The Aberration of Starlight and/in Postmodernist Fiction

Abstract

Gilbert Sorrentino's novel, ‘Aberration of Starlight’, alludes to an experiment by James Bradley (1728) proving that the speed of light is enormously high, but limited. His technique consisted of a measurement of the angle, under which a given star could be observed. His experiments proved a tight connection between the direction of the Earth's movement and the angle of observation, resulting in a special angle of aberration of starlight; thus he could give a quantitative value for the velocity of light, taken from astronomical observations of a star, without employing any further technical device. Bradley's main idea consisted in the concept that an unknown speed might be measured by comparing it to the velocity of the observer, who has to fix his observations on one distant object. This idea may be traced in Sorrentino's novel, where he applies Bradley's concept to the description of 'moving subjects' whose only chance to register the developmental speed of another subject is to compare it – in a given coercive situation – to one's own rate of change. Analogous to Bradley's geometrical technique, Sorrentino applies methods of 'narrative triangulation', leading to a complex but systematically structured pattern of subjective interactions. Regarding this (rather technological) background, Sorrentino's novel is a neological fictional achievement, offering tightly knit correlations between the worldmaking of modern natural sciences and the narrative modes of (post)modern self- and world-composition.