Realism and Postmodern Realism in Contemporary American Fiction

7/30/2019 Realism and Postmodern Realism in Contemporary American Fiction

1/24

INFORMATIONTO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI filmsthe text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis anddissertation copies are in typewriter face,while others may be from any type ofcomputer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of thecopysubmitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrationsand photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improperalignment can adversely affect reproduction.In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscriptand there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorizedcopyright material had to be removed, anote will indicate the deletion.Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced bysectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuingfrom left to right in equal sections with smalloveriaps.Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproducedxerographically in this copy. IHigher quality 6' x 9' black and whitephotographic prints areavailable for anyphotographs or illustrations appearingin this copy for an additkxial charge. Contact UMIdirectly to order.

ProQuest Informatkxi andLearning300North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346USA800-521-0600


2/24


3/24

NOTE TO USERS

This reproduction is the best copyavaiiabie.

IMI'


4/24


5/24

PERSON, THING, PLACE:REALISM AND POSTMODERN REALISM INCONTEMPORARY AMERICAN

FICTION

BYSUE-IM LEE

B.A.. Yonsei University, Seoul South Korea, 1991M.A., Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1993

THESISSubmitted as partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

in the Graduate College of theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, 2002

Chicago, Illinois


6/24

UMI Number; 3047862

(B )UMIUMI Microform 3047862

Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.All rights reserved. This microformedition is protectedagainst

unauthorized copyingunder Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information andLearning Company300 North Zeeb RoadP.O. Box 1346AnnArbor,Ml 46106-1346


7/24

TH E UNIVERSITY OF ILLIN OIS A T CHICAGOGraduate CollegeCERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I hereby recommend that the thesis prepared under my supervision byS U E - I M L E E

entitled.P E R S O N , T H I N G , P L A C E : R E A L I S M A N D P O S T M O D E R N R E A L I S M INC O N T E M P O R A R Y A M E R I C A N F I C T I O N

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofD O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y

/ concur with this recommendation

CLc K tf).Adviser (Chaitpmon ofDefenseComminee)

I HeaiVCIiair

Recommendation concurred in:12=

K ^ Members ofThesisorDisseiialian

DefenseCommittee

UlCUniversity of Illinoisat Chicago


8/24

To My Twenties

iii


9/24

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI learned to write while writing this dissertation. For this development, I must acknowledge mythree coredissertation committee members.Christian Messenger, JudithGardiner, andJosephTabbi. With unfailing prompmess, unity of spirit, and generosity, these advisors fostered thisdissertation into growth. They provided the intellectual framework for me to write, rethink, andwrite some more. In the process, I was learning that writing wasmy work. In particular, I wishto thank my dissertation advisor, Chris Messenger; I walked into hisclassroom for my firstcourse at UIC and sawa smiling face. From that moment, he has been my steadiestcounselorand cheerleader, and my graduate life could not have taken its smooth trajectory without hissturdy presence.I express a deep gratitude to James Hall andSharon Holland, my two other readers, whosereading of the near-final version of this dissertation showed immense care and scope; theirsuggestions will be fundamental in my further development of this project.I also wish to acknowledge my girlfriends, Gwynne Gertzand Eva Bednarowicz, who were therefrom the beginning. To borrow from Sula."we were girls together."Finally, I thank my husband. He provides the playground for me to play on.

SL

iv


10/24

TABLE OFCONTENTSINTRODUCTION 1CHAPTER 1THE SUCCESSFUL FAILURE OF AMERICAN LITERARYREALISM 19Between Reflectionist Historicism an d Immanent Historicism 23The Successful Failure of American Literary Realism 33CHAPTER 2INVISIBILITY, TRANSPARENCY, AND OTHER LIES THATREALISM TELLS: POSTMODERNISM AS ANTI-REALISM 50Postmodernism, Anti-Realism, and Anti-Narrativity 54Postmodern Realism 69CHAPTERSSUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS: REALISM, POSTMODERN REALISM,ANDASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY 78The Realist Formation of Asian American Identity 82Doing Without the Comfort of Identity: Postm odern Non-Identity in Dictee 10 1CHAPTER 4WOMEN WHO THINK TOOMUCH: THE POSTMODERN REALISMOF LYDIA DAVIS AND LYNNE TILLMAN 125Lydia Davis and Unobliging Storytelling 132The Disjointed Aesthetic in Lynne Tillman's Fiction 146CHAPTER 5THE HUMAN MEASURE OF THINGS; RICHARD POWERS'SPOSTMODERN REALISM IN GALATEA 2.2 AND PLOWING THE DARK 166The "Invisible" Locus of the Hum an in Realist Narrativity 174Plowing the Dark 193CONCLUSION 208WORKS CITED 219VITA 232


11/24

SUMMARY

This dissertation argues the heuristic usefulness of a"postmodern realism" to describe a realism

altered by the postmodern assault on the politics of representation. Juxtaposing the fictionaltheories and practicesof realism to those of postmodernism, I examine the internal tensionswithin a storytelling environment inhabited by both realist narrative properties and postmodernformal innovations. In particular, I focus on the making of the subject in three areas ofcontemporary American fiction^the "ethnic" in Asian American fiction, the "woman" infemale-centered fiction, and the "machine" in fictions of science and technology. In order toconceptualize a historically informed study of a postmodern realism, I begin by examiningcontemporary constructions of Nineteenth-century American literary realism. The secondchapter positions these models against the American literary postmodernism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that predicted the "death of realism." In the subsequent three chapters, I usetheories of narrative, race, ethnicity, feminism, and technology to read the works of post-1950s

writers such asTheresa H ak Kyung Cha, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and Richard Powers. Intheir moments of representational conflict over the subject marked by the "difference"of race,ethnicity, gender, or technology, I argue, their works exemplify a postmodern realism that enacts,in aesthetic terms, thecontemporary debates over notionsof identity, agency, knowledge, andsubjectivity.

vi


12/24

INTRODUCTION

This study evolved from the question^what's wrong with storytelling? It was a defiant

question voiced by a reader who loved stories. Each story was anopen invitation to someoneelse's business, someone else's days and years, someoneelse's choices and fate. How lovely itwas to glide through events, experiences, decisions, dramas not of my making; how much morelovely it was that I could demand to know of thisstoryworld than I could know of myown life.What happened? And then what happened? How did it happen? Who did whatl Why? Howdid it end? And what did it mean? What are the compelling forces, desires, and rules thatgovern the storyworld, and what do they have to do with this world I inhabit? Like those crystalglobes of miniaturized worlds that sometimes pass as holiday presents, each story held an entireworld, a specificity of"person, thing, and place," and the plentitude of such worlds promised awell that never runs dry in the land of storytelling.

The above vision of storytelling and reading is underwritten by a host of interrelatedtheoretical assumptions, and one of the most exciting aspectsof this project has been in learningto name and to situate that system of thought within the larger critical discourse. First, in taking"fiction" to be a representation of a miniature world formally constituted through the literaryconventions of plot, character, setting, description, dialogue, I was claiming the entire domain of"fiction" as the territory of "story." In a related maimer, my definition of the linguistic andliterary organism called "story" relied on the notion of "narrativity,"a presence of properties thatenact a senseof a temporal wholeness fi-om the beginning, middle, and the end. In my defiantquestionwhat's wrong with storytelling?I was calling up some of the most urgent and hotlydisputed topics in the late-twentieth-century literary and critical discoursethe topicsof fiction,narrative, and storytelling. Furthermore, in my synonymous usage of"fiction" with"story," and

1


13/24

2

"story" with the miniatureglobe of other people's affairs, I had staked some underlyingassumptions regarding issues of representation, mimesis, theaesthetic, especially of the imitativeaesthetic, that stood in strong contrast to the postmodern spirit ofanti-narrativism and anti-representation in late-twentieth-century literature and criticism.'

The most synecdochical expression of postmodemism-Lyotard's declaration, in ThePostmodern Condition, of the demise of metanarrativeswasn't a pronouncement limited to"big" narratives, like Enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism, systems of thought whoseteleology functioned as foundational concepts in explaining the workings of "reality."Postmodern suspicion of"narrative" extended to the very convention of narrative representationitselfto the politics of its internal consistency, its coherencyas a temporal whole, itsdevelopmental logic, and ultimately, its ability to impose a singleorder, a single causality, asingle story, to what was hitherto a formless phenomena. The logic of emplotment, hence,receives scrutiny as anorganizational system of control,as an epistemologicalexercise groundedwithin the dominant political, cultural, historical worldview. As Derrida puts it: "The narratorialvoice is the voice of a subject recounting... nowing who he is, where he is, what he is andwhat he is talking about... In this sense, all organized narration is a 'matter for the police'"(102). For Barthes, the law of narrative is inseparable from the "the lawof the Father" (ThePleasure of the Text 20). As an organizingsystem that finds coherence in formlessness, findswholeness in multiplicity, and unity in disparateness, narrative is equated with a totalizing modeof representation. Hence the mark of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes, may be "arepudiation of representation, a 'revolutionary' break with the (repressive) ideology ofstorytelling generally"(54).


14/24

3

However, the postmodern suspicionof narrative representation comesagainst a staunchcritical defense of the heuristic utility of emplotment and thecognitive necessity of storytellingin human lives. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention inNarrative, the organizing logic of narration is an inescapable part of human consciousness: ''Welive immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions,anticipating theoutcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of severalstories not yet completed" (3). Similarly, for Paul Rocoeur, "emplotment" is fundamental to thebusiness of living:"the plots we invent help us to shape ourconfused, formless and, in the lastresort, mute, temporal existence" ("On Interpretation" 180). As Hayden White argues with histellingly entitled essay,"The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," thecompelling pull of narrativity is difficult to escape, and even the postmodern project is"informed by a programmatic, if ironic, commitment to the return to narrative as one of itsenabling presuppositions" (xi).

But for the first generation of American literary postmodemists in the nineteen-sixtiesand seventies, the work of a truly innovative writer is precisely to liberate "fiction" from thestronghold of narrativity, from storytelling (see Chapter Two). F or too long, they argue, thedemands of storytelling have immobilized the possibility that the artistic, linguistic, andtechnological structure called "fiction" may develop into somethingother than~and more than-narrative representations of miniature worlds contained within temporal wholes. Thisdomination encourages an artistic activity of more-of-the-same, the generation of stories builtaround the conventions of "person, thing, place," as well as fostering a reading activity revolvingaround illusionismthe belief that the characters, actions, and the conflicts in the story stood forpeople, experiences, and material forces in the reader's lived world. Hence the postmodern


15/24

literary-critical challenge tocontemporary American fiction is; why this fixation onstorytelling?Why are storiesconstituted the way they are, and how do the well-known conventions constrainthe aesthetic possibilitiesof fiction? Fundamental to the postmodernsuspicion of storytelling isthe assertion that every representation is simultaneously anargument about 'Hhe way things are,"and that illusionist storytelling hides the fact that the rhetorical actof persuasion is taking place.The duplicitous element of illusionist storytelling furthermore rests upon an aesthetic andlinguistic naiveteas if the linguistic act and the literary conventions of representation enact anunmediated transmission of reality. In contemporary discussions of storytelling, then, notions ofmimesis, representation, and imitative aesthetic are reworked under postmodern anti-narrativismand anti-representation.

It is against this wider background that I discuss the state of realism in contemporaryAmerican fiction. In using such a staple of critical vocabulary to ground my study of storytellingin contemporary American fiction, I have often thought that "realism" is like a house with toomany past owners, bearing too many histories and struggles to be used neatly or even concisely."Realism" bears a different discursive lineageand meaning according to intellectual disciplines,like art, architecture, literature, historiography, sciences, philosophy; there are furthermorenumerous understandings of"modified" realisms, such as "commonsense realism,""naiverealism," "pragmatic realism,""scientific realism,""contextual realism," and more.^ Within theliterary historiography of the term, "realism" maydesignate a specific literary periodthe latterhalf of the nineteenth-centuryand revolve around a different set of exemplar realists accordingto national literary contextssuch as Eliot and Dickens in English literary history, Balzac andFlaubert in the French, and Howells, Twain, and James in the American. "Realism" m ay alsodesignate a particular mode of literary activity, as in Rene Wellek's 1963 definition of realism as


16/24

5

"the objective representation ofcontemporary social reality"(240). As Christopher Prendergastpoints out, if the literary production of realism took place in the nineteenth-century, thetheorization of realism took place in the twentieth-century, and the highly contestedphilosophical, political, ideological, and artistic evaluationsof realism have been fundamental tothe major theoretical approaches of the twentieth century, such as Marxism, structuralism andpoststructuraiism, feminism inspired by poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and as I willdiscuss in Chapter Two, literary postmodemism (The Triangle of Representation 121).

In light of the term's diffused and multiple significance, it may be more judicious toemploy the term "narrative" in my discussion of the contested nature of storytelling in late-twentieth-century American fiction. On the other hand, the specter of realism casts ashadow onany discussion of storytelling, especially the kind of illusionist, miniature-globe storyworldconstruction that comes under postmodern scrutiny. For instance, realism is the term used mostinterchangeably with the "novel." For instance, Ian Watt's influential 1957 work. The Rise ofthe Novel (which primarily focuses on such eighteenth-century novel as Defoe's RobinsonCrusoe and Moll Flanders. Richardson's Pamela. Fielding's Tom Jones), begins with a chapterentitled, "Realism and the Novel Form." As realism "is acentral moment in the novel's history,and defines essential aspectsof the novel's potential" (Bradbury 191), the term "realism" mostreadily invokes the storytelling conventions of "person, thing, place" at work in the literaryactivity of constructing the illusion of a miniature world.^ For many postmodern critics, also, thenovel's structurethe organization of temporality into a beginning, a middle, and an endingisthe ultimate exercise of a "totalizing"discipline at work. Furthermore, "realism" is the termmost conflated with those of "mimesis"and "representation." The fluid use of "realism,""mimesis," and "representation" takes place in Erich Auerbach's monumental work. Mimesis:


17/24

6

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. In the epilogue that concludes the twentychapters of close analysis, extending from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach uses the term"realism" interchangeably with mimesis as the "the interpretation of reality through literaryrepresentation or 'imitation'"(554). In poststructuralist and postmodern criticism "realism"stands for the manipulative semiotic practicesand disingenuous epistemological and politicalclaims of an imitative aesthetic. As Barthes describes it:"The writing of Realism is far frombeing neutral[;] it is on the contrary loaded with the most spectacular signs of fabrication"(Writing Degree Zero 67-8).

Finally, my rationale for speaking of "realism" rather than of "narrative"in this project isdue to the fact realism trails behind it a host of related ideals that are frmdamental to the businessof storytelling. Realism is a literary notion built upon the significance of the "common." WhenWilliam Dean Howells, in his influential "Editor's Study"columns of Harper's Monthly, arguesthe democratic ideals of realism, his mantra is that realism is an "aesthetic of thecommon."When Georg Lukacs defends the ideals of realism against the anti-representational modernistpractices of the nineteen-thirties and forties, his argument rests upon the revelatory power of the"type"or the "typical"(character, plot, setting, etc.) to stand as a synecdoche of the historicalforces of the times. For Auerbach, realism is the literary emancipation of the subject matter fromthe classical rules of style, wherein "individuals from daily life"can be treated with literarystyles ("serious, problematic, and even tragic representation") that had hitherto been reserved forthose subjects with appropriate social and class privilege (489). For J. P. Stem, realism is theform which "gives us all of our conmion reality" (152).

The politics of thecommon that underwrites the ideal of realism, hence, privilegesnotions like the communal, the ordinary, the recognizable, and the familiar. Implicit in the


18/24

7

privileging of thecommon is the idealization of intersubjective communication, particularly thenotion of consensus. As I will discuss in the first chapter, this interrelated systemof thoughtsurrounding the notion of the common is fundamental to the defense that realist storytellingserves a social good. Postmodernism targets precisely those pulsepoints of thecommunal andconsensus that inform the realist politics of the common, and posits, in contrast,a politics ofdifference. As the intellectual and political movements of marginalized subjects have shown, theclose interplay between power and representation means that the rallying cry of the common andconsensus are too often used in the service of enforcingoppressive homogeneity and coercivestandardization. As postmodernism privileges notions like fi^gmentation, heterogeneity, andmultiplicity, it effectively challenges the realist celebratory view of the commonand critiquesrealism's inability to address radical difference.

As my discussion of the embattled state of storytelling takes place between the aestheticand political impulses of realism and of postmodernism, I am as much influenced by theHowellsian idealism of the "ordinary"as I am by the Barthesian suspicion of the "stereotypical."I am as much enamored by storytelling activities that insert me into someone-else's-life-in-progress as I am conscious of the narrative conventions that enable my ensnarement. I am asmuch swayed by the politics of the common as I am shaped by the postmodern suspicion ofconsensus as an ideal. It is perhaps to be expected, then, that the contemporary Americanwriters that I discuss in this dissertation are writers who seemas ambivalent about storytelling asI am. I am interested in those writers who evince an epistemological, literary, and linguistic self-consciousness too great to tell a story comfortably,even competently. I propose the term"postmodern realists" to describe these incompetent storytellers for the ways they take, as theirthematic concern, the tensions between the established conventions of"person, thing, place" and


19/24

8

anti-narrativism, between formal accessibility and formal innovations, and between realistpolitics of the common and the postmodern politics of difference. As I describe a theme ofambivalence as the centralcharacteristic of "postmodem realists," I need to stress that thisproject does not armounce thediscovery of a new formal practice or a literary device. It willbecome evident throughout my discussion that my references to anti-narrativist and anti-representational gestures recall many of the well-known high modernist and postmodernistformal innovations and disruptions of storytelling. My rationale for naming the late-twentieth-century spirit of anti-narrativism and anti-representation as"postmodern" is in observation of thefact that literary vanguardism is always a relative descriptor, one that takes place within specifichistorical and literary contexts.

I begin by laying out what we talk about when we talk about realism. In Chapter One,"The Successful Failure of American Literary Realism," I survey scholarship concerning post-1950 American literary realism in order to identify the discursive values and strategies that comeinto play when realism, storytelling, and the politics of the common are assessed. In thenineteen-sixties and seventies, I argue, a reflectionist view of realism assessed the forminadequate to the task of aesthetically "mastering" reality, while in the nineteen-eighties, animmanentist approach indicted the form as a hegemonic tool of ideological duplication. Realismis doomed to failure when cast in critical scenarios of passive reflection or unidirectionalinscription, I argue, and point to a dialectic historicism as practiced in the critical works of AmyKaplan, Kenneth Warren, and Brook Thomas. Inaddressing realism's conflicted participationwith the historical real, these critics demonstrate a livelier model of realism; they resuscitate the"failure of realism" thesis, well established in postwar American literary criticism, discursivelyto transform the "failure" into the confirmatory site of realism's engagement with material


20/24

9

reality. In the subsequent chapters, I rely on this dynamic modelof realism to discuss the formas an aesthetic whose epistemological focus leaves it vulnerable to ideologically dominantversions of the"common."

As the leading French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet once described,"Realism is theideology which each [writer] brandishes against his neighbor"(157). In Chapter Two,"Invisibility, Transparency, and Other Lies that Realism Tells: Postmodemism as Anti-Realism,"I characterize the American literary postmodemismof the late-nineteen-sixties and seventiesas amovement of anti-realism. Relying heavily on apocalyptic and revolutionary terms, the firstgeneration of American literary postmodemists like John Barth, William Gass, and RonaldSukenick, to name a few, targeted realism as a convention that had forgotten itself as aconvention, and raised the flag of new technologies in fiction, such as metafiction,surfiction,self-reflexive fiction, and post-contemporary fiction. What the postmodemists targeted was theseeming invisibilityof the realist storytelling conventions of "person, thing, place," and as theyanalyzed realism as the "mode of representation that has 'made it' socially" (Brown 141), theysimultaneously critiqued the politics of formal invisibility. Forming a counterpart to my firstchapter review of realism's defenses, this chapter characterizes the literary-critical terrain ofcontemporary American fiction as an ongoingconflict between the aesthetic ideals and literarypractices of realism and those of postmodemism.

In the following three chapters, I use the term "postmodern realism" to describea newgrouping of contemporary American writers, writers that I believe write through the diminishedaura of storytelling in late-twentieth-century. I borrow the notion of aura from Walter Benjamin,of course. In the same year (1936) that he wrote his best known essay, "The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he argued the unique singularity of art that is lost in


21/24

10

the face ofmechanical reproduction, he wrote "The Storyteller,"in which he mourned the"incomparable aura about the storyteller"(109) that had been lost in the years following WorldWar One. Although Benjamin meant "storyteller" more specifically within the tradition of oraldelivery, he wasalso describing a period that was "poorer incommunicable experience," wherethe use-value of"information" competed against the"counsel" that storytelling could carry.Hence, in the years following World War One, "the artof storytelling [was]coming to an end"(84): "Moreand more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story isexpressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest amongourpossessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences" (83).

Now, when I use the term "postmodern realism" to describe the diminished aura ofstorytelling contemporary American fiction, my usage refers to the strong spirit of anti-representation and anti-narrativism in late-twentieth-century literary and critical climate. Inparticular, I discuss the making of the subject in the diminished aura of storytelling incontemporary American fictionthe "ethnic" in Asian American fiction, the "woman" infictions of female experience, and the"machine" in fictions of technology. In moments ofrepresentational conflict over the subject marked by the "difference"of ethnicity, gender,or non-human, postmodern realism aesthetically enacts the contemporary contestations over notions ofidentity, agency, knowledge, and subjectivity. Using theories of narratology, feminism,ethnicity, and technology, 1 argue that the contradictory operations of postmodern realism areultimately revelatory of the normative "real" that dictates the representation of "difference" incontemporary American fiction.

Chapter Three, "Suspicious Characters: Realism, Postmodern Realism and Asian AmericanIdentity,"argues realism's unparalleled utility in performing Asian American cultural work~of


22/24

II

rendering Asian American visibility, identity, and agency through the narrative properties oflocatable setting, detailed description, dialogue,character, and plot development. 1 thensituaterealism's "success" in the altered critical terrain of contemporary Asian American discourse, inwhich formal clarity is suspect as theone-sided performance ofa minority discourse, and formalopacity is valorized as envisioning a more progressive form of Asian American subjectivity. Inorder to resist the simplistic equation between the realist form and assimilative politics, I readTheresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. a Korean-American text that is frequently cited as anexemplar of postmodern subjectivity. But in contrast to its highly anti-representational surfaceof postmodern opacity, 1 argue, the text's narrating consciousness expresses a longing forprecisely the community of communication and discursive belonging that accompany the realistformation of identity and subjectivity. I locate Dictee's postmodern realism within thisconflicting articulation of identity as both a yoke and a need.

In Chapter Four, "Women Who Think Too Much: The Postmodern Realism of LydiaDavis and Lynne Tillman," I address the importance of an absolute narrative authority in thefeminist realism of the nineteen-seventies and highlight its absence in the postmodern realism ofLydia Davis (Break It Down. Almost No Memory. The End of the Story) and Lynne Tillman(Haunted Houses. Motion Sickness. No Lease on Life). The consciousness-raising fiction thataccompanied the Women's Liberation Movement fundamentally relied on the coherence of thefemale character as a knower of her reality. As the experiencing subject whose knowledge of theworld underwrote her feminist agency, the female character's epistemological facility wasfundamental to the political transaction of feminist critiqueand political agenda. In contrast,Davis and Tillman employ the trope of reading to counter the realist ideal of an absolutenarrative authority. They create femalecharacters who are obsessive readersof books, of


23/24

12

themselves, of the world^and yet whose readings arealways impaired by a postmodern doubtof ever "accessing"the"truth." And as their desire to "know" escalates, they suffer the paralysisof self-doubt in a parallel development. Consequently, in eschewing the fictional conventions ofa "knowing"character, the postmodern realism of Davis and Tillman illustrates theincompatibility of feminist storytelling and the postmodern incredulity towards truth-claims.

In Chapter Five, "The Human Measure of Things: Richard Powers's Postmodern Realismin Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark." 1analyze competing approaches to representing themachine's"difference" in contemporary American fictions of scienceand technology.Traditionally, the genre of extrapolative science fiction has relied on realist narrative devices torepresent the machine in "recognizable" terms; furthermore, the realist representation of themachine has taken place within the humanist discourse of holding the "human"as the OriginaryPresence, as theontological measure of all things. 1 argue that the realist epistemologicalprocess is in direct contrast to the postmodern one-of using the constructed-ness of the machineto unsettle the primacy of "human" identity from the discourse of the "natural," the "original,"the "real." In this last chapter, I place a different emphasison my descriptive usage ofpostmodern realism. While 1emphasized the postmodern disruption of realist narrativeoperations in the works of Cha, Davis, and Tillman, here,1 describea realist resistance to thethreat of postmodern disruptions. Hence I read Powers's postmodern realism as a self-consciousand sometimes even a desperate enactment of shoring up realist ideals in the face of postmodernskepticism. Even as he thematizes the epistemological impossibility of apprehending themachine except through human equivalents and defmitions ("mind,""memory," "agency,""subjectivity"), Powers's intense awareness of the limitsof representation reveals the ontologicalfixity of the "human" in a Baudrillardian setting of "simulacrums."


24/24

Hence, each chapterdiscusses contemporary American fiction writers whoare keenlyaware of the diminished aura of storytelling. These are writers who are too uncomfortable toassume the storyteller stance of "let me tell you a story," and whose discomfort translates, into alate-twentieth-century version, the post-World War Onecondition that Walter Benjamindescribed;"More and more often, there is embarrassmentall around when the wish to hear astory is expressed," (83). In the postmodern climate of anti-narrativism and anti-representation,a certain amountof embarrassment seems requisite in the production of stories, and the writersthat 1 identify as postmodern realists illustrate thisembarrassment by disrupting the storytellingform. But what distinguishes them from the first generation of American postmodernists of thenineteen-sixties and seventies is that as they are writing in the late-twentieth-century, they cannotexpress an euphoria in exposing the fictionality of meaning; nor can they sustain the belief, asespoused by John Barth, that an artist may "transcend artifice by insisting upon it" (qtd. in Hite46). So in the fictions of postmodem realists, I believe, an attitude of apology, or defiance, in theact of storytelling becomes part of the story itself.

Other contemporary American writers that I could have discussed under the criticaldescriptor of postmodem realists are writers such as Carol Maso and David Markson. Forinstance. Carol Maso's novel Defiance (1998) is a story about a professor w ho is defiant that shekilled two of her graduate students; at thesame time, it is a novel defiant in the act of telling thestory. So, in addition to reminding us that professors ought not to kill their graduate students,

the story of Defiance as told with defiance is an illustration of writing through the diminishedaura of storytelling. David Markson's Reader's Block (1996) is a novel constituted by literarytrivia (such as the fact that Althusser spent time in a psychiatric ward, or that A.E. Housemannever lived in Shropshire, or that John Donne posed for his death shroud, which he then kept by

Realism and Postmodern Realism in Contemporary American Fiction

Documents