Postmodernism in Pieces

Postmodernism in Pieces and Lyrical Strategies, two valuable new studies of American fiction, are quite different—in approach and methodology, in the novels they address, in the shibboleths they want to challenge—but they are united in their attempt to shake up our engrained habits when reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. The conclusions each author draws differ in part because of the contrasting critical orientations they bring to bear on the same broad field. More invested in the philosophical and culturalist branches of literary theory, Matthew Mullins reimagines postmodernist fiction as “a resolutely materialist aesthetic,” deeply concerned with everyday objects, the social realm, and the interactions between the two (3). Katie Owens-Murphy’s more formalist approach provides a new way to understand the rhetorical devices and stylistic challenges of modernist and contemporary fiction by arguing that twentieth-century American novels have “far more in common with lyric poems than with their novelistic predecessors” (188). Although they take up different novels—the only authors treated in both books are Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo—the two studies focus on a fairly familiar body of major, frequently taught American novelists; both suggest a canon in need of re-reading and key terms ripe for redefinition.Mullins’s is a rather bold quest: he wishes to reclaim one of the most fraught and, some might say, tired of categories, postmodernism. He acknowledges that postmodernism, according to scholarly consensus, is now moribund and defunct, but he insists the flood of obituaries for the postmodern have been both premature and misleading. “This book tells a different story of postmodernism,” he writes, “in light of what I call the neomaterialisms of our current critical climate, including posthumanism, thing theory, Actor-Network-Theory, and object-oriented philosophy” (3). As he explains in the substantial, far-reaching theoretical introduction, what these new materialist theories and approaches share is a commitment to deprivileging the human and a belief in the primacy of nonhuman objects and processes—a goal Mullins also locates at the heart of postmodernism itself. Closely following Bruno Latour’s notion that “the social is a network assembled of and by material actors, both human and nonhuman” (14), Mullins argues that “what makes literature postmodern is its preoccupation with the material things and interactions that constitute” (3) ready-made social categories of human existence, like race, gender, and nation.Mullins is aware of how counterintuitive this sounds: “isn’t it conventional wisdom that postmodernism is essentially abstract, theory-driven, perhaps even anti-materialist?” (25). In contrast to this familiar charge, Mullins spells out a version of postmodernism that is actually obsessed with “the real,” in particular the stubborn reality and materiality of objects. What this means in practice is that Mullins’s analyses of novels all “begin with things” and “nonhuman actors,” as he traces “their circulations throughout and across narratives to see what kinds of networks they participate in constructing” (22). For example, he argues that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) portrays social phenomena like “whiteness” and “Nativeness” as “in-process assemblages,” constructed out of material objects—such as a high school letterman jacket, a screwdriver, or a Coke bottle (61). The second chapter argues that postmodernist novels feature “flattened ontologies” in which everyday objects are endowed with just as much agency and meaning as humans. To prove this point, Mullins focuses on a trio of novels, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Morrison, and Jonathan Lethem, in which metal rings figure prominently, in order to demonstrate that “everyday things play roles that are equally important as those of the most significant human characters” in such postmodernist texts (69). Although the notion that the magic ring in Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), say, is just as consequential and has as much agency as the novel’s human characters may not be fully persuasive, Mullins’s sharp attention to the complex place of concrete objects in such narratives is welcome and illuminating. In general, Postmodernism in Pieces is a lively, helpful corrective to long-standing assumptions about postmodernist fiction’s indifference to the material, the real, and the social.Although Owens-Murphy has virtually no interest in debates about postmodernism or the new materialism, she too wants to challenge the blinkered way we have read the twentieth-century American novel. What makes her book so surprising and refreshing is that it defiantly ignores the artificial genre division between fiction and poetry, a bright line seldom crossed by scholars today, especially within a single study. Owens-Murphy refuses to abide by the generic and disciplinary boundaries that have too often obscured the vital, mutually enriching commerce between modern fiction and poetry. Deftly blending theories of narrative, lyric, and genre, she argues that the long-standing critical bias toward narrative has limited our ability to understand the distinctive devices of the twentieth-century American novel, which relies heavily on what she calls “lyrical strategies.” As she persuasively argues, it is scholars, not the writers themselves, who have always policed the boundaries between fiction and poetry, borders which practitioners of the novel have spent the last century or more happily dissolving. “It is time that we, as critics, begin to catch up,” (190) she concludes.Owens-Murphy is particularly fascinated by the fact that so many modern novels, by figures ranging from William Faulkner and Jean Toomer to Gloria Naylor and DeLillo, are decidedly nonnarrative—they do without conventional plot, linear chronology, external action, and other essential features of narrative. Instead of finding such works wanting because they fall short of some narrative ideal, as detractors often do, Owens-Murphy suggests we need to adjust our reading strategies; if we approach them with the assumptions of poetry rather than narrative, it becomes clear that such novels deploy central tropes that are familiar from lyric poetry but too often overlooked in studies of the novel, like repetition, metaphor, and the dramatic monologue. For example, she examines novels by John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Kathy Acker that use extensive repetition in order to “disrupt the sequential progressions we typically find in narrative fiction” (15). Armed with insights about the role of repetition in lyric, Owens-Murphy demonstrates that these novels are “premised on the structural logic of lyric poetry” rather than narrative and that these writers often use repetition for “political ends” (44).Each of the book’s chapters are organized around a single trope or rhetorical device, which allows Owens-Murphy to devise some unusual and illuminating pairings and connections: for instance, by highlighting various uses of dramatic personae, she manages to bring together the narrators of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and she reads both as descendants of the Victorian dramatic monologue par excellence, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), of all things. Ambitious in scope, Lyrical Strategies gives us a new framework and vocabulary for understanding the challenging formal features of a wide range of novels by authors from Henry James to Henry Miller, Zora Neale Hurston to Marilynne Robinson.For all their differences, these two stimulating, eye-opening books offer useful models for overhauling some of the stale categories, engrained binaries, and hoary assumptions that have so often guided, and limited, our understanding of American fiction

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Materialism · Poetics · Poetry · Postmodernism · Reading (process) · Realm · Rhetorical question · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy