of linear time, or 'classical' time, can be found in Aristotle's Physics, although its very existence as a divisible entity is immediately called into question: 'The following considerations would make one suspect that it either does not exist at all or barely, and in the obscure way. One part of it has been and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet. Yet time -- both infinite time and any time you like to take --is made up of these.'[3] This time can be objectively measured because 'change is always faster or slower, whereas time is not; for fast and slow are defined by time -- fast is what moves much in short time, slow is what moves little in a long time; but time is not defined by time, by being either a certain amount or a certain kind of it' (p. 371). It is, however, dependent on motion: 'For it is by means of the body that is carried along that we become aware of the before and after in the motion, and if we regard these as countable we get the now' (p. 372). This 'now is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and future time), and it is a limit of time (for it is the beginning of the one and the end of the other) (p. 375). The fact that this 'now' is both 'link' and 'limit' is highly significant for any deconstruction of time since it functions both to separate and to mediate the binary opposition of past and future. In fact Aristotle raises, though he does not finally endorse, the possibility of a radical deconstruction of linear time, when he remarks: If coincidence in time (i.e. being neither prior nor posterior) means to be in one and the same 'now', then, if both what is before and what is after are in the same 'now', things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened to-day, and nothing would be before or after anything else. …