Narrative and postmodernism : politics and contemporary American fiction

Abstract

The main issues that are covered in this study of American postmodernist fiction are its mapping of narrative, the political projects articulated by contemporary American writers, and the relationship between postmodernist fiction and postmodern culture. Narrative is not a commonly used term in discussions of postmodernist fiction, most criticism seeing postmodernism as a form characterised by an obsession with the aleatory play of language and an investigation of the fiction-making process. Nor are the political and cultural concerns of postmodernism adequately covered. The death of the `real' in postmodernism is not usually seen to allow fiction the possibility of referentially engaging with the forms and processes of postmodern culture because no `reality' exists for postmodernist fiction to refer to. This thesis questions these approaches to postmodernist fiction and offers an alternative approach to a group of novels that I call political metafiction. These novels include works by Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover, Reed, McElroy, Burroughs, Sukenick, and Barthelme, all of whom reconfigure narrative outside the linear realist model of narrative as a means to enact, address, and resist the operations of ideology in contemporary society. To ground the discussion of these texts there is a substantial discussion of narrative, focusing on the need to reconceptualise narrative as a process of arrangement and as a dynamic form, rather than as a functional structure. There is also a discussion of political metafiction's relationship to postmodern culture, which questions the view that postmodernist fiction cannot establish a critical distance from postmodern culture. I argue that the self-consciousness with which political metafiction maps its narratives prevents a replication of the fragmented space of postmodernity, allowing political metafiction to intervene in the production of cultural meanings instead of being defined by those which already exist. Detailed discussions of the novels of political metafiction follow, focusing on both the specific narrative forms they generate and the political projects they articulate as a means to reconfigure forms of identity and cultural practice in contemporary society. Particular attention is paid to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and McElroy's Lookout Cartridge, novels which crystallise many of the issues with which political metafiction is engaged.

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