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POSTMODERNIST FICTION POSTMODERNIST FICTION Brian McHale London and New York First published in 1987 by Methuen, lnc. Published in Great Britain by Methuen & Co. Ltd. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 1987 Brian McHale All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data McHale, Brian. Postmodernist fiction. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Post modernism. 1. Title. PN3503.M24 1987 809.3’04 86–31140 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McHale, Brian. Postmodernist fiction. 1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 1. Title. 809.3 PN3503 ISBN 0-203-39332-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-39614-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-04513-4 (Print Edition) In memory of Robert J.McHale 1927–85 Steve Sloan 1952–85 Arthur A.Cohen 1928–86 Contents Acknowledgments x Preface xi Part One: Preliminaries 1: From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant 3 The dominant 6 Beckett 12 Robbe-Grillet 13 Fuentes 15 Nabokov 18 Coover 19 Pynchon 21 2: Some ontologies of fiction 26 Heterocosm 27 “The old analogy between Author and God” 29 Ingarden 30 Possible worlds 33 The social construction of (un)reality 36 Part Two: Worlds 3: In the zone 43 How to build a zone 45 Ohio, Oz, and other zones 49 Intertextual zones 56 4: Worlds in collision 59 Parallel lines 62 viii POSTMODERNIST FICTION The science-fictionalization of postmodernism 65 The postmodernization of science fiction 68 5: A world next door 73 Hesitation 74 Banality 76 Resistance 77 From “worlds” to worlds 79 Displaced fantastic 80 6: Real, compared to what? 84 Constrained realemes 86 Apocryphal history 90 Creative anachronism 93 Historical fantasy 94 Part Three: Construction 7: Worlds under erasure 99 101 103 Excluded middles, forking paths 106 The sense of a (non-)ending 109 8: Chinese-box worlds 112 Toward infinite regress 114 Trompe-l’œil 115 Strange loops, or metalepsis 119 Characters in search of an author 121 Abysmal fictions 124 Which reel? 128 Part Four: Words 9: Tropological worlds 133 Hesitation revisited 134 Hypertrophy 137 Postmodernist allegory 140 Allegory against itself 143 10: Styled worlds 148 Kitty-litter, litanies, back-broke sentences 151 Letters 156 Machines 159 CONTENTS ix 11: Worlds of discourse 162 Discourse in the novel 164 Heteroglossia 166 Carnival 171 Part Five: Groundings 12: Worlds on paper 179 “A spatial displacement of words” 181 Concrete prose 184 Illustration and anti-illustration 187 The schizoid text 190 Model kits 194 13: Authors: dead and posthumous 197 The dead author 199 Auto-bio-graphy 202 Roman-à-clef 206 Authority 210 Short-circuit 213 Part Six: How I learned to stop worrying and love postmodernism 14: Love and death in the post-modernist novel 219 Love… 222 …and death 227 Coda: the sense of Joyce’s endings 233 Notes 236 Index 259
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