- inktvis
- Dec 11, 2005
-
What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.
|
I never understood the definition of postmodernism and every time I think I do I encounter a book that I'm surprised is (or is not) considered postmodernistic.
Even Brian McHale, a scholar of postmodernism, and so someone professionally burdened with having to explain what it is, struggles with it. Here's his shot at highlighting the distinction from modernism in one of the better articles on the subject I've come across:
quote:This is the distinction that I developed. Modernist fiction was preoccupied with what we know and how we know it; with the accessibility and reliability of knowledge; it explored epistemological questions. Postmodernist fiction, by contrast, explored ontological questions - questions of being rather than knowing. It asked questions like those the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins once posed: “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” The change-over from modernism to postmodernism isn’t a matter of something absolutely new entering the picture, but of a reshuffling of the deck, a shift of dominant: what was present but “backgrounded” in modernism becomes “foregrounded” in postmodernism, and vice-versa. quote:The Sound and the Fury poses special challenges for the reader; in fact, it is notoriously difficult to read. It taxes our ingenuity and interpretative resources to the utmost; we must read between the lines, fill in the gaps, link up widely dispersed details, solve puzzles, and distinguish solid clues from red herrings. The Sound and the Fury is a detective novel, in a sense, but the detective is the reader. It is a novel about the difficulty of knowing anything for sure, or anything at all; it’s an epistemological novel. (And it’s no coincidence that the detective novel, in both its “classic” and its hard-boiled form, is an exact contemporary of the highbrow modernist novel; the detective novel is modernist fiction’s disreputable twin brother.)
Like The Sound and the Fury, Gravity’s Rainbow involves multiple quests for knowledge, but two in particular. A number of characters are trying to find out what happened at the last launch of a V-2 by a rogue German rocket commander in the waning days of the war; while the novel’s hero, an American lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop, is trying to find out what was done to him in his infancy when he was handed over to a behaviorist psychologist for experimentation. Other people are also interested in Slothrop’s childhood conditioning, so the “detective” in one of these epistemological quests is also himself the object of an epistemological quest. But something strange happens to all these quests for knowledge in the course of the novel: they bog down in a proliferation of possibilities and alternatives; they dissolve in ambiguity and uncertainty; they lose their way. Responsibility for this petering out of the novel’s epistemological quests rests with the instability of its world. The world of Gravity’s Rainbow is riddled with secondary worlds and sub-worlds, little enclaves of alternative reality, so many of them that in the end they fatally weaken and overwhelm the novel’s “main” world. We fall into characters’ hallucinations and fantasies, often without knowing that we’ve done so until much later; we mistake subjective realities for the outside world. We slip in and out of movies and staged performances, plays-within-the-play, so to speak. You know you’re in trouble when a major character, a British intelligence officer named Prentice, comes equipped, like a comic-book superhero, with a special talent - a talent for having other people’s fantasies, for literally taking over their fantasies and managing them for them. Prentice is a “fantasist-surrogate.” You see the difficulty: once Prentice enters the picture (which happens literally on the novel’s first page), we can never be sure which episodes might be fantasies that Prentice is managing on someone’s behalf; worse, we can’t be sure whose fantasy he might be managing.
Whether everyone else throwing the name about is operating on the same terms as McHale is another question.
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2014 22:43
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2024 05:40
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2014 22:43
