Postmodern Fiction Research Articles

Critique, hesitation, death: Reflections on Koos Prinsloo’s <i>Weifeling</i>

This paper focuses on Koos Prinsloo's Weifeling, the last collection of fiction to appear in the writer's brief career In this article it is argued that Prinsloo's work is characterized in the first instance by an oppositional practice driven by a will to reveal which involves, inter alia, a collapse of the distinction between the private and the public. This revelatory urge is, however, compromised by residual attachment and a self-reflective practice which deconstructs the identity of the self even as it is revealed Linda Hutcheon's description of postmodernism’s ethical stance as one of "complicitous critique" and a strategically modified version of her description of postmodernist fiction as “historiographic metafiction" are used to theorize this aspect of Prinsloo's writing, although the texts under discussion remain undeniably more critical than complicit in their practice. Finally, the confrontations with death in the closing texts of Weifeling are linked to Brian McHale's arguments about postmodernism's characteristic foregrounding of ontological differences.

Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, and: Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (review)

Reviewed by: Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, and: Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism Mária Minich Brewer Marleen S. Barr. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Foreword by Marge Piercy. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993. xi + 231 pp. Jenny Wolmark. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. xii + 167 pp. In her foreword to Lost in Space, Marge Piercy makes a pertinent distinction between cultural critics as “exilers” or “shepherds,” suggesting that Marleen Barr’s “heterogeneous yokings of disparate writers” under feminist fabulation makes her a shepherd on a mission of rescue. A sense of urgency pervades Barr’s call for feminist science fiction to resist becoming “lost in space”—marginalized as an alien, noncanonical branch of conventional science fiction—as well as her argument for its classification within a redefinition of postmodern fiction. “I view feminist fabulation,” Barr states, “as an umbrella term that includes science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and mainstream literature (written by women and men) that critiques patriarchal fictions.” Barr’s own readings practice exactly such a style of critical feminist fabulation. By turns academic, autobiographical, humorous, and critical, she brings together a variety of popular and literary texts, criticism, film, and visual art. The pleasure of reading Barr may be attributed to the insights gained from such energetic and “heterogeneous yokings.” At times, she seems carried away by the dynamic of these linkages, but she redirects readers to her central concern, the ways in which affinities between diverse cultural practices contribute to social change. The essays in the first section begin by treating feminist science fiction independently of Barr’s more inclusive term—feminist fabulation—but they progressively strain against the limitations of the science [End Page 214] fiction genre. For instance, she reads the film Thelma and Louise and its notion of “taking off” from patriarchy with reference to feminist science fiction and Jean Baudrillard’s ecstatic notion of the desert. Anne McCaffrey’s popular novel Dragonsong is brought together with Tillie Olsen as well as Hélène Cixous in terms of writing and difference. Barr proposes perceptive readings of utopian works by Suzy McKee Charnas, Zoë Fairbairns, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Sally Gearhart, Kate Wilhelm, and Joanna Russ, as well as women warrior novels by Elizabeth A. Lynn and Jessica Amanda Salmonson. In one essay, she challenges Joanna Russ’s opposition to men’s sex-role-reversal fictions, which the latter calls “flasher novels.” Instead of being taken as a “declaration of postmodern generic gender war” (Russ), these novels ought to be welcomed by feminist readers as a means to explore real-world gender problems. Piercy is thus read alongside Thomas Berger, Alice Jardine, and Paul Smith. One of the most resonant chapters is devoted to dystopian novels by Charnas, Fairbanks, Wilhelm, and Margaret Atwood, whom Barr reads in tandem with nonfiction critics of new reproductive technologies. She argues persuasively that feminist science fiction becomes blurred as a fictional genre when its representations of reproductive technology come so uncannily close to reality. Its warnings, as she stresses, need to be heeded. The second section, on feminist fabulation and feminist postmodernism, continues the trajectory beyond feminist science fiction initiated in the previous essays. Referring to Barbara Christian, Barr proposes that when Octavia Butler and Tiptree are no longer treated as literary aliens and “categorized with writers who focus on zap guns,” their focus on race, class, and gender can be seen as effective for social change. Their inclusion as postmodern feminist fabulators would prevent their texts and their critique of patriarchy and racism from being marginalized. Another major chapter in Barr’s book questions definitions of manhood in Herman Melville, Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Women in the Moon, Spielberg’s Hook, the TV show “Lost in Space,” Sheri Tepper, and Isaac Asimov. Salman Rushdie is read as a male postmodernist who writes about the visibility of women’s stories, as does novelist Marianne Wiggins. They both decree that the gender war is over and done with—a sentiment echoed by Barr for whom new alliances between postmodern writers can work...

The Translator as Hero in Postmodern Fiction

The idea that the translator is a heroic figure has not yet come of age, either in literature or in the world at large. The phrase 'Conan the Translator' does have a wonderful resonance, but literature offers few instances of translators acting out epic roles. Why should the idea of the translator as hero be so unexpected, so diverting? Even as the protagonist of a postmodern novel, the translator will inevitably acquire a certain aura, will seem larger than life, will project something, however tenuous, of the heroic. Moreover, in the modern world itself we have encountered the translator as tragic hero. He is Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, stabbed to death in 1991. He is Ettore Capriolo, translator of The Satanic Verses, stabbed, but not fatally, in the same month in Italy. But the fact remains that translation and heroic activity seem antithetical. The hero is easily recognized as the one who exudes an over-abundance of self. Our virtue as translators, on the other hand, apparently depends on a deficiency of self, on a high degree of 'negative capability'. Precisely our modesty, our willingness to play second fiddle, to meld into the identity of a primary creator, is often viewed as a precondition of successful translation. Are we not required, as translators, to be humble, selfless to the degree that we can take on the sensibility, style, and world view of the writer? Does not our lack of prestige and social status as translators mirror, alas, this negative capability? We are poorly paid and often anonymous, our names left off dust jackets and title pages, omitted from bibliographies and book reviews. When not wholly invisible, we appear as marginal figures indeed. Yet there are ancient precedents for an alternative view in which translation is conceived as an epic endeavour and the translator as heroic. In the legend of the Septuagint, the Hellenistic world gives us the prototype of the translator as cultural hero. The seventy translators of the Hebrew scriptures labour in isolation, each in his cell, in Alexandria,

Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson's SnowCrash

Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash David Porush (bio) Metaphysics in Cyberspace In William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, Case the barbarian hacker confronts Wintermute/Neuromancer, the new artificial intelligence he has helped to create, as a transcendent entity. “‘So you God now? . . . You running the show?” he asks Wintermute. Wintermute doesn’t deny it, he simply replies that he is now in contact with other beings like himself far out in the galaxy. The theme of meeting God in the computer is also taken up in other cybernetic fictions: In Foucault’s Pendulum (1986), Umberto Eco’s vision of Abulafia the transcendent computer is modeled on “routines” for cabalistic manipulation of the Hebrew alphabet (specifically, the letters of God’s Name) intended by their thirteenth-century originator—Abraham Abulafia—to merge the “user” with Godhead. A. A. Attanasio’s earlier SF novel Radix forcefully imagines a computer-god who goes mad after achieving divinity. In Vineland (1991), Thomas Pynchon portrays a cyborg device—the Puncutron Machine—providing a technologically assisted means to transcendent vision. 1 Our centuries-long romance with technology, especially technologies for abstracting different faculties of the mind like language, the alphabet, mathematics, the telephone, and so on—produced by the urgent compulsion to exteriorize our nerve net, to [End Page 537] achieve intimacy, to broaden the bandwidth of telepathic communications, to control and influence other minds—has already cyberspatialized us. This coevolution of human brain and communications tech has reached critical proportions in postmodernism, as we seem poised to leap across to some new cognitive-cultural state, heralded in near-apocalyptic imaginings about cyberspace and virtual reality. Yet, the emergence of metaphysical views on the postmodern literary scene is still surprising and represents a new turn, which this paper seeks to place in context. The literature of cyberspace, a sheerly technological artifact, almost always envisions VR as giving rise to extrarational experiences and effects, including communication with metaphysical godhead. At the simplest level, mere transcendence in cyberspace may flow from the way cyberspace will reorient the mind to the experience of sensuous information BODILESSLY—that is, bypassing the normal route for sensuous experience and initiating it directly in that infinitely plastic sensorium, the brain/mind: that homuncular body without an organ. Cyberspace already transcends the physical “meat” body by creating a simulated “meta” body in the brain and communicating with it directly via electrical implants (the details of which are never explained, but which Stanford neurophysiologists are already beginning to explore) 2 —that is, in very literal terms, it is meta-physical. Cyborg hackers take the next evolutionary step that was begun in Daedalus’s dream of flight to become electronic angels, freed from the laws of physics. For Jules Verne, new modes of transportation represented a conceptual breakthrough, as humans were liberated from their restrictive notions of their earthbound bodies in space and time. In the 1950s and 1960s, space [End Page 538] flight itself presented the vision of a new, paradigmatic relationship to the universe: “Space flight was the supreme myth of SF. Humanity, no longer Earthbound, would become somehow transcendent. The 50s and 60s were the romantic heyday of this myth.” 3 But by the 1980s, with the poetics of the space program reduced to the pedestrian (golf on the moon) and mundane (“shuttle” flights in near-orbit), and with the explosion of cybernetic concerns in the culture, focusing particularly on the brain-computer link, a new mythology emerges. Gibson’s striking descriptions of cyberspace in Neuromancer emphasize the “bodiless exultation” it gives the user, a soaring through metaspace, where the same mythology is reinscribed not in outer space but in Kantian inner space. Still, SF and postmodernism here come into conflict on the issue of metaphysics. Postmodernism has traditionally—if it is not altogether too soon to talk about a “traditional postmodernism”—framed radical critiques of contemporary culture that reject essentializing viewpoints (other than the impossibility of an essential viewpoint). So it is a bit astonishing to survey postmodern cybernetic or cyberpunk fiction and find these metaphysical points of view expressed so frankly. At the same time, postmodern fiction is also generally characterized by a critique of rationalism...

The play of the double in postmodern American fiction

The play of the double in postmodern American fiction

The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context

The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context Peter Baker Through the issues it raises, the kind of writing style it employs, and coming as it does in a series of other novels by Don DeLillo, Mao II demands to be treated seriously in the context of postmodern work and theory. Rather than spend time developing that theory explicitly, hooking in to the arguments presented by, say, Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, I want to develop a series of themes and meditations through a comparison of Mao II with two other texts that are roughly contemporary, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game (1992). That is, rather than attempt to define “postmodernism,” I will take as a given that all three of these works are postmodern and explore what this might mean. The comparison of DeLillo to Pynchon has become rather widespread, but Mao IIspecifically presents the character of a hyper-reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who may interestingly be compared to the real-life figure of Pynchon, whether or not we want to argue that Gray is “based” on Pynchon.1 The comparison with Jordan’s film rests principally on the way The Crying Game stages an encounter between a “terrorist” and a hostage that is not dissimilar from some of DeLillo’s meditations on this theme. As novelist Bill Gray travels, first to London, and finally to Lebanon, he seeks to engage the relationship he has theorized between novel-writing and “terrorism” through his own person. I want to argue that Gray (and maybe DeLillo as well) is fundamentally—and in Gray’s case, at least, fatally—mistaken in his view that equates the role of the novelist with that of the “terrorist.” As Jordan’s film carries this theme out, I think it becomes clear that the “terrorist” occupies a role more like that of the interpreter, and moreover, that this has something to do with our “postmodern condition.” There is beginning to emerge a critical consensus that Thomas Pynchon “is perhaps the preeminent practitioner” of English-language postmodern fiction (McHale 1992: 83). I want to argue briefly in this context that this is at least in part due to the fact that Pynchon’s work deals with historical materials exactly defining the parameters of the rise of the United States to the status of the world’s only superpower, roughly that period from the end of World War II to the Persian Gulf War known from “our” point of view as the Cold War. Edward Said’s recent epoch-making work, Culture and Imperialism, argues for an ongoing reinterpretation of the canonical works of the modern European/American tradition based on an examination of the relationship between imperialism and culture. Twenty or thirty years from now, anyone’s first reaction to hearing the phrase “the Western tradition” will not be “Great Books” or whatever catchphrase is currently being pushed by the pundits in The New Criterion and elsewhere; it’s going to be (and for many of us already is): imperialism.2 Said’s approach is not to reject the works of the western tradition, but to reexamine them in light of these geopolitical realities for how they reveal “a structure of attitude and reference” (62). Whereas Said’s primary cultural analysis concerns texts produced at the height of colonial experience, Verdi’s Aida, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kipling’s Kim, I would argue that the same kind of analysis could be used to examine works by such “preeminent” figures as Pynchon and DeLillo for what they say about U.S. imperialism and its deep and intricate relations to American culture. Such an analysis, to be adequate to Said’s complexity, would clearly have to go beyond assigning terms implying value judgments, such as “progressive” or “pessimistic.”3 I want to begin to explore some of the outlines for such a discussion with regard to the work of Pynchon, especially Vineland, before examining how some of these same issues are worked out by DeLillo in Mao II. Pynchon’s “big” book, Gravity’s Rainbow, principally concerns the time frame at the end of...

"I Follow My Eyes": An Interview with Clarence Major

It was during the period of turmoil and transformation of the 1960s that Clarence Major achieved literary recognition, initially as an editor, poet, and anthologist, and then - following the controversial publication in 1969 of his sexually charged, highly controversial novel All-Night Visitors from Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press - as one of postmodern fiction's most versatile and radical innovators. Major's publication was a pamphlet of (mostly forgettable) poems entitled The Fires That Burn in Heaven (1954); following a stint in the Air Force, Major began editing Coercion Review (1958-61), which gradually brought him into contact with such leading poetry figures as William Carlos Williams Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg. Over the years, Major has made editorial contributions to such journals as The Journal of Poetry, The American Book Review, and The American Poetry Review, as well as editing two collections of student work - Writers Workshop Anthology (1967) and Man Is a Child (1%9). He gained national attention with the publication of The New Poetry (1969), a controversial anthology of contemporary black poetry which he edited. Its eclecticism drew criticism from conservative and liberal factions of the black artistic community, who were both already heatedly discussing the implications of the Black Aesthetic being promoted by writers like Ishmael Reed, Ed Bullins, and Amiri Baraka. In addition to his creative work as a poet and fiction writer, Major has also published a wide variety of reviews, manifestoes and critical essays (some collected in his 1974 critical study The Dark and Feeling: American Writers and Their Work). Major's important poetry collection, Swallow the Lake (1970), explored some of interests that would recur in his later fiction (music, alienation and psychic dismemberment, male-female relationships, the relationship of art and reality, sex and death, etc.) in a wide variety of styles and voices. Three more collections followed rapidly: Private Line (1971), Symptoms & Madness (1971), and the Cotton Club (1972). Major's poetry is characterized by the same rich, unsettling mixture of humor and anger, passion and intellect, self-consciousness, free-wheeling energy, and formal daring found in his fiction. Because Major has mainly avoided the social realist mode favored by most black American writers in favor of expressionistic, metafictional modes, his fiction has subsequently been analyzed primarily in terms of its experimental or anti-realist features. Unfortunately, this focus has tended to relegate Major to the avant-garde ghetto, where his works have never attained the popularity or critical acclaim given his more publicly visible contemporaries such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed. However, as with many other figures from postmodernism's first wave of literary innovators, what once seemed anti-realistic to a generation raised on the illusionistic assumptions of traditional realism can today be recognized as new approaches to realism. These approaches either describe a reality that itself seemed unrealistic by earlier norms or, as seems more relevant for Major's work, find fresh methods to depict irrational contradictory inner lives and selves that resist traditional formulations. Many of the features of Major's fictions are in fact designed to give voice to various irrational impulges and contradictory versions of self and personal identity that traditional realism couldn't give expression to. Thus, Major's best fiction often presents a fiercely passionate vision o jagged, tortured beauty that is analogous to that found in Goya or van Gogh, Hendrix or Eric Dolphy. While such non-literary analogies are always suspect, they are appropriate in this case due to Major's convictions concerning the inadequacies of verbal logic, which sustains the realistic novel, as a means of conveying the truth about experience. …

The Ideology of Detection in Pynchon and Delillo

The description of Pynchon's Oedipa Maas above might once have served to describe Pynchon critics and, indeed, Critics of postmodernism generally. Emphasis on the epistemological and ontological uncertainties of self-reflexive and open-ended texts has for too long distracted attention from their social and political import. Even Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, who might be expected to be more receptive to the social meaning encoded in complex texts, have characterized postmodern fiction as apolitical pastiche or depthlessness–generalizations as premature as they have been influential. Almost as if in response to these critics, Pynchon has recently published a text ( Vineland [1990]) so ostentatiously political that it might well prompt a more socially conscious rereading of his entire oeuvre. This essay is a mere prolegomenon to such a rereading, spurred by Vineland and by the recent work of critics like Linda Hutcheon and Robert Siegle who have begun to see the formal innovations of postmodern fiction, not merely as intellectual puzzles, but also as responses to social context and as cultural interventions designed to effect change within that context.

Are you in the text?: The “literary performative” in postmodernist fiction

Based upon Austin's foundational concept of the performative, speech acts in which to say is to do, the concept “literary performative” describes statements in second person fiction which are actualized when read by any reader. The concept of the “literary performative” is tested with textual moments in three postmodernist works: John Barth's short prose piece “Life‐Story” Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City; and Halo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Naming, chronological discrepancies, and the encoding of gender are all shown to interfere with the execution of literary performatives. Yet botched performances effect the duplicitous stance of recognizing oneself as playing with the boundaries between “reality” and “literature”: the postmodernist project.

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader

Postmodern Characters: A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction , and: Narcissus from Rubble: Competing Models of Character in Contemporary British and American Fiction (review)

Postmodern Characters: A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction , and: Narcissus from Rubble: Competing Models of Character in Contemporary British and American Fiction (review)

Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation.

From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of of writing-the forgeries of George Psalmanazar; the production of fakelore; the ballad scandals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the imposture of Thomas Chatterton; and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. She emphasizes the issues that arise once language is seen as a matter of property, and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation. This valuable and pioneering work, originally published in 1991 (Oxford University Press), will be of interest to literary and legal theorists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars of eighteenth-century and postmodern culture.

“To Wielderfight His Penisolate War”: “The Lover's Discourse” in Postmodern Fiction

(1992). “To Wielderfight His Penisolate War”: “The Lover's Discourse” in Postmodern Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 63-79.

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (review)

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (review)

The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism

Surveys the fantastic in literature from the rise of the Gothic in the second half of the 18th century, through its heyday in the horror classics of the 19th century - from Frankenstein to Dracula - to its appearance in the postmodernist fiction of the present.

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader.

In making case for mimetic function in postmodern fiction, Jerry Varsava evaluates the American reception of postmodern fiction, challenging both the critics who condemn postmodernism as morally pointless and those who celebrate postmodern fiction for its aesthetic alone. He then advances view of mimesis: the reader of fiction, not the writer, establishes the text's reference to the world. Varsava interprets selected postmodern fictions in the second part of Contingent Meanings, applying his claim that such works in fact do relate to fundamental moral concerns in the late 20th century. In the works of Walter Abish, Robert Coover, Peter Handke, and Gilbert Sorrentino, Varsava demonstrates link between formal innovation and such contemporary issues as anti-Semitism, consumerism, the culture industry, the fetishization of high culture, gender politics, the narrativity of experience, and revisionist historiography. Postmodern fiction, Varsava concludes, may be viewed as a kind of 'critical realism' that depicts, however paradoxically, foibles of contemporary life.

Remarks, Notes, Introduction and Other Guest-Editorial Texts Prefacing Postmodern Culture's Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction

Remarks, Notes, Introduction and Other Guest-Editorial Texts Prefacing Postmodern Culture’s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction Larry McCaffery Dedication: For Ronald Sukenick and William T. Vollmann The Final Measurement: Guest-Editor’s Remarks Prefacing Postmodern Culture’s Special Fiction Issue Devoted to Postmodern Fiction I *Epigraphs* I. 1 Was there no end to anything? When would he reach the final measurement? William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows I. 2 As writers—& everyone inscribes in the sense I mean here— we can try to intensify our relationships by considering how they work; are we putting each other to sleep or waking each other up; and what do we awake to? Does our writing stun or sting? We can try to bring our relationship with readers to fruition that the site of reading becomes a fact of value —Charles Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption I. 3 “You see what’s happening here you take a few things that interest you and you begin to make connections. The connections are the important thing they don’t exist before you make this. This is THE ENDLESS SHORT STORY.” —Ronald Sukenick, The Endless Short Story II *Editor’s Preview of Contents for the Issue:* I. Epigraphs: I. 1. From William T. Vollmann I. 2. From Charles Bernstein I. 3. From Ronald Sukenick II. Editor’s Preview III. Editor’s Prefatory Note IV. This Is Not the Introduction: Games that Fiction Anthology Editors Play—Towards a Consideration of the Aesthetic Conventions of the Fiction Anthology as a Literary Genre. IV. 1 “. . . Unusual formal principles and aesthetic features . . .”? “. . . despite the inherent fascination involved . . .”? IV. 2 List of Fiction Anthology Categories and Potentially Useful Postmodern Applications IV. 3 Additional Bonus For Critics Developing a Postmodern Aesthetics of the Fiction Anthology Who Are Also Interested in Postmodern Music. IV. 4 Establishing the process of collaborative interactions between anthology’s editorial introduction and fiction selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity; summary of the absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from following out-dated approaches to such introductions; sequential listing of the topics resulting from adhering to these conventions. IV. 5 Postmodern Textual Practices and the Editorial Introduction V. Introduction: Cancelled (See Editor’s Apology) V. 1 Fiction Selections Coded for Postmodernist Features Appendix A: Kathy Acker introductory comments V. 2 Contributors’ Notes VI. Appendices B, C, D, E, F. Fiction Selections in the Issue: Kathy Acker, “Obsession” Robert Coover, “Title Sequence for The Adventures of Lucky Pierre” Ricardo Cruz, “Five Days of Bleeding” Rikki Ducornet, “From Birdland” Rob Hardin, “Dressed to Kill Yourself” Annemarie Kemeny, “Attempts on Life” Marc Laidlaw, “Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early Entries From The Secret Encyclopedia of Photography”) William T. Vollmann, “Incarnations of the Murderer” *III. EDITOR’S PREFATORY NOTE:* Waist Deep in the Big Muddy I began writing some of the following material in late May and early June 1992, just before I departed San Diego for a nine-week stay in Tokyo to begin work on a project (“Postmodernism in Japan”) funded by an N.E.H. summer research fellowship. Although traces of that initial draft remain embedded in the current version (mostly in Part V), what readers now have before them differs so significantly in content and approach from my earlier drafts that for all practical purposes the two are completely different texts. During that May-June period when I began to develop my editorial introduction, I had already accepted five pieces of fiction for the issue—this out of the total number of six or seven selections, agreed upon by myself and Eyal Amiran, Postmodern Culture’s co-editor, when I accepted his offer to guest-edit a focus of his and John Unsworth’s journal devoted to Postmodern Fiction. Thus I began my editorial introduction assuming that I had only to make an additional one or two selections for the issue, insert a few extra remarks into the draft of my introduction regarding the relevance of the new material to the issue as a whole, contact the authors when I returned from Tokyo on 8–31 to make certain they had sent Eyal their selections on computer...

POSTMODERN FICTION: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

POSTMODERN FICTION: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

POSTMODERN FICTION: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

POSTMODERN FICTION: A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, & Narrative Theory by R. Rawdon Wilson

R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, & Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990). xi, 317. $39.95 (U.S.) Rawdon Wilson’s title refers to a panel on an Attic black figure vase that depicts Palamedes standing over and observing Achilles and Ajax absorbed in a board game. Palamedes invented such games as a distraction for the Troy-bound heroes becalmed at Aulis. Wilson’s book, an exploration of “some phases of the analogy between games and literary texts, and . . . between play and both textual production and reception” (8), deals with a similar distraction/fascination, where the stake is meaning. A Renais­ sance scholar, Hispanicist, and student of postmodernist fiction, Wilson draws on narrative examples from The Faerie Queene and Don Quijote to Thomas Pynchon and Magic Realism. Sophisticated theoretical critique is accompanied by illuminating practical criticism. Wilson also engages in the poststructuralist/postmodernist device of incorporating outright fiction and ostensible anecdote in his discourse, and in the propaedeutic technique of leading the reader through mazes of false reasoning to arrive by negations at correct analyses. He anatomizes pertinent concepts of game and play meticulously. To generalize, games are closed rule-governed procedures, de­ terministic in nature, while play is open and stochastic. He concludes that literary texts are more play-like than game-like, for conventions, the rules of the literary game, exist as much to be violated as observed. Specific works may be modelled on games (chess and Through the Looking Glass) or incor­ porate games (ombre in The Rape of the Lock), and Wilson looks closely at the godgame, as Fowles terms it in The Magus, in which a victim is subject to the deceits of a master illusionist. The godgame is not an end in itself, however, but constitutes for the victim and/or reader a cognitive initiation. Altogether, the textual game is not a zero-sum affair but generates its own payoff in access to new meaning. Wilson canvasses several contemporary theoretical approaches to the ques­ tion of game and play in literature, principally those of Derrida and Bakhtin. Indeed, the chief contribution of In Palamedes’ Shadow to the development of theory is an effort to reconcile the central categories of these major fig­ ures. Derrida’s jeu libre, Wilson reminds us, is a fundamental condition of language that affects all writing inescapably, rendering it radically unsta­ ble, subject to a perpetual semantic Brownian motion that mocks authorial intention and critical interpretation. In contrast, while Bakhtin’s “carnival might well describe Derrida’s own wordplay . . . in dialogic terms, indicating how meaning can be created out of the agon between distinct monologic and incomplete utterances, carnival opposes free play” (66). It posits a possible 243 wholeness where Derridean play is committed to incompleteness. Neverthe­ less, Bakhtinian carnival fascinates Wilson as partaking of the character of both play and game, random movement and deliberate moves. The point of textual “gamefulness” is to excite and liberate the reader’s imagination. Wilson contemplates how little is required on the part of the text to stimu­ late the reader into extrapolating complex fictional worlds, in other words, to enter into a ludic mode that escapes the monologism of the familiar. Prob­ lems arising with the concept of intertextuality bring the Bakhtin/Derrida debate to a head. In the system of Derridean play, intertextual allusion escapes authorial intentionality, whereas with Bakhtin, it is a matter of au­ thorial decision. This is the crux: “The [intertextual] system plays through texts, and though it may be discerned . . . it cannot be controlled. The constitutive intentionality that Bakhtinian translinguistics ascribes to tex­ tual interplay must be an illusion.” But this is unacceptable in the face of the power of the Bakhtinian argument; thus “The ineluctable problem for the articulation of a theory of play in literature is whether one may have both Bakhtin and Derrida, free play and dialogism, within a single inclusive model” (211). Wilson is a good reader of Bakhtin, but he has not followed through sufficiently on the implications of Bakhtin’s admittedly problematic state­ ments regarding the dialogic principle. Briefly, putting the case in terms that borrow from science, dialogy and monology are in an asymmetric rela...