Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism by Burn Stephen J

Author:Burn, Stephen J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Temporal form

Before outlining how the individual structures and systemic interactions of these four parts of the novel relate to systems theory, I would like to briefly consider the significance of Strong Motion’s structure against what Joseph Frank calls the “spatial form” practiced by Franzen’s postmodern and modern predecessors. In “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1963), Frank defines a mode of ordering literary works that breaks with the belief that we understand narrative through a linear temporal sequence. Rather than experiencing literature as a form “composed of a succession of words proceeding through time” (6), modernist writers, Frank argued, were attempting to order their works spatially, after the techniques of the plastic arts. In a work exhibiting spatial form, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, we see a novel composed from a series of scattered cross-references that do not necessarily cohere when the novel is apprehended in linear sequence, but rather relate “to each other independently of the time sequence of the narrative” (16). This structure means that “a knowledge of the whole is essential to the understanding of any part” (19), so to appreciate any single scene in Ulysses a reader must reconstruct the sense of that scene by assembling “fragments, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, scattered through the book” (18).

Frank’s examples are primarily drawn from high modernism—Proust, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound—but these structural techniques are part of modernism’s bequest to postmodernism. Though the juxtapositions of Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), for instance, are much less radical than Joyce’s, his novel nevertheless offers a clear example of spatial form in the post-modern novel. In a scene late in the book, DeLillo sets the reader in Lee Harvey Oswald’s scattered consciousness:

He has proof of his subscriptions to left-wing journals. He has the court summons describing the incident that led to his arrest.

The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought.

Rain-slick streets.

Aerospace is the coming thing, with courses at night in economic theory. (335)

Considered in linear sequence, this passage makes limited sense. Considered in terms of the spatial arrangement of the entire novel, however, DeLillo’s passage is much easier to decode. Oswald’s reflection on “the revolution,” for example, can be understood by connecting this fragment to a scene 156 pages earlier, when this phrase is identified as a quotation from Castro (179). Recognizing this echo makes sense, here, because Oswald is thinking of going to Cuba. “Rain-slick streets” recasts a kind of mantra that appears 289 pages earlier in a violent fantasy Oswald has as a boy in New Orleans (46). Apprehended spatially, then, the juxtaposition of these two phrases implies a continuum between his violent youth and his violent adulthood. The reference to “Aerospace” is from the preceding page, and reminds the reader that the cover story Oswald gives his wife for his move to Cuba is that he is “looking for work in the aerospace industry” (334). But the courses in “economic theory” represent a second form of long-term yearning, which Oswald will repeat 81 pages later when he is in prison (416).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.