Brian McHale- Postmodernist Fiction

This is based on Chapter 1, entitled, “From Modernist to Postmodernist Fiction: Change of Dominant” of the book:

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 2001.

McHale begins by giving us the opinions of a few other authors on how they feel towards postmodernism. He quotes John Barth, a familiar face, as saying of postmodernism that the term is, “awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the old art of storytelling than of something anit-climactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow.” McHale goes on to cite Charles Newman on his views of the postmodernist, according to Newman the term, “inevitably calls to mind a band of vainglorious contemporary artists following the circus elephants of modernism with snow shovels.” McHale himself writes of postmodernism, “the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist… Rather, postmodernism, the thing, does not exist precisely in the way that “the Renaissance” or “romanticism” do not exist.” What McHale is getting at is that we cannot give a set definition to postmodernism. And that postmodernism, as well as the Renaissance and romanticism are not solid definitive objects, but instead are contrived notions, created by, as McHale writes, “contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians.” And because postmodernism has no set definition, it is open to a multitude of interpretations. To Barth, postmodernism is “the literature of replenishment. To Newman, “the literature of an inflationary economy; Lyotard “a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan, “a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of humankind.” None of these different interpretations of postmodernism are either right or wrong because they are all “fictions”. Each of these views has its own values, but none have all the answers, and the ideal definition of postmodernism is one which does not attempt to answer every question. However, this definition cannot go the other direction and be too narrow either.

A narrower definition of Postmodernism-

McHale details what he views as “a superior construction of postmodernism” as: “One that produces new insights, new or richer connections, coherence of a different degree kind, ultimately more discourse…” McHale writes that some of the issues with postmodernism comes as a result of the term itself. He writes, “the term does not even make sense. For if ‘modern’ means ‘pertaining to the present,’ then ‘postmodern’ can only mean ‘pertaining to the future,’ and in that case what could postmodernist fiction be except fiction that has not yet been written?” McHale breaks the word apart a little later, saying that postmodernism does not come “after the present”, but instead “after the modernist movement.” Thus giving us postmodernism as a “reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth -century moderism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future.” McHale is against the notion that modernism ended and then there was postmodernism, but instead that postmodernism is a continuation of the modernist movement, and that postmodernism is modernism with a new face.

The Dominant-

The tool McHale uses to trace the emergence of postmodernism from modernism in fiction is the concept of “the dominant.” McHale uses Roman Jakobson’s of the dominant:

“The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure… a poetic work [is] a structured system, a regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices.”

According to McHale, a text can contain more than one dominant. And what exactly the dominant is, can differ between the people who read the text, “the same text will, we can infer, yield different dominants depending upon what aspect of it we are analyzing…. different dominants emerge depending upon which questions we ask of the text, and the position from which we interrogate it.” The dominant can change based on how we approach a text. If one were to go into a text with a strong feminist attitude, then the dominant would most likely be feminist to that reader. However, if a reader with an equally strong Marxist attitude approached that same text, then that reader could conceivably see a different dominant from the same text. McHale puts focus on two particular dominants, epistemological, which translates to modernism, and ontological, which relates to postmodernism. The dominant in a text does have the ability to go back and forth from epistemological to ontological. The term McHale uese to describe this is hemorrhage.

The Epistemological-

The epistemological dominant focuses on an individual’s knowledge, “the signs of the narrative act fall away, and with them all the questions of authority and reliability.” In an epistemological text, there is no question about the reliability of the narrator or the actions in the text. McHale uses the detective novel as a means of describing the epistemological. In detective novels, we are given the same questions again and again, those being the who, what, where, when, and why. And each of these questions has a definitive answer, which come with the solving of the crime. Questioning knowledge is also an important part of the epistemological dominant, “What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it?; and with what degree of certainty?; how is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?” These are all questions to be asked using the epistemological dominant. Written on the Body and Fight Club go along with these epistemological questions in that both are texts with which we have to question the information we are getting from the narrator. With Written on the Body, we are shown the text through a limited point of view. Everything we are given in the text comes from the perspective of a narrator we know next to nothing about, including name and gender. This lack of reliability makes us question all the information which we receive through the narrator.

The Ontological-

Next is ontological, which McHale correlates with the postmodern. With ontological, the focus is less on questions about the world which can be answered; instead, the world itself comes into question. Where McHale likened epistemological with detective fiction, he relates the ontological with science fiction. In science fiction, the reliability of the world around you is not a major concern. For a story to take place in a bizarre environment, or to be told by a different sort of narrator, is ok with ontological. Using Fight Club again, the narrator exists in two different worlds. There is his world, however, he also exists in Tyler’s world as well. Mchale presents us with the idea that the “blurring of identities that tends to destabilize the projected world” In Fight Club, the narrator’s identity becomes severely blurred between himself and Tyler. And as a result, his world becomes greatly destabilized. Using Galatea 2.2, we have an instance where the author is also the main character in the text. This brings the fictional world which the character inhabits together with the real world that the author is living in.

Limit-Modernist-

McHale introduces the phrase “limit-modernist”; this is a term used to link both the epistemological and ontological. If through the course of a text, “both epistemological and ontological questions seemed to be raised by a text, but which focus dominates depends upon how we look at a text.” This goes back to the idea that the definition of the dominant depends on who is reading the text. The same can be applied to deciding whether a text is epistemological or ontological, it will differ based on the reader.

The Transhistorical Party-

McHale also introduces the idea of the “transhistorical party.” In this idea, “characters apparently from disparate historical eras are brought together at the same time and place.” There are two variations of the tranhistorical party, one going along with the epistemological, the other with the ontological. In the first variation, the collection of figures is allowable because they are encased by a plot device. McHale uses the party at the end of Mrs. Dalloway as an example. Another example of this can be seen at the end of the film Blazing Saddles. For the most part, the film is in a cowboy western setting, but towards the end a large fight breaks out, and spills out and you see the movie backlot. The fight also goes into the cafeteria for the movie lot. It is here that characters from all different films, cowboys, vikings, knights, as well as others are all in the same place. Normally this would be unacceptable, but because it is on a movie set, it is okay.

The other kind of transhitorical party is one where this blending of worlds is not enclosed by a plot device. As McHale writes it is “a case of intertextual boundary-violation, transworld identity between characters belonging to different worlds.” An example of this would be the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In this movie, the worlds of humans and cartoon characters blend naturally. There is no plot device enclosing them, it is simply how they live in their world.

Synthesizing the Theory-

What McHale’s ideas have contributed to our understanding of postmodernism is that he is the first person we have encountered who has presented the idea that a text can have both modernist as well as postmodernist aspects to it. All other theorists have focused on one primary issue, whether it be the concept of meta-narratives, capitalism, history, etc. All previous authors have picked single topics and worked to explain what makes them explicitly postmodern. What McHale is giving us is the idea that something does not have to be set in stone as either modern or postmodern and there is flexibility.

Further Reading-

As if that wasn’t enough information for you, here are some options for further reading on McHale:

-This is an article you can find on JSTOR which we could not link to the page. The article is a review of his focus on postmodernist fiction

Reviewed Work(s):
Postmodernist Fiction by Brian McHale
What Fiction Means by Bent Nordhiem
Thomas Docherty
The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 40, No. 160. (Nov., 1989), pp. 597-598

Here is another review of McHale: http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/18/3/216

And finally, here is a summary of the book from which the chapter we read came: http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/mchale.html