Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
An Elaborate Suggestion
Brian McHale. Constructing
Postmodernism. London and NY: Routledge, 1992. xii+342. $49.95 cloth,
$15.95 paper.
In the final two essays of Constructing Postmodernism, Brian McHale makes an
appealing case for giving SF, and particularly cyberpunk, a privileged place in
postmodernist writing. McHale begins from a single, ostensibly simple premise:
postmodernist fiction is based on an "ontological dominant," in contrast to modernist
writing's "epistemological dominant." In McHale's account, modernist fiction was
characterized by its concern with the problems of perspectivism, of individual
consciousnesses trying to know the world: a world assumed by authors and readers to be
unified and objective, and yet ultimately inaccessible to human consciousness. The most
characteristic genre of the epoch was the detective story, with a questing cognitive hero
traversing a labyrinthine world-reality in search of the truth about things. "Modernist perspectivism (e.g., Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, To the
Lighthouse, Les Faux-Monnayeurs) multiplied points of view on the world, but
without, for the most part, undermining the underlying unity of the self. Though in
modernist fiction the perspectives on the world are many, and each differs from all the
others, nevertheless each perspective is lodged in a subjectivity which is itself
relatively coherent, relatively centered and stable..." (CP 254).
Postmodernist fiction, by contrast, assumes that the world is not one, that we function
in an ontologically plural multiverse of experience in which the classical subject is
decentered and fragmented; or rather both selves and worlds operate in many modalities
that can neither be reduced to nor synthesized into an overarching common reality. The
exemplary genre for the ontological mode is, for McHale, SF. For SF's stock-in-trade is
the potential infinity of bodily forms, cultures, spacetimes, realities.
"[W]hile epistemologically-oriented fiction (modernism, detective fiction) is preoccupied
with questions such as: what is there to know about the world? and who knows it, and how
reliably? How is knowledge transmitted, to whom, and how reliably?, etc.,
ontologically-oriented fiction (postmodernism, SF) is preoccupied with questions such as:
what is a world? How is a world constituted? Are there alternative worlds, and if so, how
are they constituted? How do different worlds, and different kinds of world, differ, and
what happens when one passes from one world to another, etc.?" (247).
In his previous book, Postmodernist Fiction, McHale used this opposition to
derive a rich catalog--"repertoire" is McHale's preferred term--of the topics and
devices that made an enormous variety of postmodernist writers seem to share a common
concern. CP is concerned primarily with the way postmodernist reading-strategies
involve and imply modernist ones (if only to subvert them), exemplified in the work of
Joyce, Pynchon, Brooke-Rose, Eco, McElroy. CP's intensive reading of a few texts
complements PF's sweep, but it also extends the earlier book's argument in at
least three ways. It moderates PF's unfashionably developmental notion that
postmodernist style always succeeds modernist style. It emphasizes that the ontological
obsessions of postmodernist fiction ultimately reflect concern about individual and
collective death. And it arrives at the conclusion that SF, with the emergence of
cyberpunk, should be treated as one of, if not the, paradigmatic genres of postmodernism,
in which the essential techniques of postmodernist fiction are made flesh on the level of
action and content.
McHale had already given SF an exemplary role in PF, even before encountering
Gibson, Sterling & Co.. "It is," he wrote then, "perhaps the ontological
genre par excellence. We can think of science fiction as postmodernism's
noncanonized or 'low art' double..." (PF59). This hypothesis was strengthened by
cyberpunk writers' avid engagement with the American postmodernist masters, and in CP
McHale abandons the discourse about "low art," identifying SF as something close to
postmodern literature's generic dominant:
Since [PF], my conviction has grown that SF, far from being marginal to
contemporary "advanced" or "state-of-the-art" writing, may actually be paradigmatic
of it. This is so in at least two respects. First, SF is openly and avowedly ontological
in its orientation, i.e., like "mainstream" postmodernist writing it is self-consciously
world-building fiction, laying bare the process of world-making itself. Secondly, SF
constitutes a particularly clear and demonstrable example of an intertextual field, one in
which models, materials, images, "ideas," etc. circulate openly from text to text, and
are conspicuously cited, analyzed, combined, revised, and reconfigured. In this it differs
from "mainstream" postmodernism only in the openness and visibility of the process. It
is precisely this visibility of intertextual circulation in SF that makes it so valuable
as a heuristic model of literature in general, and postmodernist literature in particular.
(13)
The notion that a theory of literature might be constructed using SF as the ruling
model is tantalizing, but McHale does not follow up on it in CP. He
does, however, make much of the more specific connection between postmodernist
SF (i.e., cyberpunk) and the postmodernist mainstream. In the book's penultimate
essay, "POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM," McHale describes a privileged relationship between the two
streams, which has been marked by a zig-zag historical development of ever closer approach
to aesthetic contemporaneity. The SF of the 50s aspired to conditions of the best-seller
(which McHale sees as derived from the classical art novel), while a few late modernists
were beginning to adopt motifs from SF. Gradually, there evolved a "peculiar relationship
of nonsychronization between SF and advanced mainstream fiction...with each
reflecting an outdated phase of the other" (228). The writers of the New Wave
imitated the techniques of modernist art fiction, while the new postmodernists like
Burroughs and Pynchon picked up the clichés of pulp SF. In the present moment (of 1988,
when the essay first appeared in Larry McCaffery's famous cyberpunk issue of Mississippi
Review), the independent developments of these two literary modes have meshed to
create a science- fictionized mainstream and postmodernized SF distilled in cyberpunk.
In the concluding essay of CP, "Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk,"
McHale shows how the main motifs that he identifies as postmodernist concern
with "worldness," with the centrifugal self, and with individual and collective
death appear in cyberpunk actualized and literalized, "translate[d] or transcode[d]...from the level of form (the
verbal continuum, narrative strategies) to the level of content or world" (246).
Cyberpunk thus shares with postmodernist art fiction the emphasis on space, the recourse
to parallel and inset worlds, the fragmentation of identity, and the focus on states of
being other than life and death. All of these of course represent topoi particularly
concerned with ontological plurality, and McHale clearly takes pleasure in the cyberpunks'
exuberant invention of states that they resolutely refuse to reduce to a single
overarching continuum.
On its own, "Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk" is one of the best recent essays
published on the status of SF in 20th century fiction. As it emerges from his larger
argument about the ontological concern of postmodernist art, McHale's defense of cyberpunk
is rich and even playful, for inventing and entertaining fictional worlds is ultimately
less an ontological concern, than a ludic one; even for critics there's something
game-like in deciding which cultural phenomena fit under epistemology, and which ones
under ontology. Having said this, I find myself torn between delight that such a
sophisticated literary-historical apology for c-p can exist at all, and frustration at the
vagueness and weakness of McHale's supporting arguments. McHale's thesis seems to bear out
the opinion that many scientists have about literary criticism, that it creates scads of
interesting ideas out of impossibly fuzzy models. How fuzzy a model is may be irrelevant
if we can throw it away after it generates good ideas, and judging by the admiration CP
has garnered on the electronic net and among SF academics, McHale's model is persuasive.
But on close examination, McHale's argument depends almost entirely on the combination of
close textual analysis and the application of certain concepts that, although they help to
organize the critical reading, cannot stand on their own. If most of the work of grounding
McHale's argument and of extending it beyond a case study in literary history remains to
be done, then his model, at least in its present form, may be less a model than an
elaborate suggestion.
The potentially paradigmatic role of SF is closely connected to McHale's whole
conception of postmodernism, and the problem begins here--for McHale studiously avoids
developing a theory of postmodernism that might explain the specific literary phenomena he
discusses in PF and CP. In the preface to PF McHale modestly
claimed only to be writing a "descriptive poetics" (PF, xi), as if theory were
somehow out of his league. In CP McHale reiterates this position, with rather
more protestation. But McHale's modesty is misplaced. His method is weak precisely to the
extent that it refuses to reflect on its own premises, and on his consistent bracketing of
out all the historical, social and cultural questions that might shed some light on it.
It is important to keep in mind how conservative McHale's method is for its strengths
come from the way it attempts to translate the cultural concerns of postmodernism into the
language of a modernist literary consciousness. McHale's invocations, in the introduction
to CP, of Berger and Luckman's influential The Social Construction of Reality,
and the work of Goodman, Rorty, and other pragmatic relativist thinkers are largely
gestures; McHale does not truly connect his "one idea" to a broader theoretical metanarrative. In the essays, McHale's
"construction" of postmodernism is conceived
almost entirely in terms of individual constructs, like houses on a hill, or like novels
put together by individual authors, not like the social construction of cultural systems
in which individual works are embedded. CP's essays are, accordingly, almost all
close readings of individual classical or "typical" works and oeuvres. There is one
(superb) essay on Ulysses, treating it as a example of how one text can include
both modernist and postmodernist elements; two essays on Gravity's Rainbow and
the many ways in which modernist readers misread it; another excellent essay on Vineland;
two on Eco's novels; one each on the fiction of Joseph McElroy and Christine Brooke-Rose.
McHale's gift for meticulous close readings sends him to texts that reward traditional
techniques of textual analysis and encourages him ignore the more noisy, corrupt, and
hypertextual multimedia that many would consider more typical of postmodernism than long,
intricate books. In McHale's readings, Gravity's Rainbow and Eco's
paint-by-the-pomo-numbers novels become models of postmodern fiction because they seem to
engage directly the reading strategies of modernism, if only to subvert them. Further,
this use of "high-literary" texts and authors to make claims about a literary current
that subverts the status of elite art at every turn is so problematic that even the blurb
attached to Routledge's paperback edition seems to make apologies for it: "Although
mainly focused on 'high' or 'elite' cultural products 'art' novels, Constructing
Postmodernism relates these products to such phenomena of postmodern culture as
television and cinema, paranoia and nuclear anxiety, angelology and the cybernetic
interface, and death, now as always (in spite of what Captain Kirk says) the true Final
Frontier." The blurb is silly and inept, but it identifies the problem: McHale looks for
the key where the light is, not where he lost it. To paraphrase McHale himself, he is a
modernist reading a postmodern world, but without noticing the lag.
In my view, three weaknesses in particular mar McHale's argument: the notion of the
"ontological dominant"; McHale's desire to see the plurality of worlds in cyberpunk as
irreducible, rather than as expressions of a technological dominant; and the laxness of
McHale's supporting evidence.
The idea of an "ontological dominant" is the foundation upon which the whole edifice
rests. The Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists invented and refined the notion of
the dominant as a way to determine which features of a given work or oeuvre are
most emphasized, and which have been consequently de-emphasized vis
à vis earlier styles.
It was originally applied to components of artistic works (rhythm, diction, plot, etc.),
and it is fruitful as long as the elements it refers to are clearly defined within a
relatively circumscribed domain of artistic technique. The Prague School ultimately gave
the imprimatur for applying it to theme, but this move dispersed the idea of the
dominant into areas that are simultaneously far more abstract and far more culturally
grounded than artistic technique and form. When with McHale's theory "ontology" or
ontological concern fills the niche of the dominant, the idea completely breaks out of the
frame of the formal study of artistic techniques into the comprehensive domain of culture,
where definitions of dominant features are hotly contested, and indeed where a dominant
comes perilously close to turning into a Zeitgeist. A putative dominant of
cultural concern begs for explanations of its connection to the conditions of life and
these explanations must come from outside literature, for literature is in this sort of
model an expression of culture, not the other way around.
Only in his chapter on Pynchon's Vineland does McHale drop his elite
book-centeredness to discuss another artistic technology and its cultural practice:
television and channel-zapping. Calling it an "ontological pluralizer" McHale approaches
a broader cultural explanation, forced, as it happens, by Pynchon's own insistence on
referring to it in his book. In the chapter on cyberpunk, however, McHale manages the
dubious tour-de-force of discussing the genre without referring to the legitimate
ontological questions posed by actual or plausible real-world technologies novels that
"pluralize worlds", like psychedelics, VR, AI, etc.; instead, McHale discusses the
historico-technological speculations of those works exclusively as novelistic devices.
This is where, to my mind, McHale's theory is weakest. One of his main contentions is that
postmodernist fiction revels in the proliferation of worlds and modes of being without
ever reducing them to some encompassing authoritative principle. Although this may be true
of mainstream postmodernism (I tend to doubt it, postmodern chaos has its reasons), I am
certain it is not true for cyberpunk. Behind and within all the
worlds-within-and-alongside-worlds, experiences, identities, and conditions of existence
that are neither life nor death, there is a continuum which determines the relative
importance of the thematic elements: namely, the history of technology. Technology's
almost autonomous force, distributed through machines, drugs, bionics, cyborgs, Ellul's
"technique," etc., saturates cyberpunk, and indeed most SF, to a degree that it demands
to be viewed as a driving principle overriding all other lesser powers. If there is a
thematic dominant in cyberpunk (and perhaps SF in general) it is technology, for it is the
concrete, unguided and global transformative power of technology that inspires the
widespread concern with worlds in contemporary culture which McHale calls ontological.
Technology, however, unlike ontology, has a material social history that both determines
and is determined by other cultural practices; it can be socially and politically
unconscious, even in art. It can be suffered, comprehended, contested, joined, and even
avoided via the idea of ontology, for example. It is a ground for fiction. McHale, in
trying to maintain some radical indeterminacy and irreducibility in his object
(postmodernist fiction, SF) while conserving the idealist assumptions of his formalist
method, sees the plurality of worlds as completely open and undetermined, except perhaps
by the logic of literature (and, I assume, philosophy) that led the epistemological
concerns of modernism to "tip over" into ontology when they were pushed hard enough (PF,
11).
McHale's discomfort with metanarratives leaves him with no convincing way to
distinguish why certain postmodernist practices differ from similar practices in earlier
ages, and what makes earlier modes attractive to later ages. For example, he treats the
device of the plurality of worlds as one of the central points of convergence of
postmodern SF and postmodern mainstream fiction. He attributes this convergence to the
common origin of both modes in medieval romance, a genre which also delighted in inset and
parallel worlds, questing heroes, etc. But to explain why romance should suddenly
be so favored McHale gestures to Jameson's well-known essay, "Magical Narratives: Romance
as Genre," which discusses modern romance as a form pre-capitalist nostalgia. Jameson's
political-cultural argument, which ties the genre to the social history it is embedded in,
seems irrelevant to McHale. The only important point is the structural similarity of the
romance to postmodernist modes. One might argue that modernist writing was just as
entangled with medieval romance, although in a different register, without postmodern
fiction's deadpan, unironic, and, in SF's case, literalizing reproduction of romantic
chronotopes. But why should pomo writers return to medieval devices? Is the similarity
trivial or richly determined? Does McHale accept the politically critical motivation of
Jameson, his only supporting source for the romance connection, or not? And if not, what
are the implications of deferring to Jameson's authority?
There is also considerable fuzziness about where SF comes into the explanatory picture.
Is SF per se the epitome of postmodernism, or only its postmodernist evolute,
cyberpunk? I think one could argue that most of the classical works of SF "lay bare
the process," as McHale phrases it, of world-making, the fragmentation of identity, and
most definitely the representation of immortality and collective death. (I need to note
here that McHale fudges the distinction between ontological world-making, which is linked
to concepts like reality, determination, qualities of being, and fictional world-making,
which is linked to concepts like play, irony, suspension. The two activities may be
entwined, perhaps especially in SF, but this is far from self-evident, and nowhere in CP
does McHale show he's aware that he has conflated them.) Using those categories alone I
would include Stapledon, Cordwainer Smith, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, Dick, Delany, Watson,
LeGuin, Bester, Russ... tell me when to stop. But if SF is not postmodernist in its own
right, then what makes cyberpunk so? It appears to be a matter of foregrounding and
combining certain traditional SF motifs into a new configuration. Discussing the
worlds-within-worlds motif McHale notes that such worlds en abyme occur in all
SF, but in cyberpunk they appear "with a new intensity of emphasis, sharpness of focus,
and functional centrality" (248). They are pomo, because they are more
pomo. Hmmmm.
This weakness of support extends down from larger theses to smaller
arguments. At one point McHale claims that cyberpunk and "biopunk" writers "often foreground [the] metafictional potential of paraspace" (253) by developing an analogy between the author
of the text and the author of the cyberspace or paraspace world. He provides two examples,
Continuity's function in Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and Donnell's role in
Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes. But these, too, are not self-evident, and the case
of Continuity, at least, is so obscure that cries out for a supporting interpretation. If
these are the handiest examples of the metafictional use of paraspace as metaphor in c-p,
then one must wonder whether there really are many others. Similarly, after claiming that
cyberpunk, like mainstream postmodernism, is concerned with the fragmentation and
decentering of identity, McHale has to backtrack. Well, it's not really true, "cyberpunk
writers have all too often ended up falling back on the perspectivist structural cliches
inherited from modernist poetics" (259). Finally, the description of the relationship
between the postmodernist mainstream and cyberpunk that McHale identifies in his
"POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM" is so disconnected that it constitutes a set of notes for
possible elaboration in the future, rather than evidence. It is very disappointing to see
Burroughs's and Pynchon's connection to SF explained by way of a paragraph on the travels
of the title Blade Runner from Alan Nourse's novel to Riddley Scott's film, or
via a list of characters and themes from Burroughs and Pynchon alluded to by cyberpunk
writers. And in what should be the coup de grace, a text-to-text comparison of Kathy
Acker's parodies of Neuromancer in The Empire of the Senseless with
Gibson's original passages, McHale is content to speculate, tautologically, that Acker is
simply attracted to the same repertoire of motifs that a mainstream postmodernist like
Acker would be attracted to. Why Acker should be attracted to Gibson to make her
"blank parodies" and sentence-violence is bracketed out; and seeing the relevant
passages side by side makes this reader, at least, refuse to waive my right to consecutive
interpretation.
McHale has anticipated critiques such as mine. Defending his "construction" (which I
take to mean his description) of postmodernism against competing notions in his
introduction to CP, he writes "choices among competing constructions can only be
made strategically, in the light of the kind of work that the chosen construction might be
expected to accomplish" (10). This is practical wisdom, close to the astonishing advice
quoted by McHale from Nelson Goodman: "For a categorial system, what needs to be shown is
not that it is true but what it can do. Put crassly, what is called for in such cases is
less like arguing than selling" (26). Clearly, McHale's formalist, descriptive, top-down
sell of postmodern literary practices will do valuable work in attracting academic
literary circles to buy into cyberpunk and SF. But can it do more?
I believe that "POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM" and "Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk" can do
much better work as parts of another book that seems to want to emerge from CP, a
book both more personal and more engaged with the world in which SF is embedded than CP.
McHale may be headed toward an exploration of the thematics of death in postmodern writing
that will give meat and nerves to the groundless abstraction of ontology, as well as
requiring him to refer to personal reflections and cultural concerns that extend beyond
categorizing literary strategies. In that context McHale may provide us not only a richly
grounded theory of postmodern writing and SF, but a construction that actually deals with
the questions about writing's relation to non-writing SF, to multi- and hypermedia, to the
filaments of interest and commitment that tie criticism to social life--in short, a
construction worth moving into and living in, not just to buy and sell.
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