A Poetics of Postmodernism by Linda Hutcheon

Author:Linda Hutcheon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-08-30T17:00:00+00:00

III

It’s simply that I have never shared the general admiration for his [Dvorak’s] New World Symphony, which is, to be precise, a medley, as they say in popular music…. It will lead our composers astray. It won’t be long before they’re blowing the clarinet in Carnegie Hall like drunken Negroes in Chicago and calling it serious music. Jim Huneker in Skvorecky’s Dvorak in Love

Skvorecky is aware that Dvorak’s work foreshadows the postmodern (including his own practice) both in its parodic intertextuality and in its mixing of popular and high art forms. In historiographic metafiction, it is not just (serious or popular) literature and history that form the discourses of postmodernism. Everything from comic books and fairy tales to almanacs and newspapers provide historiographic metafiction with culturally significant intertexts. In Coover’s The Public Burning, the history of the Rosenbergs’ execution is mediated by many different textualized forms. One major form is that of the various media, through which the concept of the disparity between “news” and “reality” or “truth” is foregrounded. The New York Times is shown to constitute the sacred texts of America, the texts that offer “orderly and reasonable” versions of experience, but whose apparent objectivity conceals a Hegelian “idealism which mistakes its own language for reality” (Mazurek 1982, 34). And one of the central intertexts for the portrayal of Richard Nixon in the novel is his famous televised “Checkers” speech, whose tone, metaphors and ideology provide Coover with the rhetoric and personality of his fictionalized Nixon.

Historiographic metafiction appears, then, willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a society. It wants to challenge those discourses and yet to use them, even to milk them for all they are worth. In Pynchon’s fiction, for instance, this kind of contradictory subversive inscribing is often carried to an extreme: “Documentation, obsessional systems, the languages of commerce, of the legal system, of popular culture, of advertising: hundreds of systems compete with each other, resisting assimilation to any one received paradigm” (Waugh 1984, 39). But Pynchon’s intertextually overdetermined, discursively overloaded fictions both parody and enact the totalizing tendency of all discourses to create systems and structures. The plots of such narratives become other kinds of plots, that is, conspiracies that invoke terror in those subject (as we all are) to the power of pattern. Many have commented upon this paranoia in the works of contemporary American writers, but few have noted the paradoxical nature of this particularly postmodern fear and loathing: the terror of totalizing plotting is inscribed within texts characterized by nothing if not by overplotting and overdetermined intertextual self-reference. The text itself becomes the potentially closed, self-referring system.

Perhaps this contradictory attraction/repulsion to structure and pattern explains the predominance of the parodic use of certain familiar and overtly conventionally plotted forms in American fiction, for instance, that of the Western: Little Big Man, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The Sot-Weed Factor, Welcome to Hard Times, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It has also been suggested that “the one thing

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