Postmodernism and Historicity, by Tony Myers (1998).Pdf
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3314 Postmodernism and Historicity: Narrative Forms in the Contemporary Novel Tony Myers A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English Studies, University of Stirling In Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 1998 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the British Academy for financial assistance in the writing of this thesis. I would also like to record my thanks to Vance Adair, John Drakakis, Alison McBride and Dominic Schad for the help and support they have given me. Contents Acknowledgements i ....................................................................... p. Contents ii ................................................................................... p. Abstract iii ................................................................................... p. Introduction - Time Out of Mind: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Future Perfect ! ..................................................................................... P. Chapter in One - Shangri-da: The Postmodern Imaginary William Gibson's Neuromancer Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho 51 and ...................... p. Chapter Two - Broken Hallelujahs: Mystery, History and Anamorphosis in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Lot 49 124 of ......................................... p. Chapter Three - Future Shock: Style and the Temporality of Trauma in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five 216 ................................................... p. Chapter Four - The Eccentric Canon: Of a Vanishing Mediator and the Metaphorics of the Pleonasm in John Banville's Doctor Copernicus...... p.255 Conclusion The Tense of an Ending 292 - ............................................. p. Bibliography 296 ............................................................................ p. 11 ABSTRACT This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the `otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the attempt to disinter a properly historical thinking, or historicity, from the recursive temporality of the modern. This attempt is predicated upon the retroactive temporality of the future perfect which, whilst also a synchrony, arises from a productive tension between the past, the present and the future. The self-divisive time of the future perfect expedites the discomfiture of the ego and its concomitant subjectivization of the past and, by so doing, registers the historicity of that past. The relation between the modern and the postmodern forms of temporality is expressed by the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders. It is argued, moreover, that this distinction is manifest in the narrative forms of the contemporary novel. Whilst the modern form of the contemporary novel replicates the structures of an egocentric repletion of synchrony, the postmodern novel displaces this imaginary problematic to the symbolic. By employing a variety of techniques founded upon retroactivity, postmodern novels are thereby shown to foster a disclosure of the structure of historicity. Within this rubric five novels are given extended consideration: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Banville's Doctor Copernicus. iii Introduction - Time Out of Mind: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Future Perfect' 1: At One Time Why is it that only the modem could have produced the postmodern? More specifically, what were the conditions of possibility which fostered the production of such a concept and how are these conditions inscribed within it? In order to answer this question, we must start backwards, as it were, by defining exactly what it is that the modem produced, that is, by defining the postmodem. This, of course, is a task of unusually daunting proportions, not only because of the sheer volume of material devoted to the subject, but also because it is the inconstancy of the `postmodern' (in whatever form, `-ity', `-ist', or `-ism') which is generally held up as its primary characteristic. Hans Bertens, for example, finds that it `is several things at once' and that, furthermore, `the term [has been] deeply problematical almost right from the start'. Equally, David Harvey damns the term as `a mine-field of conflicting notions'3, while Terry Eagleton declares that it `is such a portmanteau phenomenon that anything you assert of IA condensedversion of this chapterwas initially presentedas a paperto `Lacanand Postmodernity: A "Che VuoiT' One Day Conference', University of Stirling, 28 November 1998. I am grateful for the comments made by all the participants, particularly Vance Adair, Malcolm Bowie, John Drakakis and Maggie Nolan. 2 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.3. 4 one piece of it is almost bound to be untrue of another' Openly declaring his agitation with the problem, Alex Callinicos opines the slipperiness of leading definitions of the postmodern, definitions which he condemns as `mutually 5 inconsistent, internally contradictory and/or hopelessly vague'. Adding to this list of unhappy epithets, Walter Truett Anderson bemoans the fact that it is `a 6 puzzling, uppity term'. Perhaps with such assertions in mind, Linda Hutcheon notes that `[flew words are more used and abused', but then adds as a caveat that `this is an appropriate condition for... a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory'. 7 Suitably wary of the pitfalls of this mode, Fredric Jameson tentatively ventures the claim that `[i]t is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place'. ' With a surety of nerve that Jameson must envy, Thomas Docherty admits only of a secret knowledge when he observes that `it is a term which has often been used with a great deal of imprecision'. 9 For Edmund Smyth, however, `[i]t is evident that no consensus exists regarding either the parameters of postmodernism or the precise meaning 1° of the term'. In the light of such bewilderment, it falls to Brian McHale, finally, to propose that while `[n]o doubt there is no such "thing" as postmodernism', it 3 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.viii. 4 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p.viii. s Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press and Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.2. 6 Walter Truett Anderson, ed., The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London: Fontana, 1996), p. 3. 7 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 1. 8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. ix (my italics). 9 Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p.xiii. 2 does, at least, `exist discursively in the discourses we produce about it and using it'. " What, then, is the source of all this confusion? We might begin to trace it back to a series of subtle and interrelated conflations between subject and object. At the level of definition itself, Patricia Waugh advances a useful gambit when she argues that `Postmodernism tends to be used in three broad senses:as a term to designate the cultural epoch through which we are living and largely viewed in apocalyptic terms; as an aesthetic practice which is seen variously as co-extensive with the commodified surfaces of this culture or as a disruption of its assumptions from within through a "micropolitics" or "politics of desire"; and as a development in thought which represents a thorough-going critique of the assumptions of Enlightenment or the discourses of modernity and their 12 foundation in notions of universal reason'. Whilst most commentators accept one or all of these definitions, there remains a certain difficulty in disentangling each from the other. For example, how is it possible to distinguish postmodernism as an `aesthetic practice' from postmodernism as a `cultural epoch', or postmodernism as a `politics of desire' from postmodernism as a critique of `universal reason'? Faced with the impossible task of decoagulation, Waugh's solution to this problematic is to comprehend postmodernism as a structure of feeling which privileges the aesthetic. lo Edmund Smyth, ed., Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1991), p.9. " Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 1. 12Patricia Waugh, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p.3. 3 It is the incontinenceof this aestheticand its concomitanttheorization that leads Steven Connor to remark that `[i]ncreasingly disciplinary areas have sought to define their own postmodernist regimes in relation to those prevailing 13 elsewhere, rather than by reference to their own histories'. These transgeneric definitions inevitably take the form of distilling a common theoretical essence from the different disciplines, with the result that we now suffer from what 14 Connor terms a `bulging overcoherence of the concept of the postmodern'. In turn, the labours of theory come to exert their own conflationary pressures. Specifically, we may note, again with