Causality and Mimesis in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

There's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. [. . .] The next great breakthrough may come when we have courage to junk cause and effect entirely and strike off at some other angle. Roger Mexico, probabilist and statistician, arch opponent of Pavlovian conditioning, thus expresses in Gravity's Rainbow credo of post-modern hero who threatens neat causal order of the elegant rooms of history. Causality is villain of post-modern melodrama. As secret wish to establish the stone determinacy of everything, it appears as diversionary tactics, a historical conspiracy to which even Pynchon will have to pay his toll: You [reader] want cause and effect. All right. To strike off at another angle, post-modern fabulator is confronted with task of scattering overpowering presence of causality at all levels of graphic structure, from particles of speech to segments of narrative. He is challenged to upset order of words, supposedly predetermined by God, Nature or Mind, to suspend misreading of signifier as cause of signified in order to dispel pre-semantic apprehension of causation as law of constitution of verbal sequence. Vorstellung operates first in shadow of Vorstellungsmechanik and encoding of object in mnemic systems of subject tends to constitute associative series, i.e., to reconstruct sequences subjected to a finality determined by privileged representations which Freud called Zielvorstellung, translated, revealingly enough, by purposive idea. This unconscious finality overpowering figure of speech production reigns supreme over constitution of narrative sequences properly so called. Chapter 23 of Aristotle's Poetics teaches us virtues, if not dogmatic necessity, of finality in narrative poetry, a finality, or telos which is endpoint of a logically constructed narrative process: telos, in sense of extremity in space and time is clearly superseded in Aristotle's analysis, by telos in sense of denouement of a finalized process resting on an appearance of causality.