GRGR (5) PK

[rj]

Keith, Terrance:

> > Brian McHale, in _Constructing Postmodernism_ & _Postmodernist Fiction_,
> > gives quite a bit of attention to the distinction (although, I think he
> > wants to do something slightly different: rejecting any notion of ontology
> > in the pomo novel other than an allowance for a plurality of ontologies;
> > given that, epistemology becomes a very hairy business (just as it appear to
> > be in GR)).
> 
> So he rejects ontology and allows for a plurality of ontologies. Can't be
> right?   Does the preface contain a quote on Aristotle, Plato, and Cognitive
> Science, or am confusing it with another McHale book or article I've read. I
> remember discussing it here after I read it?

Terrance is thinking of McHale's _Postmodernist Fiction_ (1987), which
takes as its motto for Part 1 a quote from Dick Higgins, as he recalls.
_Constructing Postmodernism_ (1992) is the later book, where McHale's
ideas about the ontological dominant in postmodern fiction are more
fully developed. I don't think McHale is actually endorsing or rejecting
anything himself, rather, he describes what he reads as happening in a
range of fictional texts (and critical models), and from that tries to
construct what he himself admits must always be only a partial and
artifical category called postmodern(ist) fiction, or, in fact, several
categories thereof really. 

McHale looks particularly to Borges, Beckett, Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon,
Eco, Christine Brooke-Rose, McElroy and cyberpunk (eg William Gibson) as
exemplars in the later work. Some relevant excerpts:

Epistemology ("How can I interpret this world...?")
Ontology ("Which world is this?")

" ... modernist fiction is fiction organized in terms of an
epistemological dominant, fiction whose formal strategies implicitly
raise issues of the accessability, reliability or unreliability,
transmission, circulation, etc., of knowledge about the world ...
Postmodernist fiction, otoh, is fiction organized in terms of an
ontological dominant, fiction whose formal strategies implicitly raise
issues of the mode of being of fictional worlds and their inhabitants,
and/or reflect on the plurality and diversity of worlds, whether "real",
possible, fictional, or what-have-you ..." (146-7)

"Postmodernism's shift to ontological issues and themes has radical
consequences for literary models of the self. A poetics in which the
category "world" is plural, unstable and problematic would seem to
entail a model of the self which is correspondingly plural, unstable and
problematic. If we posit a plurality of worlds, then conceivably "my"
self exists in more than one of them; if the world is ontologically
unstable (self-contradictory, hypothetical or fictional, infiltrated by
other realities) then so perhaps am "I"." (253-4) 

In this respect I'm sort of drawn a little to Michael Perez's "measly
little lives" theory, too. I still think that 'control' is an ongoing
preoccupation with all of the characters -- whether in social, political
or empirical terms as with those like Pudding, Pointsman, Blicero &c at
the apparent top of the pile, or with Pirate, Slothrop, Mexico, Jessica
at the bottom, who are just trying to keep control of their own "measly
little lives". But the simple personal problem applies to Pointsman,
Pudding, Blicero as well. We keep seeing how measly and fragile and
flawed their lives and minds are; how *human* these seemingly evil,
seemingly dominating characters are. And when the ontological dilemmas
arise and impinge on their lives they all seem to shrink away, like
Mexico does from the practical conclusions of his probability theories
for his own life, as Pointsman and Jess do from the random universe(s)
ramifications of Mexico's statistical model, as Pirate does from the
uses to which his special talent is being put in the "real" world of the
historical war. Moreover it's immensely ironic that it is Slothrop, a
schlemihl whose life is feasibly the measliest, who is little more than
an instinctive creature like Vanya or Grigori and who wanders from one
ontological situation into the next with seeming blithe acceptance and
that same quirky irrational combination of resilience and paranoia, who
is the character who appears to hold, if not ultimate control over, then
the key to *all* of the text's worlds.

best