Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Abstract

Conte, Joseph. 2002. Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. $59.95 hc. $24.95 sc. 312 pp.Academics interested in postmodern theory will enjoy Joseph Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Its theoretical conjectures-if problematic-are nevertheless bold and interesting, and Conte's application of theory to individual works yields remarkable interpretations. Taking his lead from works like N. Katherine Hayles's Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), Conte further develops and applies chaos theory to postmodern literature, explicating it in context of United States. Here, he examines numerous authors, prominent among them John Hawkes, Kathy Acker, Don Delillo, and Thomas Pynchon.His theory of postmodern literature, like Fredric Jameson's, envisions a permanent and irreparable breach between modernist and postmodernist works. Using Thomas Kuhn's proposal that scientific progress proceeds via radical paradigm shifts, Conte asserts modernist science and literature have been superceded by new paradigm of postmodern science and literature. Citing authors ranging from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Conte reads modernism and traditional science as part of outmoded paradigm which obsessively seeks to reality because of a latent fear of and unpredictability. This results in a modernist political aesthetic whose concern for centering control approaches fascism (2002, 11).However, artist or scientist working in emerging postmodern paradigm does not fear such instability and uncertainty. Following Jean Francois Lyotard, postmodern artist has incredulity toward metanarratives and expresses affinity for-rather than aversion to-forms of disorder (Lyotard qtd. in Conte 2002, 6, 8). Thus, postmodernist also dispenses with modernism's binary distinction and hierarchy of order/disorder, replacing it with attitude resembling two primary branches of chaos theory, which investigate order as possible emanation of disorder, and chaos as one possible result of overly stringent order-the process by which one becomes other (9). One sees and disorder's intertwining relationship through each novel's world building-a task indicative of order-and the inventive form of novel, most prominent feature of which is nonlinear narrative-a form suggesting (2).I particularly liked Conte's reading of John Hawkes's Travesty, wherein he emphasizes emerging from disorder. In imagination of a suicidal driver-narrator, we see a beautiful, well-engineered sports car obliterated in an 'accident . . . perfectly contrived by narrator himself. This, of course, is paradoxical, since it challenges binary opposition between deterministic and stochastic, event that has a causal relation to its antecedent and one that is purely result of random processes (2002, 38). While driver has planned accident, it is also possible that unintended accident may occur while driver speeds to his intended destination, side of old farmhouse. Thus, we have order, but unavoidable possibility of chaos. Though story's entirety takes place in car as it zips to intended destination, Conte submits that linearity remains suspended as the narration refutes any claim to suspense as a means of galvanizing reader's attention (34). …