The Literature of Reconstruction

Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium

Wolfgang Funk

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501306174
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Winner of the 2016 ESSE Junior Scholar Book Award in Literatures in the English Language The Literature of Reconstruction argues for the term and concept of 'postmillennial reconstruction' to fill the gap left by the decline of postmodernism and deconstruction as useful cultural and literary categories. Wolfgang Funk shows how this notion emerges from the theoretical and philosophical development that led to the demise of postmodernism by relating it to the idea of 'authenticity': immediate experience that eludes direct representation. In addition, he provides a clear formal framework with which to identify and classify the features of 'reconstructive literature' by updating the narratological category of 'metafiction', originally established in the 1980s. Based on Werner Wolf's observation of a 'metareferential turn' in contemporary arts and media, he illustrates how the specific use of metareference results in a renegotiation of the specific patterns of literary communication and claims that this renegotiation can be profitably described with the concept of 'reconstruction'. To substantiate this claim, in the second half of the book Funk discusses narrative texts that illustrate this transition from postmodern deconstruction to postmillennial reconstruction. The analyses take in distinguished and prize-winning writers such as Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan and Jasper Fforde. The broad scope of authors, featuring writers from the US as well as the UK, underlines the fact that the reconstructive tendencies and strategies Funk diagnoses are of universal significance for the intellectual and cultural self-image of the global North.

1

Postmodernism’s Wake: From Deconstruction to Reconstruction

In part X of his Marginalia, Edgar Allan Poe muses on the impossibility of writing truthfully about one’s inner self:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own – the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple – a few plain words – ‘My Heart Laid Bare.’ But – this little book must be true to its title … But to write it – there is the rub. No man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of his fiery pen. (Poe 1981: 150; emphases in the original)

This book can be seen as an attempt to challenge Poe’s dictum. It investigates how contemporary works of literature renegotiate the relationship between experience and its representation in an attempt to truthfully re-enact experience through representation. I will argue that the notion of authenticity provides the formal and theoretical parameters for this renegotiation. The present relevance of authenticity is thereby not restricted to the field of academic criticism, where it is ‘making a comeback, in the guises of memory, ethics, religion, the new sincerity, and the renewed interest in “real things”’ (Haselstein, Gross and Snyder-Körber 2010: 19). Authenticity also pervades many aspects of everyday life, as Charles Lindholm’s wide-ranging inventory demonstrates:

The quest for authenticity touches and transforms a vast range of human experience today – we speak of authentic art, authentic music, authentic food, authentic dance, authentic people, authentic roots, authentic meanings, authentic nations, authentic products. A desire for authenticity can lead people to extremes of self-sacrifice and risk; the loss of authenticity can be the source of grief and despair. Authenticity gathers people together in collectives that are felt to be real, essential, and vital, providing participants with meaning, unity, and a surpassing sense of belonging. Authenticity can be sought internally, through transformative ecstatic experiences, or externally, in the consumption of goods that symbolize the really real. If a Rembrandt can be called authentic, so can Coca-Cola. Authenticity can describe tourist sites, the scent of floor polish, and the president of the United States. (2008: 1)

In this book I will make a case for the aesthetic category of metareference as the most fitting model for re-enacting the effect of authenticity on a formal level. I will argue that the effect of authenticity enacted in and through metareferential literature is the result of processes of reconstruction, which are triggered by the epistemological and ontological paradoxes inherent in metareference. I will therefore introduce the pragmatic and procedural category of ‘reconstructive literature’ to describe this new development.1

There seems to be general agreement nowadays that postmodernism, the cultural and philosophical paradigm which has so significantly shaped and inspired the second half of the twentieth century, has fallen out of fashion. Its decline had been a long time coming. Uneasiness about the efficacy and topicality of the term can be observed at least since the 1990s. In 1995 the subtitle of Hans Bertens’s monumental study on The Idea of the Postmodern: A History indicates that its theoretical panache may have spent itself. To become history means after all to be put into perspective and to be disconnected from the dynamic immediacy of the here and now. Historical concepts may still prove useful and accurate, but they can no longer be considered the default mode for explaining the world. By the end of the twentieth century, it is safe to say, the patient postmodernism lay etherized upon the table. The turning point of the new millennium and the attacks of 9/11 in particular presented a disruption in the collective imaginary, the ultimate impetus, as it were, to force the postmodern moment to its crisis and relegate it to history once and for all. Roger Rosenblatt’s essay ‘The Age of Irony Comes to an End’, published in the wake of the terrorist attacks, claims that the one positive upshot of the collapse of the Twin Towers is that they will take with them the postmodern mode of scepticism and detached aloofness.

The demise of somebody considered dear or important typically involves two forms of reaction: a, usually positive, review of the achievements and activities of the deceased, followed by an outlook – emotionally ranging from utter hopelessness to cautious self-confidence – on how the future might be tackled without them. In the case of postmodernism, the former duty has been carried out to the fullest. The overriding significance of its predominant ways of thinking need not even be demonstrated in eulogistic acclamations but is confirmed most articulately by the fact that notions such as simulation, différance, deconstruction, the death of the author or the end of grand narratives have become indispensable elements of our theoretical vocabulary and imaginary.

The second aspect of this process of grieving for postmodernism, that is, the outlook as to what will come afterwards, presents a much more difficult task. As is often the case with people who had been hanging around for quite a while, acute devastation and inconsolable grief about the departure keep within limits. Nevertheless, there is the palpable sense of a terminological rug having been pulled from under the congregation’s feet. Since an end of postmodernism also entails the nullification of many habitually used instruments and conceptual approaches, there is a resounding loss for words to delineate a potential way ahead. This speechlessness and general lack of direction, as well as first painful attempts to overcome it, have characterized and shaped the cultural discourse of the past decade.2

Yet, so far there has not emerged a generally recognized terminological successor for ‘postmodernism’ as a cultural marker. This is not due to a shortage of proposals, however. Among the many who have come forward with suggestions are Gilles Lipovetsky with his idea of the ‘hypermodern’, Nicholas Bourriaud with his notion of the ‘altermodern’, Alan Kirby, who first suggested ‘pseudo-modernism’ before finally opting for the term ‘digimodernism’, and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker with their concept of ‘metamodernism’. If there is anything which unites these concepts, apart from their unwillingness to abandon modernism as their terminological basis, it is a focus on the media-related transformations of recent years and the effects these are having on the representation of the human self. Kirby, for instance, stresses the structural empowerment granted to the recipient in new forms of media communication, as ‘the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development’ (2009: 1). Bourriaud imagines ‘a positive vision of chaos and complexity [and] a positive experience of disorientation’ as a result of current developments in the media, a chaos which will eventually form the basis for a new aesthetic approach to make sense of what he calls our ‘heterochronic’ existence (see 2009: 13). Adam Kelly likewise diagnoses a formal and structural indecisiveness as the salient feature of what he simply labels ‘post-postmodernism’: ‘Whereas postmodernism emphasizes the singular and “readily visible” event, the identifiable moment “when-it-all-changed”, for post-postmodernism, in contrast, an event will always have an undecidable and indeed paradoxical status: never certain, wholly visible or consignable to a past that is fully behind us’ (2010c: 327–8).

Likewise using the idea of indeterminacy as a theoretical basis, Vermeulen and van den Akker centre their concept of ‘metamodernism’ on the formal characteristic of metaxis, a Platonic term which refers to a perennial state of uncertainty and oscillation generated by epistemological and ontological ambiguity. Unlike postmodern différance, which emphasizes the ultimate emptiness of any act of signification, however, this metamodern metaxis opens up new aesthetic spaces where a meaningful correspondence of signifier and signified might again be possible (see 2010). Synthesizing the most significant ideas from these different approaches, I want to establish an aesthetics of reconstruction as the principal literary development in recent years. This new form of literary communication draws on structural and formal paradox in order to create effects of authenticity in the reception of literary texts. My choice of ‘reconstruction’ as the term to describe this development is founded on two pragmatic propositions. In keeping with the customary protocols of mourning, one is a retrospective observation, while the other looks tentatively ahead. Considering the suppositions described above, it becomes evident that any attempt to bury postmodernism apparently implies the establishment of a new version of ‘-modernism’. This, however, represents a contradiction. If postmodernism, as its etymology determines, indeed refers to a period after modernism, then the insistence on retaining the determiner ‘-modern’ in all attempts to denominate a successor would indicate a nostalgic retrogression rather than a radically new imaginary; adapting Bruno Latour’s famous adage, one might even be tempted to ask if we have actually never really been postmodern at all. Having said that, I am in no doubt that the term ‘postmodernism’ will prevail to denote the dominant cultural and philosophical discourses of the second half of the twentieth century. What I do doubt, however, is that the break between modernism and postmodernism is quite as significant and comprehensive as is often assumed, most influentially perhaps by Brian McHale, who claims that ‘postmodernist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues’ (1987: xii).

Perhaps the unquestionable political and, in many cases, personal discontinuity caused by World War II has come to overshadow the conceptual continuities between modernism and postmodernism. In my understanding, modernism refers to a cultural and critical condition which can be deduced from, but certainly not restricted to, several key events round the turn of the twentieth century, such as the full implementation of industrial capitalism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, the Stahlgewitter of World War I or the onset of structuralism. These (and indeed many others) combined to uncover the essential incongruity of human experience and its representation. This, in turn, instigated a compulsion to analyse, depict and enact, in short to reflect upon, this incongruity in and through art, a process of aesthetic reflection which reiterates rather than overcomes the initial rift it seeks to represent. Nevertheless, this defensive and defective reflectivity comes to figure as the default mode, or at least the inescapable foil, of cultural representation throughout the century. Postmodernism then must not be understood as a reaction to but rather as the consistent and radical continuation of modernism’s aesthetic premise of dissociation and a crisis of representation.3 Paradoxically it might even turn out to be postmodernism’s most lasting achievement to have shown that eventually even an endless free play of signifiers will not be able to deliver us – as individuals and as a society – from an inherent pining for closure and congruence.

My book pursues a pragmatic approach when it comes to acquiring the one definite signifier which may eventually replace (post)modernism as a marker for a contemporary cultural perspective on the interplay of experience and representation. It concentrates on clearly observable aesthetic phenomena by retracing predominant formal patterns which can be detected in contemporary literature and for which I suggest the term ‘reconstruction’.4 Evidently, the bridge to postmodernism is provided by Derrida’s notion of ‘deconstruction’, a process of reception which privileges the indeterminacy, performativity and aporia inherent in any form of representation, its ultimate and irremediable différance from experience and reality. This technique of deconstructive analysis, of inscribing into any representation a fundamental undecidability and its own aporetic insignificance, is an irrevocable cultural and philosophical achievement. In a sense it is impossible to undo this logic of deconstruction and différance, as Derridean deconstruction represents a theory to end all theory, in so far as it can – in a potentially endless game of deferral – always insert another layer of apparent constructedness and relationality to protect (the absence of) its essential core.

In a nutshell, the objective of deconstruction – in so far as deconstruction can ever have a clear objective – is to demonstrate and enact the autonomy and solipsism of each of the constituent factors which have a share in the act of cultural and literary communication. Deconstructive analysis eviscerates this communicative process by revealing and parodying its unspoken hierarchical and relational structures. It is literally reduced to the différances and apertures between its elements (author, reader, text, context), to the extent even that significance itself can be lost in a ‘movement without origin or end’ (Miller 1985: 264). Reconstructive texts, on the other hand, attempt to close these very gaps, to rekindle the connections between the constituents of the act of communication by renegotiating the relations and hierarchies between the individual elements. These texts can be said to enact Ihab Hassan’s appeal ‘to discover new relations between selves and others, margins and centers, fragments and wholes – indeed, new relations between selves and selves, margins and margins, centers and centers’ (2003: 6). In this regard, reconstruction can be seen as an attempt to open up new depths in artistic representation in a reaction against the ‘kind of flatness or depthlessness, [the] new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ which Fredric Jameson sees as emblematic of postmodernism (1991: 9). It proposes to erect a new common ground for signification, thereby contesting Baudrillard’s verdict that in the postmodern imaginary ‘nothing remains for us to base anything on’ (1993: 5). While deconstruction is driven mainly by epistemological scepticism and suspicion, reconstruction is founded on an attitude of confidence in the power of sign systems to actually convey experience rather than reflect the workings of the sign systems themselves. Hassan describes this change in attitude as an investment in what he calls an ‘aesthetic of trust’ (2003: 9), while I propose that the notion of ‘authenticity’ is the most appropriate theoretic concept to account for this development.

In the following, I will combine a diachronic and synchronic investigation of various discourses of authenticity, understood as an interface between experience and representation, with the analysis of textual metareference, which acts as authenticity’s formal correlative. Unduly condensing the argument of this book, I suggest that reconstructive texts use the formal technique of metareference, which can be imagined as tangling and invalidating traditional hierarchies within a given text, to generate ontological and epistemological paradoxes that are irresolvable within the logic of the text itself. Th...