RESISTING POSTMODERNISM: THE PARODIC MODE OF ANGUS WILSON’S NO LAUGHING MATTER A N D R Z E J G A S I O R E K U n iversity o f E ast A n glia A.NGUS Wilson’s much discussed No Laughing Matter (1967), his most in novative novel, is considered by many critics to be his finest work. Set in the twentieth century and located primarily in England, it is a grand fam ily saga that traces the fortunes of one family, the Matthews, focussing on the different paths in life taken by its various members. By giving almost all of his characters roles that take them to the heart of public life — ac tor, journalist, art collector, businesswoman, novelist — Wilson is able to explore their responses to some of the key events of the century’s history. Divided into five books, the novel begins in Edwardian England and then moves through a succession of dates (1919,1925-38,1946, 1956,1967) to the date in which it was published. However, No Laughing Matter is not sim ply an updated version of the totalizing nineteenth-century burgher novel. Through its multi-perspectival form, which entails several narrative view points, an elusive narrator, plays within the novel, and various pastiches of older literary styles, it both exposes the limitations of an earlier realism and pays tribute to its strengths. Several critics have focussed perceptively on the skill with which Wilson combines a self-reflexive analysis of the problem of representation with a dogged commitment to the nineteenth-century novel’s emphasis on social density and texture. Particular attention has been paid to Wilson’s use of pastiche, most notably by Malcolm Bradbury, who foregrounds this aspect of the novel in a persuasive article, but also by Kerry McSweeney, Jay Halio, and A.S. Byatt. These critics’ analyses have illuminated No Laughing Matter in various ways, but although the novel is replete with pastiches of different literary forms, its controlling mode, I would argue, is in fact that of par ody, within which the pastiches are placed and contained. While in some respects this distinction might seem to be gratuitous, I have Fredric Jame son’s influential remarks about the differences between parody and pastiche in mind, and I suggest that a reconsideration of Wilson’s novel in relation to these remarks will not only clarify its stance vis-à-vis contemporary post modernist fiction but also expose some problems in Jameson’s position. No Laughing Matter, multiple-voiced, unstable, carnivalesque, and linguistically English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 19 , 1, March 1993 self-conscious, might easily be taken for another postmodernist text. But if it is, then it is a singularly combative and oppositional one, which actively resists many of the assumptions embedded in other postmodern artifacts. Jameson’s work on the cultural logic of late capitalism offers a variety of thought-provoking reflections on the nature of the elusive and contradictory phenomenon it sets out to map. I am concerned here with only two as pects of his argument: his contention that postmodernism results in a loss of temporality, a dehistoricized sense of the present, the aesthetic corollary of which is depthlessness; and his further claim that parody, once potent and productive, has been displaced by motiveless pastiche, which treats the past as a museum of images that the cultural bricoleur can showcase in any number of arbitrarily chosen patterns. Postmodern society, for Jameson, is “bereft of all historicity” ; its “own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles” (18). Pastiche represents such a dehistoricized culture’s artistic mode par excellence. It is “blank parody,” or “speech in a dead language” ; it is “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists” (17). Pastiche is styleless; it replaces individual sig natures with codes, idiolects, and sign-systems, abandoning the attempt to represent history and to rejuvenate literary forms. Jameson’s argument is explicitly related to postmodernism. And although he acknowledges that contemporary culture...