The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

Abstract

Early in her compelling first book, Succeeding Postmodernism (2014), Mary K. Holland posited a new conception of experimental fiction, asserting that the growing body of contemporary novels that have “shift[ed] their foci toward the real, the thing, and presence, and away from the sign, word, and absence” provides ample evidence of “a new mode of realism, poststructural realism, that produces ‘reality effects’ not by repressing the machinations of fiction, as does traditional realism, but by making them visible via metafiction” (7). In confronting the received wisdom about the linguistic turn’s evacuation of the human from fiction, Succeeding Postmodernism proceeds to articulate the provocative thesis that today’s fiction employs poststructuralism’s tenets “toward the ends of realism and humanism.” So understood, the literature succeeding postmodernism seeks to reconcile language’s fundamental limitations by addressing them directly, resulting in texts that have come to be described generally, and perhaps imprecisely, as metafiction. Through an analysis of such works as Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), A. M. Homes’s Music for Torching (1999), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Holland presents a nuanced reading of contemporary literature’s departure from postmodernism, arguing that “twenty-first-century fiction” firstnotes the fundamental antihumanist and poststructural assumptions that remain in place in [postmodern] fiction— arbitrary language, multiplicitous and subjective truth, the defense of particularity and difference—while illuminating the humanist pursuits, of truth, critique, self-knowledge, and empathy, leading to community, that develop doggedly out of them. (15)However, the argument explored in Succeeding Postmodernism, persuasive though it is, remains almost wholly focused on the first part of the term “poststructural realism,” and so by necessity largely assumes the stability of the equally problematic second part.In The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism, Holland continues the work she began in her first book, taking on the endlessly vexed notion of realism by offering a framework for understanding it beyond the contentious and irresolvable debates about what it means to refer to certain writing as realistic. Instead of quibbling over which features distinguish realism and set it apart from anti-realism, Holland, echoing Ian Watt (1957), initiates her discussion by explaining that attempts to demarcate realism’s territory only succeed in returning us to the “invidious suggestion” that anything other than traditional realism “pursue[s] the unreal” (10). Establishing the terms of her argument in the preface, Holland asksIs there any writing . . . that doesn’t assume an outside world about which it can communicate? What would writing that doesn’t make that assumption look like? Can you think of any? Of all the “anti-realist,” “experimental,” “conceptual” . . . literature I read and teach and write about, none of which looks much like traditional realist literature, I can’t think of any that does not intend to communicate about the world we live in. (xiv)Through Moral Worlds Holland proceeds to refine the concept of “poststructural realism” presented in Succeeding Postmodernism, positing it as an umbrella term that includes “metafictive realism” (chap. 1), “material realism” (chaps. 2 and 3), and “quantum realism” (chaps. 4 and 5), which together compose the approaches taken by contemporary fiction to convey a model of reality that includes the uncertainty and relativism of quantum mechanics and poststructuralism. Rather than attempt to formalize a body of conventions or techniques that define realism, a project that would inevitably reestablish the binary she seeks to dissolve, Holland argues that literature’s evolution from the postmodern period to the post-postmodern—a term synonymous with “contemporary” as it is used throughout Moral Worlds—is a reflection less of contemporary fiction’s greater fidelity to the conventions of realism than of how our understanding of reality has caught up to scientific discovery and the consequent changes made to prevailing models of reality. In other words, texts such as DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001)— discussed at length in chapter 5—that might once have looked like experiments of anti-realist fiction, now read like attempts to dutifully convey the bizarre reality of the quantum universe through “quantum realist” fiction.In her opening chapter on “metafictive realism,” Holland concentrates on pieces from Wallace’s short story collections, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004), and posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011), in order to illustrate the subtle adaptation of metafiction that post-postmodern authors make in order to escape postmodernism’s involuted logocentrism and return the ambit of the signified to a presumed physical reality. Expanding on her conception of metafictive realism, Holland states thatrealism in the twenty-first century, born of poststructural notions of language, and into a culture steeped in irony and winking metamoments, harnesses traditionally anti-Realist tools such as nonlinear, nonchronological, and multiple narration, hypertext, self-reflexivity, and metafiction, in order to represent a highly signification-oriented textual world that feels as real to us as did the visually mimetic fiction of a more empirically minded nineteenth century: poststructuralism turned toward the ends of realism. (56)Making a careful distinction between kinds of metafiction—which suggests that metafiction may be an inexact term—Holland contrasts Wallace’s work to that of one of his most widely recognized influences, John Barth, claiming that while Barth saw in the “self-reflexivity” of metafiction a means of exposing the truth of the world’s artificiality, Wallace “views metafiction as revealing the truth of the artifice inherent in fiction.” So whereas postmodern authors employed metafictive techniques to direct the reader to conclude that the world, like the postmodern text, was artificial, post-postmodern authors employ them to signal their knowledge of the perspective of postmodern authors. And by displaying such knowledge, post-postmodern authors like Wallace effectively wield “traditionally anti-Realist tools” in order to perform “the social critique characteristic of pre-modernist realism” (36), thus “bend[ing] metafiction into the service of emotion, connection, and human need” (60). Through extensive discussions of Wallace’s fiction, Holland concludes that metafictive realism is capable of “using language to connect readers not only to other readers, texts, and writers, but to their own embodied experience of the world around them” (70).In the chapters on “material realism,” Holland confronts the conceptualization of language inherited from poststructuralism and the enduring notion of language’s inherent ephemerality by illuminating the branch of contemporary fiction concerned with “reimagining generic and textual form by making visibly meaningful the language of which all texts are made, and the visual and tactile features of printed texts” (110). For Holland, such works as J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and the fiction of Steve Tomasula show how formal experiments—inserting miscellany between pages, die-cutting pages, presenting atypical patterns of textual arrangement—function to return the reader’s attention to the material properties of the novel in order to emphasize the material reality of the world.Together, these texts’ various techniques for emphasizing literature’s materiality are “more than another kind of formal play or rejection of the literary status quo,” because they “participat[e] in the period’s debates about the abilities and dangers of language not just to mean but to impact the real world” (111). These debates, prefigured in the discussion of metafictive realism, center on the ramifications of the linguistic turn, including the presumption that literature cannot truly represent the real world because the model of the divided sign—that is, the unbridgeable division between signifier and signified—guarantees language’s radical isolation and thus our own coextensive isolation within its prison house. Taking up poststructuralism’s interpretation of language specifically, Holland argues that material realist texts seek to reimagine “the fundamental aspects of reality” that “we have lost sight of” while “we have been so long fixated on language” (124). Registering the advent and proliferation of digital text after the linguistic turn, when “even our ideas about materiality, language, and the possibilities for literature can never be the same” (116), material realism “enacts and reflects our changing notions of reality, the real world, and matter itself” (144). Holland anchors this discussion of material realism with an examination of several of Tomasula’s works, including VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009). Together, these indicate how material realist texts respond to the “late twentieth-century anxiety that technology will make art, its testimony, and perhaps the material world disappear” (109) through the composition of texts that emphasize their materiality and so “assert the importance of the material in a world becoming increasingly virtual” (100). By presenting an argument for how authors of contemporary fiction have come again to believe in literature’s potential as a means of engaging and intervening with the real world, the chapters on metafictive and material realism provide an insightful account of how post-postmodern literature sets itself apart from postmodernism through a combination of formal innovations and a renewed faith in language’s ability to do more than refer only to itself.Quantum physics, like poststructuralism, offers arresting conclusions about the nature of reality, typified by such declarations as, “What quantum mechanics says is that nothing is real and that we cannot say anything about what things are doing when we are not looking at them” (Gribbin 1984: 2). Studies exploring quantum mechanics in the context of literary criticism, including Susan Strehle’s Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992) and Samuel Coale’s Quirks of the Quantum: Postmodern Contemporary Fiction (2012), have almost uniformly sought to emphasize the similarities between quantum mechanics and poststructuralism, using quantum mechanics as supporting evidence for a poststructural vision of the world along the lines of “nothing is real.” Holland’s discussion of “quantum realism” counters this trend by using Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (2002), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and DeLillo’s The Body Artist to explain how quantum realist novels—works that embrace paradox in order to explore such heady concepts as superpositions, quantum uncertainty, and the infinite worlds hypothesis—ultimately highlight the fundamental paradox of literary realism itself: “the complicated, paradoxical truth that the closest a human being can get to inhabiting the full reality of the universe is to know she can never inhabit the full reality of the universe, . . . that the reality we attempt to convey through art is itself a screen for a truer reality to which we have no access” (240).This line of thought sets up Moral Worlds’s most significant insight: language, the sole, imperfect system of accessing and representing reality, does not inhibit our ability to engage with the world but, rather, precisely because of its limitations, parallels the human experience of limited sensory perception. “The mistakes language makes in representing the real,” Holland argues, “are the same mistakes we all make in processing experience, in experiencing being itself. In this way, language actually is continuous with human experience, not alien to or cut off from it, and is our best way of understanding and interacting with a reality whose ‘deep physical laws’ we cannot comprehend” (153). Continuing with the premise that “changes in how we view the world necessitate changes in how we represent the world,” Holland argues that quantum realism, “a mode of writing . . . that requires metafictive and other anti-Realist techniques” (156), seeks to account for a non-Newtonian model of reality that does not square with our empirical, human experience. By matching an awareness of its own limitations as a medium for representing “a reality beyond our imaginations” (236) with innovative formal devices, quantum realism stands at the forefront of contemporary literature.As she does in the conclusion of Succeeding Postmodernism, Holland returns in the conclusion of Moral Worlds to the debate over what to call the period following postmodernism. Rather than add to the crowded field of terms that now includes, among many others, Alan Kirby’s “digimodernism” (2009: 1), Lee Konstantinou’s “postirony” (2016: 37), and Adam Kelly’s “New Sincerity” (2016: 198), all attempting to name the period of contemporary literary fiction, Holland instead clarifies her ambivalence toward the term “post-postmodern” by saying that “capitulating to ‘post-postmodernism’ feels to me like handing over today’s big-hearted, aggressively alive fiction to the zombiefied afterlife of a period that is already dead” (255). Far from endorsing “post-postmodernism,” which she refers to as “the stutter of postmodernism” (254), Holland uses the conclusion to reiterate her vision of poststructural realism as the aesthetic dominant of the current period, whatever it eventually comes to be called. However, readers keen on Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism (2012), or similar texts that see in the duplicative name certain merits worthy of endorsement, might be dissatisfied with this vision. Ultimately, Holland’s choice not to rigorously engage with Nealon’s work reflects her decidedly aesthetic theorization of recent fiction, a disposition that likewise informs Moral Worlds’s disengagement with the robust body of recent criticism on neoliberalism’s relationship to contemporary literature.Holland’s equivocation respecting period naming does not detract much from Moral Worlds, especially given how clearly she develops her conception of realism in relation to poststructuralism throughout. And though the idea of a renewed morality remains on the margins of Holland’s arguments, it is the attention to poststructuralism that finally illuminates the meaning of the “moral worlds” referred to in the book’s title. Poststructuralism’s totalizing relativism led not only to “the reformulation of all branches of academic inquiry, including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and aesthetic theory” but also to “the recognition that the deep structure of language profoundly shapes every aspect of the human experience and of subjectivity itself” (17). Among the consequences of poststructural relativism is that “big things like truth, meaning, empathy, and morality” have been reduced to “an uncomfortable sum of multiple incommensurate representations of each” (64), leaving behind the flattened, amoral landscape so characteristic of postmodern fiction. The recent change in the nature of that landscape is a crucial distinction that Holland draws between the postmodern and the post-postmodern, as the “ethical ways of being and relating that had been rendered impossible” by poststructuralism have given way to an “awareness of our continuity with and responsibility toward all other beings and matter,” thereby allowing contemporary realism to create “fiction as a space for observing and experiencing empathy, and so also for reshaping the world in its ethical image” (185). Thus, poststructural realism’s “renewed intimacy—between reader and writer, between language and reality, between beings in the world” (260)—gives back to literature the power to produce moral worlds not just within texts but beyond them as well.