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Moments of Decision in Contemporary American Fiction: Roth, Auster, Eugenides

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 51; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111611003643905

1939-9138

Adam Kelly,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

ABSTRACT Debates concerning the emergence of a post-postmodern paradigm in contemporary American fiction have highlighted the thinking of transition as a central problem. In this essay I explore three examples of a literary genre—observer-hero narrative—that historically specializes in monitoring transition and identifying shifts "in the representation of things" (Jameson ix). After outlining the critical history of this genre, I go on to argue that contemporary novels in the genre, by Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Jeffrey Eugenides, focus on the problem of representing moments of decision. I frame the alternating interpretations these novels foreground—tragic, modern, postmodern—and conclude the essay by relating this interpretive oscillation to a Derridean undecidability that challenges the spatial emphasis found in Jamesonian postmodernism, thereby pointing toward new representational possibilities in contemporary literature. Keywords: post-postmodernismobserver-hero narrativetragedyPhilip RothPaul AusterJeffrey EugenidesJacques DerridaFredric Jameson Notes 1. See the essays by Franzen, Moody, and Wallace, and Eugenides's interview with Foer ("Jeffrey Eugenides"). 2. Robert McLaughlin refers to "the current sense of a sea change" in American fiction and other critics would seem to agree, while arguing over the precise nature of the shift from postmodernist concerns and styles (59). McLaughlin locates the primary change in a renewed emphasis on social engagement in contemporary writing, linking this to concerns about the current state of the literary marketplace, a point also emphasized by Jeremy Green. Daniel Grassian argues that an increased engagement with, and through, popular culture marks the new fiction (15), while Andrew Hoberek similarly draws attention to shifting attitudes among younger writers toward the evaluation of traditionally "low" genres ("Introduction" 237–40). In general, much depends upon which contemporary writers each critic finds to be most significant; while Marshall Boswell observes a "third wave of modernism" led by David Foster Wallace (1), Robert Rebein argues that recent fiction has in fact been characterized by a return to realism and a renewed investment in place. In Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, Stephen Burn offers an eloquent and extensive defense of the term "post-postmodernism" to categorize the new fiction. 3. This position statement from the opening page of Jameson's text expands on Ihab Hassan's earlier assertion that postmodernism marks the emergence of the problem of literary change, and also echoes David Harvey's analysis in The Condition of Postmodernity (subtitled "An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change"). In another article in Hoberek's volume, Timothy Bewes contests Jameson's diagnosis of "a certain spatial turn" in the postmodern, arguing that this formulation constitutes an obstacle to historicizing the contemporary and to thinking transition: "The task of theorizing what comes after the postmodern, then, may well have to begin by challenging the spatialized notion of the postmodern as an epoch that may be succeeded by anything at all" (274). The present article seeks to contribute to this challenge by examining new and alternative models of the event in recent fiction. 4. Bruffee also suggests that "the structure of elegiac romance is at some level generically a displaced version of [the] primary Oedipal relationship" (Elegiac Romance 148). 5. That observer-hero narrative is virtually synonymous with major American fiction—from early examples in the stories of Irving and Poe, through Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Moby-Dick, to such era-defining texts as The Great Gatsby, All the King's Men, On the Road, Pale Fire, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the twentieth century—is indeed striking, although Buell himself offers no theory to explain it. Recognizing Emerson's "Heroism" and Representative Men as formative texts, many scholars have noted the important role of hero-worship in American cultural history (see Bush); observer-hero narrative might be viewed in this light as a genre ideally suited to critical engagement with the anxieties associated with this kind of hagiography. In addition, the relationship between the self and God explored in many of the Puritan texts might suggest a further thematic source for the influence of observer-hero narrative in later American literature. I would like to thank Ron Callan for bringing this latter possibility to my attention. 6. Bruffee also makes the point that elegiac romance deals in transition, in "the experience of catastrophic loss and rapid cultural change" (Elegiac Romance 15). In addition, he offers anecdotal evidence to suggest that, from Conrad on the writing of elegiac romance fiction tended to mark a transitional point for the writer too, "after which the writer was either propelled into a new and still more fruitful phase of work, or else came to the end of creative life altogether, at least for a time" (221). 7. Bruffee argues that Conrad was in fact the originator of the elegiac romance genre, and devotes three chapters of his study to an analysis of the growth of the narrative structure in Conrad's early fiction through to Lord Jim. However, the appearance decades previously of The Blithedale Romance and particularly Moby-Dick (which Bruffee admits is an elegiac romance) draws attention to the many elisions involved in the construction of Bruffee's historical thesis. 8. Of course, the argument can run the other way too: if, as I shall suggest, the form of observer-hero narrative suggests the clash of modes of representation, then examples of the genre are not likely to be found among the culminating works of a particular hegemonic representational model. Hence, and conversely, periods of literary transition might be identified by the number of significant observer-hero narratives they produce. A related point worth making here is that the generic form of Pale Fire, as well as its "early" publication vis-à-vis the postmodernist period, may help to account for the controversy surrounding the classification of Nabokov's work as postmodernist or not (a controversy also to be found in critical work on Auster and Roth). In the scholarship on the one author named above who is definitely considered a postmodernist—John Barth—the general consensus is that it is not until the mid-1960s that the shift occurs, as one critic puts it, "from the existentialist style of novels such as The End of the Road (1958) to the more obviously postmodern works like Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Chimera (1972), and Letters: A Novel (1979)" (Punday, "John Barth's" 596). 9. Hoberek maintains that "if we believe that stylistic shifts in works of literature presage, rather than merely symptomatize, larger cultural changes, then such shifts may have relevance beyond the aesthetic realm" (237). In my view, it is not necessary to decide between these two positions in order to see stylistic shifts in literary texts as having broader relevance; indeed, the distinction between presaging and symptomatizing is elided in the vast majority of contemporary scholarship. 10. The collective element of The Virgin Suicides makes it an unusual variation on observer-hero narrative, but as we shall see, a significant one. The plural status of observer and hero in Eugenides's text also necessitates some pronominal infelicities in my attempt in this paragraph to outline common features of the three novels. 11. For early discussions of tragedy in the novel, see Bakewell, Lyons, Rankine, and Safer. I have expanded upon the present section of this essay, offering a fuller reading of tragedy in The Human Stain, in my article "Imagining Tragedy." 12. Jameson argues that the symbol usually invites a hermeneutical reading that imagines it "as a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth" (8). If, however, that vaster reality remains unsure, as the ontological complications of The Human Stain imply, the hermeneutical (modern) reading becomes critically destabilized. 13. See Jameson's well-known discussion of the fragmented subject of postmodernism, 11–16. 14. For examples, see Roth 108–09, 125–26, and 176–77. 15. For examples of this recurring pattern, see The Virgin Suicides 17–21, 37–41, 96–103, 112–13, 157–58, 220–23, 231–32, and 245–48. 16. The full quotation is "I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive—syntactical or rhetorical—but also political, ethical, etc.) They are pragmatically determined" (148). In his early work, Derrida stressed undecidability in meaning, focusing primarily on discursive and rhetorical situations (see, for example, "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination). The claim that undecidability is the positive condition of the moment of decision comes later, and this quotation from Limited Inc. can be seen as a hinge point in this regard. The stipulation that these possibilities (of meaning and of acts) are pragmatically determined also suggests the embeddedness of thinking within the categories available in a context. At the same time, however, Derrida will argue that a decision always defies the closure of this context, registering a futurity and an event to-come: "A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes" (116). 17. What the above paragraph also suggests, of course, is that my own neat categories—tragic, modern, and postmodern—are themselves attempts to master the texts being read, to structure them schematically in a move toward revelation of a critical kind. Yet these categories are clearly open to being read otherwise, and indeed are necessarily repeated with difference in my analysis of each novel. The premises of my own readings thus involve decisions that seem to close down possibilities, but the singularity of each text provides for other resources, other conceptualizations. What I am calling post-postmodernism is in some sense defined and enabled by this awareness—the awareness of an undecidability that is not simply a form of relativism, but rather the necessary opening to future responses, events of reading and writing, that lie beyond present determination. 18. It is important to note the differences between the spatialization Saint-Amour finds in Derrida's reading of time and the privileging of space associated with postmodernism, especially that of Jameson and Harvey. This analysis, which is beyond my scope here, would need to begin with Derrida's early texts, particularly the opening essays in Margins of Philosophy. For exemplary discussions, see Martin Hägglund's analysis of différance as "the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space" (43), and Daniel Punday's reading of "Ousia and Gramme" in "Derrida in the World." 19. At a moment of high tension at the finale of Roth's novel, Zuckerman tells Farley that the book he is writing is called "The Human Stain" but that "It's not out yet. It's not finished yet" (356). And the final line of Leviathan reads: "We walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages of this book" (245). While the narration of The Virgin Suicides, in contrast to the two novels above, is presented generally as a kind of impossible oral memoir, the men are not beyond making reference to their means of presentation, which seems to involve a series of exhibits presented to a judge or jury (see 119). 20. In the same passage, Derrida contrasts the figure of Abraham with "the tragic hero" who "has access to mourning" (66). One might clarify by saying that one can perhaps know how to mourn the tragic hero, just as one can know how to mourn the modern man who is simply the victim of his own psychology or unconscious impulses. In The Human Stain, Leviathan, and The Virgin Suicides, however, the narrator's process of mourning is precisely that which is interrupted by the singularity of the hero's decision (this is perhaps most obvious in The Virgin Suicides, but is also highlighted in The Human Stain when Zuckerman tells us "that is how all this began: by my standing alone in a darkening graveyard and entering into a professional competition with death" [338]). Derrida's reading of Freud's emphasis on the passage from melancholia to mourning (in, for example, The Work of Mourning) is another example of how the former challenges the totalizing narratives of modernity without resorting to a postmodernist language of fragmentation and disconnection. 21. For an explanation of these ideas, see my article "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction." 22. Roth, Auster, and Eugenides were born in 1933, 1947, and 1960 respectively, and hence could be described as preboomer, boomer, and late/postboomer American writers.