Postmodernist Fiction

279 Pages·2004·3.808 MB·English

by  McHale, Brian

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