Mcnab Christopher
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00 Alterity, Religion, and the MetaphySI*CS of Postmodernism Christopher McNab it Submissionin Candidaturefor Doctor of Philosophy University of Wales, Aberystwyth September1998 DECLARATION This work hasnot previouslybeen accepted in substancefor any degreeand is not beingconcurrently submitted in candidaturefor any degree. Signed (candidate) .......................................................................................... Date qF ......... ............................................................... STATEMENT 1. This thesisis the result of my own investigations,except where stated otherwise. Other sourcesare acknowledgedby footnotesgiving explicit references.A bibliographyis appended. Signed (candidate) ...... n. .......................................................... Date ......... ... ............................................... Signed Lx.. (supervisor) .................... ........ ........................................ Date ........................... ............................................. STATEMENT 2. I herebygive consentfor my thesis,if accepted,to be availablefor photocopyingand for inter-library loan, and for the title and summaryto be made availableto outside organisations. C............................................................ Signed (candidate) ..... ......... Date ........ ................................................................ ii CONTENTS Acknowledgments iv Abstract Introduction 'In the Country of Last Things': Postmodernity Religion and Alterity I A brief history of alterity 4 Postmodern theology 13 Derridean religion 21 Social alterity 35 Chapter 1 The Metaphysical Self in the Postmodern Novel 53 Postmodern characterisation 54 Fictional alterity and postmodern spirituality 75 Chapter 2 On the Edge of Death: Mortality and the Postmodern Imagination 96 Postmodernisin and death 97 Mortality and the limits of representation 102 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five 105 Don Delillo - Wzite Noise 125 Thomas Pynchon - The gravity of death 131 Chapter 3 A Tale of Absence: Postmodern Allegory 148 Allegorical alterity and postmodern culture 150 John Barth 156 i) Alterity and epiphany 168 ii) Alterity and the absent godlauthor 171 iii) Barth and the subject 174 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 179 Angela Carter - The Passion ofNew Eve 189 Chapter 4 The Retrospective Other - Postmodern History and Fictional Transcendence 204 Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose 211 Peter Ackroyd - Hawksmoor 221 Toni Morrison - Beloved 228 iii Chapter 5 Salman Rushdie: Dialogue and the Transcendent Aesthetic 244 Bakhtin, Rushdie, and Midnight's Children 246 Rushdie's transcendent aesthetic 259 The Satanic Versesand the politics offaith 262 Conclusion 287 Bibliography 289 iv Acknowledgments A sincere debt of gratitude must go to my supervisor, Dr Tim Woods. His academic advice and intellectual enthusiasm has fired my progress on many occasions, and the relevance of his guidance has always been appreciated. Thanks must also go to Professor Lyn Pykett for departmental support, the University of Wales Aberystwyth for the provision of a studentship, and to Joan Crawford and June Baxter for all their friendship and administrative guidance. The production of this thesis has rested on the exceptional care of family and friends. My wife, Mia, has provided me with immeasurable support over the last years and no expression of thanks could be sufficient. Immense gratitude must also go to my family for their constant encouragement and a financial assistancewithout which this thesis could not have been written. I am also grateful to the Di Francesco family for help of many kinds, and Dr Paul Goring and Francesca Rhydderch for their much valued friendship and researchcontributions. The centralideas of this thesishave been expressed in severalconference and seminar papers.My analysisof ThomasPynchon developed out of two papers:'Where has all the reality gone? Postmodernityand the fiction of Thomas Pynchon' given at The Fantastic conference,Hull University, 25-26 November 1995; and the seminarpaper 'Representingthe Negative:symbol and void in postmodemfiction' given at Glasgow University, 22 February 1996- my thanks to Dr. David Jasperfor the opportunity. Parts of the introductory chapterand the sectionon Pynchon'sTile Crying of Lot 49 in ChapterThree were presentedin the Staff/PostgraduateResearch Seminar at UWA, 12 February 1997. An extended treatment of Derrida's The Gift of Death and Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh was given at the UWA conferenceLiterature and Ethics, 4-7 July 1996.This paper is published in A. Hadfield, D. Rainsford and T. Woods (eds.), TheEthics in Literature (Basingstoke,Macmillan, 1998)pp. 136-151. V ABSTRACT Postmodernism privileges figures of negativity, figures defined under such terms as alterity, absence, aporia and the Other. The ostensible function of these tropes is the disruption of logocentrism through the introduction of the indeterminate. However, by arguing that the 'metaphysics of presence' is all that exists in social communication, alterity can be reinterpreted as a metanarrative trope whose language and function repeat attributes previously defined by theology. Much postmodem fiction, with its indeterminate style, acts like a negative theology by systematically negating other thematic presencesin the text in order to present alterity itself as a dominant with final jurisdiction over all areas of language and being. Because of its dominance, this alterity comes to exercise conceptual powers akin to the metaphysical expressions of the divine: ineffability, infinity, omnipotence, atemporality, ethical force. The religious and mystical references that often crowd postmodem fiction, therefore, support alterity's shift from the aporetic to the transcendent. By examining metaphysical alterity in postmodem treatments of character, death, allegory and history, I argue that postmodem literature is a limited theological discourse that questions postmodem pluralism and populism. The reified negative has such a privilege in postmodernism that it creates an aporetic politics that is only capable of representing otherness rather than others. I suggest that this is a 'natural' philosophy for late-capitalism in that it refuses broad social praxis in favour of a value-free market and anti-foundational argument. I set aside Salman Rushdie as someone whose fiction manages to use metaphysics and fragmentation in a non-transcendental manner. Rushdie locates meaning in the dialogue between the metaphysical and the material, rather than an abstracted absenceand presence,and thus he is able to portray metanarratives without transcendence or dogmatism. As such, Rushdie shows that postmodernism's insistence on alterity fafls to engage meaningfully with social conditions. Introduction 'In the Country of the Last Things': Postmodernity, Religion and Alterity. Are we now living in the last days of postmodem ideas? Has the original postmodem desire for multiplicity crumbled in the face of nationalist politics, economic hegemonies and international conflicts? Just as Lyotard, Hassan and Meyer once heraldedthe deathof the humanistlogos, there are now resonantvoices which write equally confident obituaries for the expressions and possibilities of postmodernism: I think postmodernism is now dead as a theoretical concept and, more important, as a way of developing frameworks influencing how With its basic &Icultural we shape theoretical concepts. enabling arguments now sloganized and its efforts to escapebinaries binarized, it is unlikely to ' generatemuch significant new work. Here Charles Altieri envisages postmodernism's aesthetic, theoretical and social terminus, where the language of multiplicity and difference becomes anachronistic and banal. His assured vision of the postmodem dead-end seems to reflect a growing caginess in many people about postmodernism's ability to meet its original liberatory promise,especially in the needto transfertheory into meaningfulcultural and political action. More particularly, postmodernism has unavoidably wandered into the standardisationand codification of its difference and contradiction. Indeed, it does seem to be the case that however much postmodemismhas embracedthe drive towardscontradiction, it has also createdidentifiable metanarrativesof its own in its modesof languageand its codesof accessibility. 2 Formulating the metanarratives of postmodernity leads us to perhaps the most important dilemma in contemporary theory. Is it actually possible to express difference and absence without relying on a general return to totalisation and presence?This question is not simply answered by poststructuralism's tenet that we can never escape the 'metaphysics of presence'. What needs to be reconsidered is whether the metaphysics of presenceis all there is within linguistic systems that have their telos in communication between social subjects. I will not go on to claim in this thesis that there is indeed an indelible bond between word and object. Yet by gravitating towards a Bakhtinian sociology, the basis of my argument will be that the 'free play' of language is always grounded within the communicative demands of a particular social body, be that communitylocal, national,or international.By applying this perspective, I shall in turn contend that absence and alterity, arguably the enigmatic cornerstonesof postmodern theory, are figures formed in the social tradition seemingly at the top of the anti-foundationalists' hit-list - religion. Postmodem theory does not sever