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978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted Material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 © Irmtraud Huber 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–42990–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Contents Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations x Introduction: Epitaph on a Ghost, or the Impossible End of Postmodernism 1 Part I Tracing Shifts 1 Post-post, Beyond and Back: Literature in the Wake of Postmodernism 21 2 Pragmatic Fantasies: From Subversion to Reconstruction 51 Part II Reconstructive Readings 3 Leaving the Postmodernist Labyrinth: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves 79 4 The Quest for Narrative Reconstruction: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated 113 5 Escaping Towards History: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 148 6 Dreaming of Reconstruction: David Mitchell’s number9dream 181 Conclusion: The Coming of Age of Reconstruction 215 Notes 255 Works Cited 267 Index 277 vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Introduction: Epitaph on a Ghost, or the Impossible End of Postmodernism On 24 September, 2011, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened their exhibition “Postmodernism – Style and Subversion 1970–1990,” which with those innocent-looking four numbers after the dash, declared an end to something that had claimed to be endless. Postmodernism, which proposed the end of history, has apparently become dated. Its style, its subversion, it seems, has petered out and lost its force sometime around the beginning of the last decade of the old century. In spite of its antagonism to stable structures, it has become institutionalised. Its interest in the margins nowadays paradoxically occupies the centre. In contrast to its emphasis on the indetermina- ble and on absence, it has gradually come to signify a specific set of philosophical ideas, thematic foci and aesthetic devices. These are very present today, indeed, not only in academia but also in popular culture. Postmodernism, so one could surmise, has been too successful for its own agenda.1 The assessment of the curators of the V&A exhibition is shared by an increasing number of recent scholarly publications, also and perhaps particularly in the field of literary studies, which assert to different degrees of vehemence that postmodernism is (probably) over.2 This, of course, is not at all a new claim. The death-knells of postmodernist literature have notoriously been rung continuously ever since its birth. In fact, considering John Barth’s early manifesto “The Literature of Exhaustion,” literary postmodernism could be said to have been born a ghost. And, just like a ghost, it has proven exceedingly difficult to bury. As Ihab Hassan evocatively stated in 2001, looking back on the thirty years of his engagement with postmodernism: ‘I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 2 Literature after Postmodernism about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it’ (“Postmodernity” 1). Few are as confident in their death- declarations as Linda Hutcheon, who concludes her epilogue to the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism with the assertion that ‘the postmodern moment has passed’ (181), or as Robert McLaughlin, who diagnoses ‘an aesthetic sea change in literature, particularly fiction’ (“Post-Postmodern Discontent” 55). Nevertheless, the feeling that there has been a significant shift in literature published in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century seems to be pervasive. Over the course of the last two decades, scholarly interest has increasingly turned towards the question of whether literature (or art in general for that matter) has moved beyond the postmodernist, how to best describe the e mergent trend, and ultimately, whether such a move is conceivable at all. But if postmodernism has really come to an end, what will come next? Such an inquiry faces serious difficulties. As already indicated by Hassan’s perplexity, a major problem is posed by the contested defini- tions of postmodernism itself. Linda Hutcheon’s complaint that ‘[o]f all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contem- porary writings on the arts, postmodernism must be the most over- and under-defined’ (Poetics 3), is still as true as it was in 1988. A number of studies have since taken pains to review the usage and meanings of the term and struggled to find adequate definitions, only to reiterate its slipperiness. ‘Postmodernism,’ so they agree, has become ‘a kind of data-cloud, a fog of discourse, that showed up on the radar even more conspicuously than what it was supposed to be about’ (Connor 4). Thus, paradoxically, it still remains difficult to reconcile various understand- ings of postmodernism, even as a widely emerging consensus suggests that we are currently in the process of leaving postmodernism behind us. The picture becomes no clearer if one narrows the focus from a larger cultural situation to the specifics of what might constitute the aesthetics, ethics and politics of postmodernist literature in particular. The plethora of definitions, core texts and approaches that the term encompasses belie positivistic attempts to definitively circumscribe its canon. To declare an end to something as diffuse as postmodernism can therefore never be more than a rhetorical move which constructs its point of departure just as much as the new beginning it seeks to estab- lish. Any attempt to move beyond postmodernism inevitably leads to a reduction of the complexity and instability of the term. Ultimately, every endeavour to make sense of larger tendencies in culture depends on such simplification. The attempt to avoid it, so Fredric Jameson reminds us, would risk to ‘fall back into a view of present history as Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–42990–2 Introduction: Epitaph on a Ghost 3 sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of dis- tinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable’ (Postmodernism 6). Indeed, in the process of periodisation, the definite shape of any period is deter- mined to a large degree by the one it is succeeded by. Just as modernism has partly come to be defined retrospectively by ‘post’-modernist revi- sions and deviations, the aesthetic shift to be perceived in the present moment will contribute to how future generations will think about postmodernism. Meanwhile, any claim for a move beyond postmodernism is predi- cated on two conditions. First, if authors and critics now strive to move beyond established paradigms, this impetus takes the form of an attempt to transcend institutionalised ideas of what postmodernist fiction is, means and does. The rapid institutionalisation of postmod- ernism, which has gained a firm foothold in most Western university curricula over the last decades, has contributed significantly to the gradual emergence of a general consensus of some kind on what post- modernist literature is all about. While definitions continue to be slip- pery, postmodernism has stratified sufficiently to be coherently taught and talked about, and perhaps in spite of itself, it has come to be iden- tified with a distinct set of aesthetic strategies and philosophical ideas. Thus, the best evidence for postmodernism’s demise can perhaps be found in the fact that Bran Nicol, in the recent Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction, confidently presents its object to his student reader- ship as ‘something effectively in the past, like modernism, something we can treat as a more or less “complete” historical movement with its own set of core texts’ (xv). Due to its success postmodernist writing has become ‘the victim of a self-created paradox,’ as Richard Bradford puts it: ‘it has become what its practitioners sought and seek to avoid, a classifiable field and subgenre of literary writing’ (70). The second condition emerges directly from this internal contradic- tion. Postmodernism’s conundrum is increasingly felt to lie in the very nature of its incessantly oppositional stance.
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