Parody In Postmodernist English Literature

INTRODUCTION

This study is about parody – a highly ambiguous literary form that has manifested itself throughout history with widely varying features, intentions, and functions. Perhaps the diversity of the form becomes most apparent in the impossibility of specifying a single, fixed target that parody aims to imitate.

The object of parody is sometimes an individual work or a personal style and at other times a convention, genre, or discourse. The devices parody employs are also of a

highly varying nature. Sometimes irony and sometimes comedy created through exaggeration, understatement, or incongruity may be the devices parody heavily relies on. At other instances the emphasis of parody may be on breaking the illusion created by the target text through the use of metafictional strategies. The relationship between parody and its target is never of a uniform and easily definable nature, either.

Parody’s attitude towards its target is often ambivalent and may range from degradation and mockery to respectful admiration. Parody, then, can assume a multiplicity of forms and functions. Taking such diversity as its point of departure, this study aims to account for the various different parodic kinds that have occupied the literary scene in Britain from the Middle Ages to postmodern times. Three major kinds of parody are specified for this purpose. The first kind is parody directed at texts and personal styles; the second is parody directed at genres, and the third is parody directed at discourse.

This study contends that while all three kinds have been produced throughout history, different literary-historical periods have witnessed the rise and popularity of different parodic kinds – a phenomenon that can best be explained through the prevailing literary, cultural, social, and ideological characteristics of each period.

The study contends further that this argument also applies to the postmodern period, where discourse – rather than texts, personal styles or genres – appears to be the most essential target of parody.

As these arguments also suggest, this study employs primarily a historical approach. It does not, however, place the same amount of emphasis on all literaryhistorical periods. While those periods that precede postmodernism are treated on a fairly equal basis, a special significance is accorded to the postmodern age. This is justifiable, given the fact that parody in this period has risen to prominence through a proliferation of parodic productions paralleled by an increase in scholarly attention. Dwelling more intensely on parody in the postmodern age also suits the wider aims of this study, which consist in attempting to account for this interesting and significant turn parody has recently taken.

A study like this definitely requires the formulation of a clear definition of parody. This is especially important, given the fact that parody is a highly ambiguous and multifarious form which has never enjoyed a single unanimously accepted definition.

Parodia is the ancient Greek word which the modern term parody derives from. The word is made up of a prefix (para), which may mean either “against” or “beside”, and a noun (“ode”), which means “song” (Hutcheon 1991a: 32). The etymology of the word “parody”, then, suggests two meanings which seem to oppose each other to a certain extent. Does parody mean a song sung “against” another or does it mean one sung “beside” another without any intent to oppose or

to “counter”?

Both definitions can be equally valid in their own ways, and it can be suggested that this etymological vagueness forms the basis of the ongoing difficulty of providing an exhaustive definition of parody. It is as though the indefinite etymology of the term is reflected in the diversity of the examples which we tend to label as “parody”.

All this diversity, however, has not received much scholarly attention in the periods preceding the twentieth century – a consequence probably of the widespread opinion about parody as a “low” and hence “trivial” and “unimportant” form. This may be why British literary criticism before the twentieth century exhibits relatively few attempts to define parody. It should not be surprising that the most systematic pre-twentieth-century definitions have been made by intellectuals of the eighteenth century – a period well-known for its emphasis on mock-forms as well as satire, where parody may be a commonly employed device.

The following definition of parody, for example, is from one of Jonathan Swift’s earliest satirical works, A Tale of a Tub (1704):

There is one Thing which the judicious Reader cannot but have observed, that some of those Passages in this Discourse, which appear most liable to Objection are what they call Parodies, where the Author personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom he has a mind to expose (Swift 1973: 267).

This is a rather narrow definition, regarding parody as a form that targets the style of a writer in order to criticize him. Samuel Johnson’s definition of the term in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is quite similar:

“A kind of writing, in which the words of an author or his thoughts are taken, and by a slight change adapted to some new purpose” (Johnson 1986: 177)

This definition appears a little less narrow since the aim of the parodic act is not fully specified.

Nevertheless, it still limits the scope of parody to a great extent by suggesting that parody can target only the “words” or “thoughts” of an author. Scholars have formulated such narrow definitions of parody in the twentieth century, too. The century, however, has also seen much wider definitions as well as diverse ways of understanding, appreciating, and interpreting parody. All this, of course, is a consequence of the heightened twentieth-century interest in parody as a literary form. In the early twentieth century parody acquired a new significance mainly through the Russian Formalists, whose major aim was to develop a theory that would enable them to approach and analyze literature “scientifically”. For this purpose they singled out

the devices that made literary language distinct from ordinary language. This kind of focus led them to coin the term “defamiliarization” – a term which denoted a major characteristic of literary language:

What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of discourse, was that it ‘deformed’ ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language ‘made strange’; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was also

suddenly made unfamiliar. In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, ‘automatized’. Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more ‘perceptible’ (Eagleton 1996:3).

Definitions and Functions of Parody: general features

The vast diversity of the proposed definitions of parody, both before and after the twentieth century, can be an emblem of the lack of a thorough agreement amongst the literary critics about the definition of this literary technique .While there is not a comprehensive all-accepted definition of parody, modern and postmodern literatures both exhibit a wide application of it. After looking at the definition of parody under Bakhtin's dialogic concepts, Genette's structuralist viewpoints, and Barthes's poststructuralist notions this study endeavours to put forward a more comprehensive and more applicable definition of parody mainly based on Bakhtin's dialogic criticism. Parody then can be defined as a deliberate imitation or transformation of a socio-cultural product (including literary and nonliterary texts, and utterance in its very broad Bakhtinian understanding of it) that recreates its original subject having at least a playful stance towards it.

One of the major concerns of poststructuralist theories in general and postmodern literary practices in particular is the call for plurality and thereupon criticism. In line with these concerns, parody as a literary device is a significant method in demonstrating and responding to this notion.

Imitating a subject, parody enables the writers to depict at least two voices simultaneously. One is the writer's own voice and the other is the voice of the original subject that is parodied. Parody as a literary form is highly ambiguous. Its ambiguity is mainly because of different definitions

that are put forward by various theorists and writers on the one hand and the variety of its practices by miscellaneous writers on the other. A definition of parody which can embrace wider instances of its postmodern practices with less ambiguity specifically concerning its borderlines with the other closely-related literary devices and forms such as pastiche, travesty, caricature, satire, allusion, cento, etc. can facilitate appreciating postmodern literary works far better.

As yet another attempt to revise and improve the definition of parody, this article proposes a definition which may prove to be more inclusive in terms of the postmodern practices of parody. Parody then can be defined as a deliberate imitation or transformation of a socio-cultural product that takes at least a playful stance towards its original subject. This definition is thus primarily applicable for scrutinizing postmodern literature and is mainly based on an extended Bakhtinian view although it makes use of Genette's structuralist view point as well.

Literary language, in other words, “lays bare” its techniques and devices and “…modifies the reader’s habitual perceptions by drawing attention to the artifice of the text” (Cuddon 1992: 226). It is not very difficult to see how these ideas of the Russian Formalists led them to attribute a special significance to parody. To them, parody often works by “laying bare” the devices its target makes use of, and especially those devices that have become “mechanized or automatic”. It then “refunctionalizes” those devices, i.e. attributes new functions to them, thereby developing a new form out of the old, “without really destroying it” (Hutcheon 1991a: 35-36). This kind of process makes a major contribution to “the evolution of literary style” (Dentith 2000: 33). New forms are produced out of old ones, and parody may even “… serve the function of reordering the elements in the [literary] system, allowing previously low-status elements to take on high-status positions”(Dentith 2000: 33).

Parody, then, plays a very significant role in the Formalists’ theory of literature. It is not only a form that best exemplifies the concept of “defamiliarization” but also one that greatly enables them to account for literary change and evolution.

Even more important than the role played by the Russian Formalists is the contribution made by Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) to the study and appreciation of parody in the twentieth century. Some of Bakhtin’s ideas on parody seem to echo those of the Russian Formalists;1 however, he has developed many of those ideas much further and has provided unique and valuable insights into the significant role played by parody in the cultural/historical context of

literature in general and of literary genres in particular. In most of his studies Bakhtin’s interest mainly lies in what he calls “dialogism” or “polyphony”.

Dialogism, as opposed to monologism, is what enables the different “voices” or “languages” in a literary work to co-exist and to interact with each other.

Dialogism, to Bakhtin, is a most valuable and essential characteristic and its best examples can be found in the novel, a genre that Bakhtin highly values. Bakhtin’s theories on literarywhat he calls “dialogism” or “polyphony”.

Dialogism, as opposed to monologism, is what enables the different “voices” or “languages” in a literary work to co-exist and to interact with each other.

Dialogism, to Bakhtin, is a most valuable and essential characteristic and its best examples can be found in the novel, a genre that Bakhtin highly values. Bakhtin’s theories on literary change and evolution are also closely related to this concept. To him, literary change is characterized by a process of dialogization, in which the monologic and authoritative nature of old literary forms is gradually subverted through various devices. And this is where parody comes in as a very significant device:

It is our conviction that there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse – artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday – that did not

have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comicironic contre-partie. What is more, these parodic doubles and laughing reflections of the direct word were, in some cases, just as

sanctioned by tradition … as their elevated models (Bakhtin 1992:

“Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist comment in their Mikhail Bakhtin of 1984 on how Bakhtin has both taken up ideas from the formalists about the role played by parody in the evolution of the novel and about the ‘laying bare of the device’ and echoed the formalists’ choice of literary worksby Sterne, Cervantes and Dickens …” (Rose 1995: 125-126).

These parodic counterparts, then, paved the way for a kind of “polyphony” or “multivoicedness” by “refracting” the single authoritative voice of the monologic form. This, however, does not mean that the previously authoritative voice is suppressed and subsumed by the new voice introduced through parody. Bakhtin’s theory is based on real “polyphony”, i.e. the co-existence of all voices on an equal basis:

[It is essential that] the [parodic] stylization not function as a gross and superficial destruction of the other’s language. … In order to be authentic and productive, parody must … re-create the parodied language as an authentic whole, giving it its due as a language possessing its own internal logic and one capable of revealing its own world inextricably bound up with the parodied language (Bakhtin 1992: 364).

Bakhtin’s theory of “carnivalization” is also closely related to the idea of “polyphony” and hence to parody. To him, “carnival”, which does not represent authority but which is legitimized by it to a certain extent, is a means of introducing the language and culture of the folk to the language and culture of authority. It is, therefore, an important means of creating “polyphony”. And this is

where parody comes in again. As Dentith explains, “parody is … one of the cultural forms that draws upon the popular energies of the carnival. … it is mobilized to debunk official seriousness, and to testify to the relativity of all languages, be they the dialects of authority or the jargons of guilds, castes, or priesthoods” (Dentith 2000: 22-23). Bakhtin’s theory of “carnival”, then, goes

even further in placing literary change within a social/cultural context and again emphasizes the value and significance of parody in all these phenomena.

As the above discussion makes clear, first the Russian Formalists’ and then, more importantly, Bakhtin’s fruitful arguments about the nature and function of parody played a significant role in increasing the interest in parody as a subject of critical analysis and discussion. This, however, cannot be considered the sole reason for the heightened interest in parody in the twentieth century. The century also witnessed a gradual increase in the production of parodic works – an increase which took such a turn that parody became one of the most widely used devices in postmodern literature.

Many critics published on parody, trying to account both for past parodic works and for the proliferation of parody especially in the second half of the twentieth century. The remaining part of this section will look into howthese critics have defined parody while the next section will build on these to formulate a definition that best suits the purposes of this study.

It is interesting to observe that when John D. Jump published his Burlesque in 1972, previous definitions of and notions about parody were still around. Even the title of Jump’s study attests to this. “Burlesque” is the umbrella term he uses to describe the diverse kinds of humorous imitation that can be found in literature. Although Jump does not make any value judgments, his use of the term “burlesque” inevitably brings to mind previous connotations of this literary kind as a “low” or minor form that does not deserve as much critical attention as “higher” forms. Jump’s model divides “burlesque” into four kinds, one of which is “parody”:

I. Travesty, the low burlesque of a particular work achieved by treating the subject of that work in an aggressively familiar style: e.g., Byron’s Vision of Judgment.

2. Hudibrastic, the low burlesque of a less confined material: e.g., Butler’s Hudibras.

3. Parody, the high burlesque of a particular work (or author) achieved by applying the style of that work (or author) to a less worthy subject: e.g., Fielding’s Shamela.

4. The Mock-Poem, commonly the mock-epic, the high burlesque of a whole class of literature achieved by lavishing the style characteristic of the class upon a trifling subject: e.g., Pope’s Rape of the Lock. (Jump 1972: 2)

Such a model is based essentially on the distinction between “high” and “low” styles and subjects – a distinction that is a legacy of pre-twentieth-century literary theory. Only about a decade later Margaret Rose, Gérard Genette, and Linda Hutcheon published studies on parody. Each study was highly distinct in the way it approached and defined the form. They were, however, largely united by a concern for describing parody from a modern perspective and foregrounding in their discussion the considerable significance the form had acquired over the past few decades.

In 1982 the French theorist and critic Gérard Genette published a comprehensive study on what he called “hypertextuality” – a term which denotes “any relationship uniting a text B (… the hypertext) to an earlier text A (… the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette 1997: 5).

The book is titled Palimpsests, a word which serves as a metaphor for all kinds of “hypertextuality” or “re-writing” that Genette wishes to dwell on. Genette, therefore, discusses parody as one form of hypertextuality among many. What is striking about Genette’s scheme is that he makes quite precise distinctions between all the forms of hypertextuality he specifies. He sets out by pointing to two kinds of relationships a hypertext can have with its hypotext. The first of these is “transformation”, and the second is “imitation” (or “indirect transformation”). According to this scheme parody, travesty, and transposition are forms which directly “transform” the hypotext while pastiche, caricature, and forgery are forms which “imitate” the hypotext. Genette’s distinction between “transformation” and “imitation” is not always very easy to understand. To exemplify his distinction, he cites Virgil’s Aeneid and Joyce’s Ulysses as hypertexts of Homer’s Odyssey, the former being an example of “imitation” and the latter of “transformation”:

The transformation that leads from the Odyssey to Ulysses can be described (very roughly) as a simple or direct transformation, one which consists in transposing the action of the Odyssey to

twentieth-century Dublin. The transformation that leads from the same Odyssey to the Aeneid is more complex and indirect. … this transformation is less direct because Virgil does not transpose the action of the Odyssey from Ogygia to Carthage and from Ithaca to Latium. Instead, he tells an entirely different story: the adventures of Aeneas, not those of Ulysses. He does so by drawing inspiration from the generic – i.e., at once formal and thematic – model established by Homer in the Odyssey (and in fact also in the Iliad):

that is, … by imitating Homer. Imitation, too, is no doubt a transformation, but one that involves a more complex process: it requires … a previously constituted model of generic competence (let us call it an epic model) drawn from that singular performance that is known as the Odyssey (and perhaps a few others), one that is capable of generating an indefinite number of mimetic performances. … In order to transform a text, a simple and mechanical gesture might suffice. … But in order to imitate a text, it is inevitably necessary to acquire at least a partial mastery of it, a mastery of that specific quality which one has chosen to imitate (Genette 1997: 5-6).

Such a sharp distinction between transformative and imitative forms also points to another distinction between what can be imitated and what can be transformed.

Talking about pastiche as an imitative form, for example, Genette explains that “The pastiche in general does not imitate a text … [because] it is impossible to imitate a text …. one can imitate only a style: that is to say, a genre” (Genette 1997: 82-83). He then elaborates on this argument:

To imitate a text directly is … impossible because it is too easy, hence insignificant. It can be imitated only indirectly by using its idiolect to write another text; that idiolect cannot itself be identified except in treating the text as a model – that is, as a genre. That is the reason why there can be only a pastiche [i.e. imitation] of genre, and why imitations of an individual work, a specific author, a school, an era, a genre are structurally identical operations – and why parody and travesty, which do not go through that stage at all, can be defined in no circumstance as imitations but rather as transformations – limited or systematic – imposed upon texts. A parody or a travesty always takes on one (or several) individual text(s), never a genre. The notion, so commonly found, of a ‘parody of genre’ is a pure chimera. …

One can parody only particular texts; one can imitate only a genre (a corpus, no matter how narrow, that is treated as a genre) … (Genette 1997: 84-85).

Genette’s scheme, then, greatly limits the scope of parody. Only individual texts can be parodied, and in the case of genres, styles, and discourse, one can only talk about pastiche, not parody. Genette limits the definition of parody even further when he makes another distinction – this time between the different “moods” hypertexts can have. The three major moods he specifies are “playful” (for parody and pastiche), “satirical” (for travesty and caricature), and “serious” (for

transposition and forgery).

Genette defines parody in a highly restrictive manner: a hypertext can be called a parody only if it playfully “transforms” its hypotext.

If Genette’s limitation of parody to a very narrow scope can be considered extreme, then Linda Hutcheon can be said to go to the opposite extreme in this respect in her book titled, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth- Century Art Forms (1985). As the name also suggests, Hutcheon’s study, unlike Genette’s, focuses only on examples of parody produced in the twentieth century.

Her major concern, then, is to account for modern parodic forms, and she opposes Genette’s definition mainly for this reason: “Gérard Genette … wants to limit parody to such short texts as poems, proverbs, puns, and titles, but modern parody discounts this limitation, as it does Genette’s restricted definition of parody as a minimal tranformation of another text …” (Hutcheon 1991a: 18). The definition Hutcheon proposes instead is one that greatly widens the scope of parody. To her, parody, and especially modern parodic art can be defined as “imitation with critical distance” or as “repetition with difference” (Hutcheon 1991a: 36, 32).

This, of course, is a highly inclusive account of parody and runs the risk of embracing all forms of intertextuality. Hutcheon herself is aware of this problem,

The dotted lines separating the three moods indicate that sharp divisions cannot be made and that

one mood may overlap with another, but she explains it away by arguing that her theory of parody involves an important element that differentiates it from theories of intertextuality. This

element is the “encoder” (i.e. producer) of the parody, and to Hutcheon, the role of the encoder and the existence of shared codes between the encoder and the “decoder” (i.e. reader) are very essential elements in parody – elements which need not be so essential in general theories of intertextuality. This is, then, how Hutcheon justifies her definition of parody: “… although my theory of parody is intertextual in its inclusion of both the decoder and the text, its enunciative context is even broader: both the encoding and the sharing of the codes between producer and receiver are central [to my theory] …” (Hutcheon 1991a: 37).

In addition to these Hutcheon contends that parody does not necessarily involve comic elements. She blames the “stubborn retention of the characteristic of ridicule or of the comic in most definitions of parody” and argues that this is “a retention that modern parodic practice contests”. She suggests, instead, “a range of pragmatic ‘ethos’ (ruling intended effects), from the reverential to the playful to the scornful” (Hutcheon 1991a: 26). This, then, is a further indication of the highly inclusive nature of Hutcheon’s theory of parody. It is as though her definition allows us to regard all kinds of re-writing as parody. Hutcheon’s disregard of the element of comedy in her definition of parody is highly disapproved of by Margaret A. Rose, whose Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern (1993) expands and elaborates on her previous study on parody titled, Parody // Metafiction (1979). Rose can understand recent attempts like Hutcheon’s to eliminate the element of comedy from parody. She contends that Hutcheon’s approach represents an attempt to elevate modern parody to a higher status – to the status it deserves – by divorcing it from the comic, which is mostly associated with “lower” forms like ridicule and burlesque:

“One of Hutcheon’s reasons for her separation of parody from the comic is her laudable, if not novel, criticism of the reduction of parody to the negative and one-dimensional form of ridicule with which the modern definition of parody as burlesque has been

associated” (Rose 1995: 239).

Rose argues, however, that elevating parody to a higher status does not necessarily require the elimination of the comic from its definition. Instead, she suggests that parody can and should comprise at the same time both comic elements and intertextual and/or metafictional elements –

elements that critics like Hutcheon are so keen on emphasizing. She then defines parody along these lines as “the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material” and explains her terminology:

The term ‘refunctioning’ … [refers] to the new set of functions given to parodied material in the parody and may also entail some criticism of the parodied work. The term ‘preformed material’ is used in the above definition in order to describe the way in which the materials targetted in a parody have been previously formed into a work or statement of some kind by another, and is used in place of the terms ‘form’ and ‘content’ which have been seen to have been used in misleading ways in many modern definitions of parody (Rose 1995: 52).

It should not be forgotten, however, that in this definition the essential and distinguishing characteristic is comedy. The term “refunctioning” can be used to define parody only if it is coupled with the adjective, “comic”. In fact, the emphasis on the comic aspect of parody and on the possibility of engaging in discussions of parody as both a comic and a complex5 form is what characterizes Rose’s study from the beginning to the end.

The above discussion illustrates how widely different various definitions and accounts of parody may be. Moving on from such variation, Simon Dentith argues in his recent book, Parody (2000) that “disputes over definition” may often prove to be “a fruitless form of argument”. To him, parody is such an old and versatile form that formulating a single definition to comprise all examples is often a hopeless endeavour:

“… because of the antiquity of the word parody …, because of the range of different practices to which it alludes, and because of differing national usages, no classification [of parody] can ever hope to be securely held in place” (Dentith 2000: 6).

What Dentith proposes instead is formulating a definition of parody in line with one’s major focus. He argues that this kind of approach may prove much more fruitful and may even make “disputes about definition seem less significant” (Dentith 2000: 10).

He then formulates his own definition in line with his study’s major concern, which is the cultural politics of parody. Arguing that such a focus requires as wide-ranging an account of parody as possible, he suggests the following definition:

“Parody includes any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice” (Dentith 2000: 9).

“Cultural” and “polemical” can be regarded as the keywords of this definition, and it should not

be so difficult to figure out the importance of such keywords in a study looking into the cultural politics of parody. Dentith, then, formulates his own account of parody in line with his major focus.

Dentith’s approach appears rather useful and practical, especially when we consider the fact that it is almost impossible to come up with a fully satisfactory, comprehensive definition of parody.

What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. In fiction this means that it is usually metafiction that is equated with the postmodern. Given the scarcity of precise definitions of this problematic period designation, such an equation is often accepted without question. What I would like to argue is that, in the interests of precision and consistency, we must add something else to this definition: an equally self-conscious dimension of history. My model here is postmodern architecture, that resolutely parodic recalling of the history of architectural forms and functions.

The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the

past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it "historiographic metafiction."

But it seems to have found that it can no longer do so in any innocent way: the certainty of direct reference of the historical novel or even the nonfictional novel is gone. So is the certainty of self-reference implied in the Borgesian claim that both literature and the world are equally fictive realities. The postmodern relationship between fiction and history is an even more complex one of interaction and mutual implication. Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within

historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction.

And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the "world" and literature. The textual incorporation of these intertextual past(s) as a constitutive structural element of postmodernist fiction functions as a formal marking of historicity-both literary and "worldly." At first glance it would appear that it is only its constant ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity that distinguishes postmodern parody from medieval and Renaissance imitation .

Nevertheless, a distinction should be made:

"Traditionally, stories were stolen, as Chaucer stole his; or they were felt to be the common property of a culture or community … These notable happenings, imagined or real, lay outside language the way history itself is supposed to, in a condition of pure occurrence" (Gass 147).

Today, there is a return to the idea of a common discursive "property" in the embedding of both literary and historical texts in fiction, but it is a return made problematic by overtly metafictional

assertions of both history and literature as human constructs, indeed, as human illusions-necessary, but none the less illusory for all that. The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers, it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces-be they literary or historical.

Clearly, then, what I want to call postmodernism is a paradoxical cultural phenomenon, and it is also one that operates across many traditional disciplines. In contemporary theoretical discourse, for instance, we find puzzling contradictions: those masterful denials of mastery, totalizing negations of totalization, continuous attestings of discontinuity.

In the postmodern novel the conventions of both fiction and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and subverted, asserted and denied. And the double (literary/historical) nature of this intertextual parody is one of the major means by which this paradoxical (and defining) nature of postmodernism is textually inscribed. Perhaps one of the reasons why there has been such heated debate on the definition of postmodernism recently is that the implications of the doubleness of this parodic process have not been fully examined.

Historiographic metafiction manages to satisfy such a desire for "worldly" grounding while at the same time querying the very basis of the authority of that grounding. As David Lodge has put

it, postmodernism short-circuits the gap between text and world.

When that past is the literary period we now seem to label a modernism, then what is both instated and then subverted is the notion of the work of art as a closed, self-sufficient, autonomous object deriving its unity from the formal interrelations of its parts.

In its characteristic attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the "world," postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this formalistic view. But this does not necessitate a return to the world of "ordinary reality," as some have argued, the "world" in which the text situates itself is the "world" of discourse, the "world" of texts and intertexts. This "world" has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality. It is a contemporary critical truism that realism is really a set of conventions, that the representation of the real is not the same as the real itself. What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naive realist concept of representation and any equally naive textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world. The postmodern is self-consciously art "within the archive" and that archive is both historical and literary.

To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. And this is the postmodern paradox.

The theoretical exploration of the "vast dialogue" (Calinescu, 169) between and among literatures and histories that configure postmodernism has, in part, been made possible by Julia Kristeva's early reworking of the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony, dialogism, and heteroglossia-the multiple voicings of a text. Out of these ideas she developed a more strictly formalist theory of the irreducible plurality of texts within and behind any given text, thereby deflecting the critical focus away from the notion of the subject (here, the author) to the idea of textual productivity.

A literary work can actually no longer be considered original; if it were, it could have no meaning for its reader. It is only as part of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance.

Not surprisingly, this theoretical redefining of aesthetic value has coincided with a change in the kind of art being produced. As in historiographic metafiction, these other art forms parodically cite the intertexts of both the "world" and art and, in so doing, contest the boundaries that many would unquestioningly use to separate the two. In its most extreme formulation, the result of

such contesting would be a "break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable" .

One of the most significant features or practices in postmodernism today is pastiche. I must first explain this term (from the language of the visual arts), which people generally tend to confuse with or assimilate to that related verbal phenomenon called parody. Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles. It is obvious that modem literature in general offers a very rich field for parody, since the great modem writers have all been defined by the invention or production of rather unique styles: think of the Faulknerian long sentence or of D. H. Lawrence's characteristic nature imagery; think of Wallace Steven's peculiar way of using abstractions; think also of mannerisms of the philosophers, of Heidegger for example, or Sartre; think of the musical styles of Mahler or Prokofiev.

All of these styles, however different from one another, are comparable in this: each is quite unmistakable; once one of them is leamed, it is not likely to be confused with something else.
Now parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of these styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original. I won't say that the satiric impulse is conscious in all forms of parody: in any case, a good or great parodist has to have some secret sympathy for the original, just as a great mimic has to have the capacity to put himself/herself in the place of the person imitated. Still, the general effect of parody is – whether in sympathy or with malice – to cast ridicule on the private nature of these stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness and eccentricity with respect to the way people normally speak or write. So there remains somewhere behind all parody the feeling that there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modemists can be mocked.

But what would happen if one no longer believed in the existence of normal language, of ordinary speech, of the linguistic norm (the kind of clarity and communicative power celebrated by Orwell in his famous essay 'Politics and the English Language'. One could think of it in this way: perhaps the immense fragmentation and privatization of modern literature – its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms – foreshadows deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole. Supposing that modern art and modernism – far from being a kind of specialized aesthetic curiosity – actually anticipated social developments along these lines; supposing that in the decades since the emergence of the great modern styles society had itself begun to fragment in this way, each group coming to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else? But then in that case, the very possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.

That is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of the eighteenth century. But now we need to introduce a new piece into this puzzle, which may help to explain why classical modernism is a thing of the past and why postmodernism should have taken its place. This new component is what is generally called the 'death of the subject' or, to say it in more conventionallanguage, the end of individualism as such. The great modernisms were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.

Yet today, from any number of distinct perspectives, the social theorists, the psychoanalysts, even the linguists, not to speak of those of us who work in the area of culture and cultural and formal change, are all exploring the notion that this kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is 'dead'; and that one might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological. There are in fact two positions on all this, one of which is more radical than the other. The first one is content to say: yes, once upon a time, in the classic age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate capitalism, of the so-called organization man, of bureaucracies in business as weIl as in the state, of demographic explosion – today, that older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists. Then there is a second position, the more radical of the two – what one might call the poststructuralist position. It adds: not only is the bourgeois individual slJbject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they 'had' individual subjects and possessed some unique personal identity.

For our purposes, it is not particularly important to decide which of these positions is correct (or rather, which is more interesting and productive). What we have to retain from all this is rather an aesthetic dilemma: because if the experience and the ideology of the unique self, an experience and ideology which informed the stylistic practice of classical modernism, is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing. What is clear is merely that the older models – Picasso, Proust, T. S. Eliot – do not work any more (or are positively harmful), since nobody has that kind of unique private world and style to express any longer. And this is perhaps not merely a 'psychological' matter: we also have to take into account the immense weight of seventy or eighty years of classical modernism itself.This is yet another sense in which the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds – they've already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the unique ones have been thought of already.

So the weight of the whole modernist aesthetic tradition – now dead – also 'weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living', as Marx said in another context.
Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Parody and Postmodernism: a theoretical framework

To begin, we might distinguish between ‘modernity’ conceptualized as the modern age and ‘postmodernity’ as an epochal term for describing the period which allegedly follows modernity. There are many discourses of modernity, as there would later be of postmodernity, and the term refers to a variety of economic, political, social, and cultural transformations. Modernity, as theorized by Marx, Weber, and others, is a historical periodizing term which refers to the epoch that follows the ‘Middle Ages’ or feudalism. For some, modernity is opposed to traditional societies and is characterized by innovation, novelty, and dynamism (Berman 1982). The theoretical discourses of modernity from Descartes through the Enlightenment and its progeny championed reason as the source of progress in knowledge and society, as well as the privileged locus of truth and the foundation of systematic knowledge. Reason was deemed competent to discover adequate theoretical and practical norms upon which systems of thought and action could be built and society could be restructured. This Enlightenment project is also operative in the American, French, and other democratic revolutions which attempted to overturn the feudal world and to produce a just and egalitarian social order that would embody reason and social progress (Toulmin 1990).

Aesthetic modernity emerged in the new avant-garde modernist movements and bohemian subcultures, which rebelled against the alienating aspects of industrialization and rationalization, while seeking to transform culture and to find creative self-realization in art.

Modernity entered everyday life through the dissemination of modern art, the products of consumer society, new technologies, and new modes of transportation and communication.

The dynamics by which modernity produced a new industrial and colonial world can be described as ‘modernization’ – a term denoting those processes of individualization, secularization, industrialization, cultural differentiation, commodification, urbanization, bureaucratization, and rationalization which together have constituted the modern world.

Yet the construction of modernity produced untold suffering and misery for its victims, ranging from the peasantry, proletariat, and artisans oppressed by capitalist industrialization to the exclusion of women from the public sphere, to the genocide of imperialist colonialization. Modernity also produced a set of disciplinary institutions, practices, and discourses which legitimate its modes of domination and control

The ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972) thus described a process whereby reason turned into its opposite and modernity’s promises of liberation masked forms of oppression and domination. Yet defenders of modernity claim that it has ‘unfulfilled potential’ and the resources to overcome its limitations and destructive effects.

On the postmodern literary scene, the blurring of boundaries has long been a given. For years now, the border-crossing between high art and popular culture, in particular, has been both decried and celebrated' . For Andreas Huyssen, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism', it is in fact the erosion of the boundary between the elite and the popular that marks the move from the modem to the postmodern in twentieth-century culture. But generic borders are also losing their comforting defining power, as fiction, history, biography, autobiography, and other genres mix to create hybrid forms that, for some, simply recall the early days of the novel's formation! and, for others, oretell the death of the novel -once again.

Yet another contentious characteristic of postmodernism has been its controversial relationship with history- that is. "history" understood as both the events of the past and the narratives that tell of them. For some, to challenge the accepted objectivity of historical accounts, pointing to their constructed nature, is tantamount to questioning the truthvalue of historical narrative itself; to others, it is a welcome acknowledgement of the narrativizing process in which all historians are engaged when they select, order, and narrate the events of the past. "Facts" deemed historical are perhaps more made than found

Postmodernism may be said to challenge the basic premises of liberal humanism which have so far shaped Western ways of perceiving the world. Previously unquestioned notions concerning language, meaning, reality, and the human subject all come under attack in postmodern thought. Postmodernism often goes about this difficult project through a paradoxical process of first accommodating and then undermining its target. This makes postmodernism – in Linda Hutcheon’s terms – “… a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges …” (Hutcheon 1988: 3). It is no wonder, then, that parody, which employs a similar method of simultaneously incorporating and challenging its target, is a form closely allied with postmodernism.

Parody is also reconciled to postmodernism through its inherent intertextuality: the idea that every artistic production is a text whose traces can be found in other texts and the questioning of “origin and originality” that naturally follows are among the basic tenets of postmodern thought. Parody, then, may be regarded as a form which agrees favourably with postmodern concerns. It is these qualities of parody that make Hutcheon go even so far as to call it “a perfect postmodern form” (Hutcheon 1988: 11).

It is, therefore, not surprising that postmodern literature abounds in parody. Such abundance may accommodate all kinds of parody ranging from parodies of individual styles and works to those of genre and discourse.

The question remains, however, as to which kind of parody best characterizes postmodernism. The rest of this chapter will look into this question, arguing that neither genre parodies nor parodies of texts and personal styles make much sense within the context of postmodern thought. It will naturally follow that discourse parody, the only remaining kind, is the one that best reflects postmodern concerns – hence its pervasive use in postmodern literature.

Some of the basic tenets of postmodern thought concerning language, meaning, and literature can be found in poststructuralism, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to structuralism. Poststructuralist thought challenged the concept of the sign, which suggested stability of meaning and closure in language. It emphasized instead the “signifier” which can never attach itself to a “signified”, but which is caught up instead in a continuous process of “signification” – a process where the attainment of a stable, determinate meaning becomes an impossible goal:

“Signifier of the signifier” describes … the movement of language …. There the signified always already functions as a signifier. … There is not a single signified that escapes … the play of signifying practices that constitute language. … This … amounts to destroying the concept of “sign” and its entire logic (Derrida 1997: 7).

This emphasis on the process of endless signification in language inevitably found its counterpart in literature. The literary work, whose raw material is language, could no longer be regarded as a closed unit directing the reader to stable meaning. It was to be regarded, instead, as “text” – as an open field caught in a continuous process of signification, a field where it no longer made sense to talk about boundaries, closure, and determinacy in meaning. In Roland Barthes’ words,

… the work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory: its field is that of the signifier … and the signifier must not be conceived of as “the first stage of meaning” … but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action [aprèscoup] …. the Text … like language … is structured but decentered, without closure (Barthes 1971: 171).

The notion of the “text”, then, is central to poststructuralist thought. The “text” is wherever there is language. “The text works … language. It deconstructs the language of communication, representation, or expression … and reconstructs another language, voluminous, having neither bottom nor surface …” (Barthes 1973: 37). Any linguistic production, therefore, is a text “without closure”, with “neither bottom nor surface”, and literature is no exception in this respect. As

Roland Barthes’ distinction between “work” and “text” illustrates, literature in general and the literary work in particular can no longer be regarded as closed systems with well-drawn boundaries.

All this, of course, has significant implications for postmodern parody. It is, for example, no longer very meaningful to talk about parodies of individual works within a theory of textuality which replaces the notion of the work with that of the text. While parodying an individual work, the parodist naturally assumes that his target is an autonomous entity existing independently of other works. It is exactly such a conception of the work that the theory of the text rejects. The work can no longer be regarded as a closed, coherent system. It is, instead, a text that reaches out to other texts in an endless process of echoing, quoting, and repetition.

It is rather obvious that such a theory does not render meaningful the practice of parodying specific works. Genre parody, too, suffers from similar implications of poststructuralism.

The notion of “genre” depends upon the legitimacy of concepts like “class”, “category” and “boundary” – concepts which lose much of their validity in poststructuralist thought. The notion of the text which cannot be contained within boundaries inevitably leads to a questioning of traditional genre divisions. Texts resist closure (within a class, a category, a genre) by continually overflowing into other texts, forming endless intertextual relationships with them.

The theory of the text, then, subverts “old classifications” and dissolves the sharp dividing lines between genres. It, therefore, becomes increasingly difficult to talk about the defining characteristics of a genre – characteristics which “close” the genre and rule out its affinities with

other genres.

This theory is corroborated by literary practice, too. Postmodern literature is often characterized by the mixing of genres – a practice which poses significant questions about traditional conceptions of genre division. Such questions preoccupy especially the postmodern novel which frequently introduces problems about its own generic status. This is not very surprising, given the inherent flexibility of the novel genre. By its very nature the novel is capable of accommodating highly diverse elements from different genres. It is, therefore, very conducive to challenging traditional notions about genre. It is precisely this quality of the novel that makes a theorist like Mikhail M. Bakhtin attribute a very special place to it in the historical development of literature. Bakhtin, of course, is not a poststructuralist, but some of his valuable insights about language and literature can be related to various tenets of poststructuralist thought. To Bakhtin,

the novel is the only genre which cannot be fully defined, described, and thus “closed”: “ … the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted …. The generic skeleton of the novel is far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities” (Bakhtin 1992: 3). As a form that resists closure, the novel questions, examines, and renews itself, and its extraordinary potential to accommodate other genres plays a very significant role in this process

The novel’s increasing dominance among other genres is, to him, a significant indication of literary change and development:

The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. In many respects the novel has anticipated, and continues to anticipate, the future development of literature as a whole. In the process of becoming the dominant genre, the novel sparks the renovation of all other genres, infects them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness. It draws them ineluctibly to its orbit precisely because this orbit coincides with the basic direction of the

development of literature as a whole (Bakhtin 1992: 7).

The increasing prevalence of the novel, then, makes a significant influence on other genres. In the presence of the novel, all genres are forced to become like the novel, i.e. they are forced to break down their strictly drawn boundaries, interact with other genres, and assume much more flexible characteristics

Though very different in other respects, the theory of the text and Bakhtin’s theory of “novelization” may be said to coincide with regard to their conception of genre. Both theories imply the dissolution of dividing lines that sharply separate one genre from another. The notion of the text which cannot be confined within limits rules out ideas about sharply distinct literary genres. In the presence of the novel, then, it is no longer very meaningful to talk about defining characteristics that “close” genres once and for all – characteristics which contain genres within welldrawn boundaries.

The implications of all this for genre parody are quite obvious. Genre parody assumes full meaning when the targeted genre is a clearly demarcated, closed system. The parodist discerns the defining characteristics of this system, and puts them to use often by imitating them with an ironic distance. Once the boundaries that delimit this system are dissolved in the face of theories of textuality or the pervasiveness of novelized genres, then genre parody per se becomes a rather pointless activity.

Parodies of individual works and genres, then, cannot be properly reconciled to the tenets of poststructuralism. Similarly, parodies of individual styles, too, are hard to accommodate within poststructuralist thought. An individual style presupposes a unique author who leaves a lasting imprint on his work. Such an author is thought to “nourish” his work, to father and to own it

This traditional conception of the author, of course, finds little approval in poststructuralist thought. The theory of the text, which overthrows the notion of the work, similarly rejects the idea of a unique and original author who fathers the work. The author as creator loses all significance.

The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject wth [sic.] the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. … the hand [of the modern scriptor] … traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all

origins .

Furthermore, language often works by making the subject believe that he is a stable identity that can be summed up through the pronoun, “I”. This, however, is a misconception. The linguistic “I” can never fully define and delimit the fragmented subject who is in a constant process of becoming. In Jacques Lacan’s words, the significant question is “… knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (Lacan 1992: 165). This question, of course, cannot get an affirmative answer within the context of poststructuralist thought. It can, instead, be answered by drawing attention to the problematic relationship between language and identity, maybe in a statement like the following: “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Lacan 1992: 86).

Of course such theories of subjectivity also pertain to the author. It is no longer possible to regard the author as a unified, coherent, and fully definable identity – an approach that would elevate him to the status of an individual. The author, instead, is a de-centered and fragmented subject shaped in and through language, and in this sense he can no longer be said to “father” what he writes by imprinting on it his unique and original style.

This view of the author is also corroborated by poststructuralist theorists who are more socially oriented. Michel Foucault, for example, is interested in charting “… a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Foucault 1982: 417). This, to him, is an essential task because it sheds light on how discourse and, consequently, power relationships operate in society. Individuals are made into subjects who appear to have their independent identity and individuality but who are in fact “subject to” the existing forms of discourse.

To Foucault, the author is similarly a subject and therefore a function in discourse.

In our time the author-function serves to maintain the circulation and continuity of the prevailing forms of discourse. The author, therefore, is subordinate to discourse and to power relationships and should in no way be regarded as an individual with unique creative powers, as “an originating subject”.

It is obvious that Foucault’s conception of the author, too, undermines traditional ideas about authorship and authority. Only a function in discourse, the author is no longer an autonomous individual in full control of his creation. Nor is he to be esteemed for his unique creative powers which – as traditionally believed – become manifest in his individual style.

Poststructuralist thought, then, renders the notion of an individual author with an individual style rather meaningless. Precisely such a notion, however, is required to render parodies of individual styles meaningful. The parodist who aims at parodying an author has to assume that his target is characterized by a unique, original style that can be imitated humorously and with a difference. Such an assumption cannot be made in poststructuralist thought. Parodies of individual styles, therefore, cannot be properly reconciled to poststructuralism. It follows naturally that this parodic kind cannot be meaningfully accommodated in postmodern literature.

In the light of the above discussion it can be argued that neither parodies of individual works and styles nor parodies of genre can be smoothly reconciled to the tenets of poststructuralism. None of these parodic kinds, therefore, may be said to describe and characterize postmodern parody. This suggests that discourse parody, the only remaining kind, may be the one that best relates to postmodern concerns.

Discourse, indeed, is a term that occupies a prominent place in poststructuralist thought. It emerges as a significant concept in the presence of poststructuralist theories which emphasize the primacy of language and textuality and which, therefore, reject all kinds of logocentric thought. The belief in a center, an essence, an organizing principle which would point to full meaning and to a single, unquestionable reality no longer holds in poststructuralism. Reality is shaped through language, which is caught up in a continuous process of signification and which, therefore, knows neither origin nor center. Within such a model one can no longer talk about a single reality, a transcendental truth which is at once the source and the center. Instead, one can only talk about “discourse” – an entity shaped and constructed by language, which is an arbitrary system of differences and signification

Grand narratives, which are master discourses that have so far shaped western notions about truth and reality, all come under attack in postmodern thought. No discursive realm is immune to this attack: master discourses in areas as diverse as literature, philosophy, religion, science, politics, and ideology are all exposed and undermined. No longer believed to represent the truth, they lose ground and become mere constructs that are always open to deconstruction.

Throughout history this quality of discourse has made it a significant agent in the exercise of power.

Institutions have sustained their authority through the production and maintenance of dominant discourses whose claim to truth have made them immune to questioning and subversion.

Any dissenting and hence dangerous voice or discourse, then, is subject to suppression by the dominant discourse, whose claim to truth guarantees the continuity of its power and authority.

Poststructuralist theory undermines this authority by contending that, being a mere construct in language and history, no discourse can make a claim to truth and superiority. It subverts the power of dominant discourses, allowing greater freedom to previously suppressed voices. It also exposes the way power is maintained and exercised, thereby inviting a reassessment of the status of those dominant discourses which have so far maintained authority by making a claim to truth.

Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. … at every moment of its linguistic life … [a unitary language] is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia [the centrifugal, stratifying forces]. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a … unity – the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, ‘correct language’.

We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization).

Dominant discourses sustain their authority by constantly excluding other voices, discourses, or languages that might pose a threat to their unity and centrality.

The polyphony of the novel continually resists the monologic tendencies of language and discourse, allowing dissenting or non-dominant voices to be heard, too.

In all this parody plays a very significant role. Its double-coded nature guarantees dialogism and polyphony, ruling out the idea of a dominant, unitary discourse. The novel genre is again crucial here because of its unlimited potential to embrace all kinds of parodic stylization.

The novel, then, can accommodate parodies of any language or any discourse, including its own. It is, therefore, the genre most open to polyphony, whose presence makes the idea of a master unitary discourse impossible. Parody, then, is a significant political tool in Bakhtin’s thought. It activates and foregrounds the centrifugal forces in any discursive language. Dominant discourses become subject to parodic exposure and lose much of their authority when they are no longer able to maintain their monologic integrity.

For the past two decades, the postmodern debates dominated the cultural and intellectual scene in many fields throughout the world. In aesthetic and cultural theory, polemics emerged over whether modernism in the arts was or was not dead and what sort of postmodern art was succeeding it. In philosophy, debates erupted concerning whether or not the tradition of modern philosophy had ended, and many began celebrating a new postmodern philosophy associated with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, and others. Eventually, the postmodern assault produced new social and political theories, as well as theoretical attempts to define the multifaceted aspects of the postmodern phenomenon itself.

Advocates of the postmodern turn aggressively criticized traditional culture, theory, and politics, while defenders of the modern tradition responded either by ignoring the new challenger, by attacking it in return, or by attempting to come to terms with and appropriate the new discourses and positions. Critics of the postmodern turn argued that it was either a passing fad (Fo 1986/7; Guattari 1986), a specious invention of intellectuals in search of a new discourse and source of cultural capital (Britton 1988), or yet another conservative ideology attempting to devalue emancipatory modern theories and values (Habermas 1981 and 1987a). But the emerging postmodern discourses and problematics raise issues which resist easy dismissal or facile incorporation into already established paradigms.

In view of the wide range of postmodern disputes, we propose to explicate and sort out the differences between the most significant articulations of postmodern theory, and to identify their central positions, insights, and limitations. Yet, as we shall see, there is no unified postmodern theory, or even a coherent set of positions. Rather, one is struck by the diversities between theories often lumped together as ‘postmodern’ and the plurality – often conflictual – of postmodern positions. One is also struck by the inadequate and undertheorized notion of the ‘postmodern’ in the theories which adopt, or are identified in, such terms. To clarify some of the key words within the family of concepts of the postmodern, it is useful to distinguish between the discourses of the modern and thepostmodern .

Postmodern theorists claim that in the contemporary high tech media society, emergent processes of change and transformation are producing a new postmodern society and its advocates claim that the era of postmodernity constitutes a novel stage of history and novel sociocultural formation which requires new concepts and theories. Theorists of postmodernity (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Harvey, etc.) claim that technologies such as computers and media, new forms of knowledge, and changes in the socioeconomic system are producing a postmodern social formation. Baudrillard and Lyotard interpret these developments in terms of novel types of information, knowledge, and technologies, while neo-Marxist theorists like Jameson and Harvey interpret the postmodern in terms of development of a higher stage of capitalism marked by a greater degree of capital penetration and homogenization across the globe. These processes are also producing increased cultural fragmentation, changes in the experience of space and time, and new modes of experience, subjectivity, and culture. These conditions provide the socioeconomic and cultural basis for postmodern theory and their analysis provides the perspectives from which postmodern theory can claim to be on the cutting edge of contemporary developments.

In addition to the distinction between modernity and postmodernity in the field of social theory, the discourse of the postmodern plays an important role in the field of aesthetics and cultural theory. Here the debate revolves around distinctions between modernism and postmodernism in the arts. Within this discourse, ‘modernism’ could be used to describe the art movements of the modern age (impressionism, l’art pour l’art, expressionism, surrealism, and other avant-garde movements), while ‘postmodernism’ can describe those diverse aesthetic forms and practices which come after and break with modernism. These forms include the architecture of Robert Venturi and Philip Johnson, the musical experiments of John Cage, the art of Warhol and Rauschenberg, the novels of Pynchon and Ballard, and films like Blade Runner or Blue Velvet. Debates centre on whether there is or is not a sharp conceptual distinction between modernism and postmodernism and the relative merits and limitations of these movements.

The discourses of the postmodern also appear in the field of theory and focus on the critique of modern theory and arguments for a postmodern rupture in theory. Modern theory – ranging from the philosophical project of Descartes, through the Enlightenment, to the social theory of Comte, Marx, Weber and others – is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic

truth, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism. Defenders of modern theory, by contrast, attack postmodern relativism, irrationalism, and nihilism. More specifically, postmodern theory provides a critique of representation and the modern belief that theory mirrors reality, taking instead ‘perspectivist’ and ‘relativist’ positions that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects, and that all cognitive representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated. Some postmodern theory accordingly rejects the totalizing macroperspectives on society and history favoured by modern theory in favour of microtheory and micropolitics (Lyotard 1984a). Postmodern theory also rejects modern assumptions of social coherence and notions of causality in favour of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. In addition, postmodern theory abandons the rational and unified subject postulated by much modern theory in favour of a socially and linguistically decentred and fragmented subject.

Thus, to avoid conceptual confusion, in this book we shall use the term ‘postmodernity’ to describe the supposed epoch that follows modernity, and ‘postmodernism’ to describe movements and artifacts in the cultural field that can be distinguished from modernist movements, texts, and practices. We shall also distinguish between ‘modern theory’ and ‘postmodern theory’, as well as between ‘modern politics’ which is characterized by party, parliamentary, or trade union politics in opposition to ‘postmodern politics’ associated with locally based micropolitics that challenge a broad array of discourses and institutionalized

forms of power.

The way other parodic kinds are rendered rather meaningless within the context of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories has already been dwelt on. Add to this the postmodern project of undermining master discourses, and the significance and pervasiveness of discourse parody in postmodern literature become quite clear. Like all parodies, postmodern examples, too, may differ in the intensity of their political intent. Some may appear highly playful and devoid of seriousness while others may exhibit explicit political aims. Within such diversity, however, it can still be argued that postmodern parody – whether playful or political – is primarily discourse parody because this is the kind that best reflects postmodern concerns.

IV. From Theory to Practice: discourse parody applied to the works of John Fowles,

Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge

Discourse is an essential object of parody in the postmodern novel, and this is not very surprising, given the significance postmodernism accords to exposing all discourses as constructs that can always be deconstructed and undermined. Like all novels, the postmodern novel, too, can accommodate many different kinds of discourse. Unlike all novels, however, the postmodern novel often situates these discourses within a parodic context, preventing any single discourse from assuming dominant qualities by suppressing others and making a claim to truth. Robert Phiddian’s argument in his article on parody and deconstruction applies very well to the project that often characterizes parody in the postmodern novel: “Parodies deconstruct the discourses they invade; they do not blankly destroy the discourses on which, parasitically and critically, they live. Instead, both genesis and structure of those discourses appear ‘under erasure’ (visible but problematized and devalued)” (Phiddian 1997: 682). It is exactly in this way that discourse is treated in most postmodern novels. Any discourse is deconstructed and undermined at the same time as it is represented. The postmodern novel, therefore, creates a non-hierarchical discursive realm where no discourse is immune to parody and where it is constantly implied that all discourses are products of language, which shapes reality and maintains an arbitrary relationship with it. Such a parodic realm, of course, is never conducive to the creation of master discourses believed to embody the truth. Parody, then, curbs the tendency of any discourse to make a claim to truth, continually reminding “… us that we are facing words rather than things, rhetoric rather than pure ideas, language rather than phenomena” (Phiddian 1997: 689).

Literary-critical discourse is widely parodied in postmodern novels – a phenomenon which may at first appear rather unusual. The question arises as to why the novelist should prefer to parody and hence undermine this kind of discourse, which has, after all, close affinities with the discursive realm he himself is situated in. A relatively satisfactory answer lies in a more careful consideration of the character of postmodern parody, which never chooses its object by differentiating between “more” and “less” privileged discourses. All discourses are equally prone to parody, and literary-critical discourse is no exception in this respect.

The pervasiveness of parody directed at literary-critical discourse can also be explained through the self-conscious and self-critical tendencies that characterize postmodern artistic productions. Parody targeting this kind of discourse inevitably raises questions about art and literature in general and the validity of their study and practice in particular. Self-conscious questions like these, of course, occupy a rather significant place in postmodern art. It is no wonder, then, that this kind of discourse parody is a widely employed device in postmodern fiction.

Self-criticism is also a result of self-conscious tendencies, and the parody of literary-critical discourse serves this purpose, too. A novel that accommodates this kind of parody often engages in self-criticism, subjecting to scrutiny those discourses closely affiliated with its own. Questions concerning the authority and validity of these discourses are raised in line with the poststructuralist project of exposing all discourses as constructs that can be deconstructed and

undermined. The parody of literary-critical discourse, therefore, turns the novel into a site where literature is practiced and criticized at the same time. Theboundaries between literature and criticism are dissolved in a way that echoes the rejection of well-defined genre boundaries in poststructuralist theory.

The parody of literary-critical discourse also occupies a very essential place in David Lodge’s comic campus novel, Changing Places (1975) and its sequel, Small World (1984). The plots of both novels revolve around the personal and professional lives of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp – British and American professors of English literature respectively. It is, therefore, not very surprising that a major target of parody in both is academic discourse. Such parody becomes

apparent quite early in Changing Places when the reader cannot help sniggering at Professor Morris Zapp’s highly ambitious research project, which is to examine Jane Austen’s novels “… from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it …” (Lodge 1978: 44).

That Morris Zapp, who can seriously devise such an improbable and exaggerated research plan, is at the same time “a highly respected scholar with a long and impressive list of publications” (Lodge 1978: 43-44) heightens the parodic humour even further. A similar ironic imitation of the discourse of literary research can also be found in Small World, where Professor Philip Swallow prepares his talk for the literature conference he is going to attend as guest speaker in Ankara, Turkey. The title of his paper is “Literature and History, Society, Philosophy, and Psychology” (Lodge 1991: 187) – a topic no less ambitious than Morris Zapp’s research project. Swallow has been asked to speak not on a specific author but on a broader topic such as “Literature and History”, or “Literature and Society”, or “Literature and Philosophy”. A misunderstanding over “the telex transmission”, however, has led Swallow to prepare a lecture on literature and all these areas (Lodge 1991: 205) – a situation which is doubly humorous considering the fact that Swallow has immediately agreed to write such a paper, finding nothing wrong with the breadth of the topic.

In both novels academic discourse is also parodied through a humorous representation of the literature class. In Changing Places, Morris Zapp’s lecture on Jane Austen to his tutorial students is one such representation:

Readers of Jane Austen, he [Morris Zapp] emphasized, … should not be misled by the absence of overt reference to physical sexuality in her fiction into supposing that she was indifferent or

hostile to it. On the contrary, she invariably came down on the side of Eros against Agape – on the side, that is, of the private communion of lovers over against the public communion of social

events and gatherings which invariably caused pain and distress .…

Getting into his stride, Morris demonstrated that Mr. Elton was obviously implied to be impotent because there was no lead in the pencil that Harriet Smith took from him; and the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth lifted the little brat Walter off Anne Elliot’s shoulders … He snatched up the text and read with feeling:

‘ “… she found herself in the state of being released from him … Before she realized that Captain Wentworth had done it … he was resolutely borne away … Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles with the most disordered feelings.” How about that?’ he concluded reverently. ‘If that isn’t an orgasm, what is it?’ He looked up into three flabbergasted faces [of the students] (Lodge 1978: 215).

Such a talk, of course, becomes a major source of laughter, given especially the extremely far-fetched nature of Zapp’s comments about sexual symbolism in the novels of Jane Austen. Besides being playful, a parody like this may also be said to make a critical remark on the nature of literary criticism, which may at times appear so flexible as to embrace any approach, interpretation or methodology without considerations of relevance and validity.

Small World also includes a parodic representation of a literature class. This time the parody is highly reminiscent of the humorous examination questions in Flaubert’s Parrot, and it appears in the form of a student’s exam paper submitted to Professor Philip Swallow: By what means did Milton try to “justify the ways of God to man” in “Paradise Lost?” …

I think Milton succeeded very well in justifying the ways of God to man by making Satan such a horrible person, though Shelley said that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. On the other hand it is probably impossible to justify the ways of God to man because if you believe in God then he can do anything he likes anyway, and if you don’t there is no point trying to justify Him.

“Paradise Lost” is an epic poem in blank verse, which is another clever way of justifying the ways of God to man because if it rhymed it would seem too pat.

The humorous imitation of the discourse of modern literary theory is another device both novels employ to parody academic discourse. In a manner that echoes Francis Marloe’s absurdly humorous postscript in The Black Prince, Freudian psychoanalysis becomes a parodic target in Changing Places, too. Philip Swallow writes to his wife, Hilary, from the States, explaining that he does not approve of Hilary’s decision to allow Mary Makepeace, “an unmarried mother”, to live with her and the children. Philip is especially worried that Mary Makepeace and her friend, Professor Morris Zapp will set a bad example to his daughter, Amanda, who, according to him, is “… at a very sensitive and impressionable age …” (Lodge 1978: 140). Hilary, however, does not take this warning seriously, especially after having learnt that Philip has deceived her with Morris Zapp’s daughter, Melanie. Her witty answer to Philip is devised in such a way as to suggest that, as an unfaithful husband, Philip no longer has a right to comment on the moral standards he expects his daughter to adopt:

I [Hilary] must say it was unfortunate that of all the girls in Euphoria, you [Philip] had to pick on Mr. Zapp’s daughter. Also somewhat ironic, not to say hypocritical, that you should have been

so exercised about his bad influence on your daughter. I showed Mary [Makepeace] your letters and she says your obsessive concern to protect Amanda’s innocence indicates that you are

really in love with her yourself, and that your affair with Melanie was a substitute gratification for the incestuous desire. An interesting theory, you must admit. Does Melanie look anything

like Amanda? (Lodge 1978: 149).

To make her attitude clear, then, Hilary relates to Philip Mary Makepeace’s psychoanalytic reading of the situation Philip finds himself in. Mary’s interpretation, however, is too far-fetched to be taken seriously. It turns, then, into a parody of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the humour becomes more intense given Hilary’s credulity in relating this theory to Philip.

Saussurean linguistics and structuralism similarly become parodic targets in Small World. The conference setting which the novel opens with is very appropriate for this kind of parody. Discussions about the latest trends in literary research abound,34 and it is not long before Persse McGarrigle, a young instructor who has recently completed his Master’s thesis, feels that he urgently needs to understand what is meant by the term “structuralism”, which he continually keeps hearing. He first directs his inquiry to Angelica Pabst, a young doctoral student, and Robin Dempsey, a professor “… from one of the new universities in the north of England” (Lodge 1991: 6), and this is how the parody gradually emerges:

… “Hallo, how was the lecture?’ he [Persse] greeted her [Angelica].

“Boring. But there was an interesting discussion of structuralism

afterwards.”

“Again? You’ve really got to tell me what structuralism is all

about. It’s a matter of urgency”.

“Structuralism?” said Dempsey, coming up with a sherry for

Angelica just in time to hear Persse’s plea, and all too eager to

show his expertise. “It all goes back to Saussure’s linguistics. The

arbitrariness of the signifier. Language as a system of differences

with no positive terms.”

“Give me an example,” said Persse. “I can’t follow an argument

without an example.”

“Well, take the words dog and cat. There’s no absolute reason

why the combined phonemes d-o-g should signify a quadruped that

goes ‘woof woof’ rather one [sic.] that goes ‘miaou’. It’s a purely

arbitrary relationship, and there’s no reason why English speakers

shouldn’t decide that from tomorrow, d-o-g would signify ‘cat’ and

c-a-t, ‘dog’.”

“Wouldn’t it confuse the animals?” said Persse.

“The animals would adjust in time, like everyone else,” said

Dempsey

(Lodge 1991: 25-26).

Dempsey’s light-hearted explanation of the concept of arbitrariness in language and the way he seriously responds to Persse’s uneducated question (“Wouldn’t it confuse the animals?”) turns this discussion into a parody. In the novel Persse makes several other attempts to learn about structuralism, all of which result in failure. Each time either another character or another event abruptly intrudes, changing the topic and leaving Persse with a greater number of unanswered

questions – a situation which contributes further to the parodic effect.

Still another target of parody in Small World is the discourse of poststructuralism, which is adopted especially by Professor Morris Zapp, who ardently argues that structuralism no longer makes sense in a world where we have learned that language is characterized by a constant deferral of meaning.

Zapp’s conference lecture, which humorously develops various poststructuralist theories ranging from the pleasure of the text to psychoanalysis and desire in language, is a good instance of such parody. The quotation that follows is a section from this lecture, where Zapp draws an analogy between the activities of reading and watching a striptease:

The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl’s underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends – but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The

vagina remains hidden within the girl’s body, shaded by her pubichair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this point several ladies in the audience noisily departed] it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping.

Staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vain – it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be regarded as compulsive readers) – that obsessive reading is the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother’s genitals [here a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out] but the point of the remark, which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another …

(Lodge 1991: 31).

Clearly Morris Zapp’s lecture often translates the rather abstract and philosophical language of poststructuralist theory into daily, ordinary language with highly straightforward examples sometimes verging on vulgarity. This, together with the abrupt narratorial remarks in parantheses, turn Zapp’s lecture into a rather humorous imitation of poststructuralist discourse. The discussion session that succeeds the talk is similarly parodic, and all this contributes further to the parody of academic discourse, which characterizes the novel.

As a whole Malcolm Bradbury’s Mensonge (1987) is even a more powerful parody of the discourse of modern literary theory. The work is purportedly a scholarly book written by a Malcolm Bradbury, a fairly well-known scholar interested in bringing to light the life and work of Henri Mensonge, who, he argues, is the hidden figure behind modern literary theory. The task this fictional Bradbury has set himself, however, is not an easy one since Henri Mensonge is a philosopher interested in putting theory fully to practice. Therefore, in keeping with the latest theories on the disappearance of the subject, the death of the author, and the impossibility of attaining meaning in language, Mensonge has completely absented himself from the academic scene. Not many scholars have heard his name, and getting hold of his several essays and the only book he has supposedly written – La fornication comme acte culturel36 – is a very difficult task indeed.

Bradbury first sets the scene for his argument by providing a brief survey of recent developments in literary theory. He starts off with Saussure and his theory of signs and arbitrariness in language – a discussion which is clearly parodic: “… what Saussure proved – or so his students seemed to think – was that words were arbitrary, and hence that in effect everything had been given the wrong name, so that horses were really fish and fish onions” (Bradbury 1993: 9).

Mensonge is a work of fiction, but its status as narrative is debatable. Most of the book is in the form of a scholarly essay on a significant philosopher, and this is definitely a non-narrative quality.

It may, however, be argued that the “writer” of this essay occasionally turns into a first-person narrator telling the reader about the events he came across during his research for this essay. It is

owing to this narrative aspect of the work that I include it as an example among other postmodern novels.

There follows a discussion of the ideas of other theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and among these he dwells especially on Barthes’ seminal essay, “The Death of the Author” since this is the essay to which Mensonge’s disappearance as an author can be directly related:

… what Barthes asserted was indeed that they [works] were not by anyone at all, or certainly not by their authors; for writers do not write but get written, and by something outside themselves. Of course we know this from experience; often it is a wife, an old aunt, the bank-manager, one’s literary agent, or some new girl at the publishers who, unable to make head or tail of the stuff, sits down and rewrites it all completely for clarity. Barthes, however, argues more daringly that the responsible party is not another person at all, not being in favour of the concept. What writes books is in fact nothing other than history, culture, or to be more precise language itself. Indeed, so effective is language that it has frequently arrived early in the morning, sat down at the typewriter, and as good as completed half a day’s work before the average socalled author has even showered, dressed, and got through his breakfast croissant

(Bradbury 1993: 21-22).

Bradbury’s explication of the topic in a way that juxtaposes the complex discourse of theory with an often surprisingly naive and uneducated commentary. This kind of humour pervades the whole work and gets more and more intense as Bradbury, in his own “scholarly” way, sets out to explain the main argument of Mensonge’s only book, La Fornication comme acte culturel.

Set in 1969, the time of student movements, Changing Places employs parody of political discourse much more pervasively. In the novel the political background is described mainly through a chapter which is largely made up of a collection of different news items quoted from local newspapers.

These news items are often parodic of various kinds of political discourse, and the discourse of

student movements is a significant one of these.

The comic and parodic atmosphere, of course, is mainly created through the incongruous reference to the Costanoan Indians and the promise to vacate the garden if any of them show up. Another parodic news item is similarly about student protests, and here it is especially the highly strained analogy drawn between the students’ and Hitler’s strategies early in the Second World.

It is essential to observe that these parodies are not directed towards a single political view. They do not aim, in other words, to promote one political perspective by satirizing and hence undermining its opposite. If this were the case, the novel would not present parodies of the discourse of opposing factions. As the above examples suggest, however, all kinds of discourse, even those that directly oppose each other, are subject to parody in the world of the novel. This is most clear in two other news items from the same chapter in Changing Places.

Purportedly written by younger school children, the two items voice two different discourses which run counter to each other. Neither, however, is immune to parody:

I didn’t get to see the People’s Garden really, but I could feel that it

was beautiful. In the Garden it was made of people’s feelings, not

just their hands, they made it with their heart ….

The police are just ruining their lives by being police, they’re also

keeping themselves from being a person. They act like they are

some kind of nervous creatures.

– Submitted by Plotinus schoolteacher

to Euphoric State Daily

(Lodge 1978: 163)

………..

I don,t like students cos they all follow each other in what they do

they all wear the same clothes and they all talk like americans, and

they smoke drugs and have injections to make themselves happy

and they talk about love and peace when their unhappy.

(Lodge 1978: 164)

A major source of humour is the obviousness of the fact that the children are serving as effective tools for the promotion of the discourses of their elders. This, coupled with the incorrect language and spelling in which these ideas are voiced, turn both discourses into highly comic parodies.

In Changing Places, then, political discourse is parodied mainly through the chapter which is almost completely made up of news items from local newspapers. It is interesting to observe that these parodic news items also turn this chapter into a parody of journalistic discourse. Changing Places, then, may be said to parody the discourse of politics through the parody of journalistic discourse and vice versa.

So Changing Places (1975) is yet another novel that parodies literary-fictional discourse by employing genre parody closely intertwined with metafiction. The third chapter of Changing Places is titled, “Corresponding”, and in keeping with this title, the novel suddenly changes form and remains epistolary for a whole chapter. Such an abrupt shift in form coupled with the often comic content of the letters that keep going back and forth between the characters turn this chapter into a parody of the epistolary novel genre. It is, however, essential to mnote that genre parody here is primarily a tool to serve the larger metafictional concerns of the novel. In his book, The Art of Fiction, David Lodge himself explains that in Changing Places he “… felt the need to provide some variety and surprise for the reader … and accordingly wrote each chapter in a different style or format” (Lodge 1992: 227). Such a strategy, of course, breaks the illusion of reality for the reader, continually reminding him of the fictional and constructed nature of what he is reading. The more explicitly metafictional instances in the novel emphasize this point even further. In one of the letters Hilary sends to her husband Philip Swallow, who is away as visiting professor in an American university, she makes a reference to the book her husband has asked her to send to the States. The book is titled, Let’s Write a Novel, and Philip needs it for the course he is expected to teach “in the writing of extended narrative” (Lodge 1978: 66). In the letter Hilary informs Philip that she has found the book he is asking for and comments on it at the same time: “Do you still want me to send on Let’s Write a Novel? What a funny little book it is. There’s a whole chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody’s done that since the eighteenth century?” (Lodge 1978: 130). Laughter inevitably ensues, given especially that Hilary makes this remark in the epistolary chapter of the novel. Also the book in question (Let’s Write a Novel) is itself an instance of self-reflexivity, and all these combine to create a very strong vein of comic and parodic metafiction in the novel.

Just like the epistolary chapter, the last chapter of Changing Places, too, presents an abrupt shift in the medium of presentation. This time the dramatic mode replaces the narrative, and the chapter turns into a screenplay where the major characters – Philip, Hilary, Morris, and Désirée – come together to decide about the future of their marriages. Of course, this chapter may again be regarded as a parody targeting the dramatic mode. The parody, however, is again subordinated to metafiction, in which this chapter abounds. Even the title is clearly metafictional: “Ending” – for a chapter which literally “ends” the novel.

The conversation between the four characters also includes lots of metafictional instances. The conversation prompted by Hilary’s question regarding what to do about the future is one such instance:

HILARY: Shouldn’t we have a serious talk? I mean, that’s what

we’ve come all this way for. What are we going to do? About

the future.

MORRIS: Let’s consider the options. Coolly. (prepares to light

cigar) First: we could return to our respective homes with our

respective spouses.

…

DESIREE: Next option.

MORRIS: We could all get divorced and remarry each other. If you

follow me.

PHILIP: Where would we live ?

MORRIS: I could take the Chair at Rummidge, settle down there. I

guess you could get a job in Euphoria …

PHILIP: I’m not so sure.

MORRIS: Or you could take Désirée to Rummidge, and I’d go back

to Euphoria with Hilary.

HILARY rises to her feet.

Where are you going ?

HILARY: I don’t wish to listen to this childish conversation.

PHILIP: What’s wrong? You started it.

HILARY: This is not what I meant by a serious talk. You sound like

a couple of scriptwriters discussing how to wind up a play. (Lodge 1978: 244-245)

And the chapter they are having this conversation in is indeed a “play” which needs to be wound up. It is, then, possible to regard this remark together with the characters’ preceding conversation about possible “endings” as a reflection of the author’s own writing process – a process where he, too, is experiencing similar problems about “winding up” the plot. Indeed, this is such a difficult problem to solve for the author that he evades it through what he himself calls a “metafictional joke” (Lodge 1992: 229). The four characters’ conversation is somehow directed towards the question of “endings”, and especially Philip and Morris start a heated (and metafictional) discussion about how novels and films end. This discussion is stopped abruptly, in medias res, and this is the point where Changing Places ends, too:

PHILIP: You remember that passage in Northanger Abbey where

Jane Austen says she’s afraid that her readers will have guessed

that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.

MORRIS: (nods) Quote, ‘Seeing in the tell-tale compression of the

pages before them that we are all hastening together to perfect

felicity.’ Unquote.

PHILIP: That’s it. Well, that’s something the novelist can’t help

giving away, isn’t it, that his book is shortly coming to an end? It

may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he can’t disguise the

tell-tale compression of the pages.

HILARY and DESIREE begin to listen to what PHILIP is

saying, and he becomes the focal point of attention.

I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As

you’re reading, you’re aware of the fact that there’s only a page or

two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. But with a film

there’s no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are

much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent than they

used to be. There’s no way of telling which frame is going to be

the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are

behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we’re watching

them, and at any point the director chooses, without any warning,

without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can

just … end.

PHILIP shrugs. The camera stops, freezing him in mid-gesture.

THE END

(Lodge 1978: 251)

This, perhaps, is the most conspicuously metafictional instance in the novel. David Lodge cleverly ends the novel and the film script which makes up the last chapter through Philip’s discussion of “endings” in novels and films. And this is indeed a “metafictional joke” for the reader since, in keeping with his own argument about films, Philip’s own talk ends abruptly at a point “… the director chooses, without any warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up …”.

This and all other metafictional devices in Changing Places may be said to comment both humorously and critically on the discourse of realism, which often works by making the reader forget about the constructed nature of the work he is reading. And genre parody is a significant tool the novel uses for this purpose. It may, then, be argued that genre parody in Changing Places does not consist solely in targeting a genre and making a critical comment about it. On the contrary, genre parody in this novel may be regarded as an essential component of a much larger project – the project of exposing and parodying traditional literary-fictional discourse which is firmly rooted in the conventions of realism.

Compared to The Black Prince and Changing Places, genre parody is even more conspicuously present in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983). The novel as a whole is a parody of the fairy-tale genre.

This atmosphere is reinforced throughout as the narrator insists on being non-specific about time and place. “Once upon a time” is a phrase he employs fairly regularly, and his occasional references to the timespan covered by his story are made using the Hegiran rather than the Gregorian calendar – a practice which disorientates especially the Western reader, who clearly represents the majority of the novel’s reading public.

The story begins with the introduction of three sisters, who, in their secluded lives at home, have established a highly intimate relationship verging on eccentricity. Upon the death of their father, they make their only public appearance in many years to come by giving a big party to which they invite especially the rich British population of the town. It is rumoured later on that Omar Khayyam has been conceived during this party, following which the sisters permanently shut themselves up in their mansion, having the “finest handyman” of town build for them a dumb-waiter containing “many terrible secrets” (Rushdie 1995: 17).

It is in this strangely secluded house that one of the sisters gives birth to Omar Khayyam. Right from the beginning, however, all three sisters act as his biological mother, making the identity of the father as well as the real mother their biggest secret. Khayyam is raised in such a secretive and eccentric house, whose aura of mystery pervades the whole story, hence contributing greatly to the fairytale convention of creating a magical atmosphere.

John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman is regarded as a compelling historiographic metafiction in contemporary British literature. The interweaving of historical and literary sources of Victorian Era is characteristic of the novel. This intertextuality reinforces the historical verisimilitudinous connection with Victorian Age, and simultaneously it materializes Fowles’s constant conversation with other forms of literature and the Victorian world. Nevertheless, with self-consciousness about the form of fiction and the intrusion of modern novelist-surrogate that interrupts the coherence of narrative, the illusion of Victorian historical reality is disrupted. Such paradoxes of fictionality/reality and the present/the past in the novel demonstrate Fowles’ breakthrough in the traditional literary narrative. Moreover, within the historiographic metafictional structure, Fowles employs the parody of Victorian romance – an imitation with critical difference – to reconstruct the Victorian world, to subvert the traditional fixed denouement and to create a unique woman of emancipation.

By employing the historical works in Victorian women studies as my methodology, this thesis is an attempt to discuss John Fowles’ critique of Victorian sexual hypocrisy and female sexual oppression as well as the process of Sarah Woodruff’s pursuit of subjectivity within the narrative of historiographic metafiction. In the first chapter, I analyze the structure of the novel in terms of metafictional theory and Linda Hutcheon’s concepts of historiographic metafiction. The focus of my discussion is on the function of this experimental narrative.

Within the frame of historiographic metafiction, I draw forth the Victorian problematics on female sexuality. Chapter two examines the Victorian concepts of female hysteria and its relation to insanity. I employ the Victorian psychological theory of “associationism” to elaborate Dr. Grogan’s interpretations of Sarah as a cunning schemer.

.

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the dual epigraphs in each chapter, the footnotes and the Victorian medical and sociological documents are the instrument that Fowles employs to respond to the Victorian past. Through the play of intertextuality of Victorian social and literary sources that are applied to make Victorian historical connection with the Victorian social milieu, the illusion of verisimilitudinous historical reality is produced. However, the intrusion of novelist-narrator with the perceptions of the twentieth century disrupts this illusion of historical reality. Through the perspectives of modern novelist-surrogate, the present is blended into the Victorian historical past. Such an experimental and complex narrative of paradoxes functions to foreground Fowles’ critique of social and sexual rigidity in Victorian society.

The paradoxes of fictionality/reality and the present/the past constitute not only the structure of novel but also the appearance of Sarah Woodruff. Sarah exists in the novel as well as appears in the real life. According to John Fowles’ “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” the writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman arises from the fact that he was haunted by a recurring image of a mysterious woman, standing motionlessly on the end of a quay and starring out to the sea (161-2). Sarah in 1867 England is thus the materialization of Fowles’s haunting mysterious woman of the twentieth century. Being Fowles’s Muse in this novel, she can be seen as another presentation of his interweaving of the present into the Victorian past.

The characterization of Sarah accentuates the theme of emancipation in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The purpose to criticize to Victorian sexual inequality is accompanied with the employment of parody of Victorian literary conventions. In this parodic writing form, Fowles expresses his belief in freedom through characterizing Sarah as a fallen woman, contrary to a virtuous heroine in Victorian traditional novel. The miserable endings of “impure” heroine, such as death or insanity, are modified. Far from being the victim of patriarchal sexual regulations and the suffer of female hysteria, Sarah reappears in 1869, the year of John Stuart Mill’s publication of The Subjection of Woman, in a complete different image as a New Woman. She asserts the finding of her true happiness and the achievement of her selfhood in the house of Pre-Raphaelites. Moreover, Fowles discards the Victorian literary convention of a fixed consummate ending in a romance. The three denouements are presented by narrator’s interruption to the reader who has the freedom to choose.

From the perspectives of Margaret Bozenna Goscilo, the achievement of Sarah’s subjectivity disperses in the closing chapters as a model in the household of Dante Rossetti, because it is the representation of “inveterate patriarchal gender dichotomy of male artist and female object” (64). His critique of Sarah falling into the trap of being gazed ignores her progress of struggling for social and sexual emancipation.

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles shows his innovation in narrative: the intrusion of modern novelist-surrogate to criticize the omniscient role of Victorian novelist, the play of intertextuality by interweaving the past texts to construct his new Victorian world and his rewriting of Victorian fallen woman’s ending to respond to his faith in human sexual emancipation. I argue that these features show Fowles’s breakthrough in writing a novel and at the same time reveals his critique of Victorian sexual suffocation on the emancipation and autonomy of female sexuality.

Metafiction is a type of fiction about fiction itself. It self-consciously addresses the devices of constructing fictions and points out the paradoxical relationship of fictionality to reality. Patricia Waugh in Metafiction specifically defines metafiction as a literary term “given to the fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between the fiction and reality”

In John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the self-consciousness is reflected in the process of writing the novel. The God-like image of Victorian writers is criticized through the novelist-surrogate’s meditation on the freedom of characters and the freedom outside the fiction.

In the process of writing, writer’s omniscient role is deconstructed by the declaration of freedom in the novel: “There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedom to exist” (The French Lieutenant’s Woman 99). This is the principle that the novelist-surrogate or Fowles conforms to in writing this novel. Characters are not fully under the novelist’s control and the novelist-surrogate in the novel can’t do whatever he likes.

He no longer stands in an all-knowing position to command the characters. Characters possess the freedom of choice and autonomy.

The self-consciousness shown in the writing process also responds to the blending of fictionality and reality in the novel. The demarcation between fictionality and reality is blurred by the intrusion of self-conscious novelist-narrator. As Sarah fabricates her story, the novelist-narrator claims that the modern readers constantly fictionalize their life, blending the reality and the fictionality. The paradoxical “fictionality of reality” can be explored in the human life.

The dual epigraphs in the beginning of each chapter, one form of intertextuality, not only function as reinforcement for the Victorian milieu but also present Fowles’s constant conversations with Victorian Age.

Through the intertextuality of Victorian texts, the themes of freedom and female sexual emancipation are accentuated. The social and sexual problematics of Victorian era are extensively laid bare through the epigraphs.

Among the characters throughout the novel, Sarah is the only one who doesn’t let herself be confined to the sexual regulations. Employing the strategy of being stigmatized as a French Lieutenant’s whore, she can be on the journey to pursue her subjectivity.

Through Fowles’s characterization of Sarah Woodruff as a sexual rebel and social outcast, the Victorian sexual problematics are uncovered: inhuman sexual repression, sexual hypocrisy, and the fetishism of virginity. The Victorian patriarchal sexual dominance over female sexuality is exposed to the readers and should be questioned.

Chapter Two briefly sketches the history of hysteria from the ancient time to Victorian Age and explores the psychological theory of associationism by which Dr. Grogan employs to diagnose Sarah. This chapter mainly investigates the patriarchal demonization of female hysteria and moral dominance in the history of Victorian medical development. Sarah’s resistance to the medical control over female sexuality dismantles Fowles’s critique of Victorian phallocentric medical dogmatism.

The discourse that the hysterical woman is sexually abnormal and insane is thus developed. Such cognition strengthens the patriarchal domination over female sexual disciplines. However, the Victorian medical perspectives that impute sexual repression to the main cause of female hysteria expose stringent sexual regulations of female sexuality. Sexual repression is the doctrine for a feminine ideal but simultaneously it increases the amounts of hysterical women. Accordingly, the patriarchal sexual morality should be subsumed in the discussion of the causes of the aggravation of female hysteria.

Victorian physicians elaborate the relationship between female hysteria and mental disorder. The Victorian medical theory assumes that female sexual repression leads to female hysteria which then causes the mental instability. The extravagant emotional behaviors results in the insanity of female hysterics. Besides, the medical perspectives that female hysteria leads to excessive emotional behaviors are combined with contemporary psychological analysis: associationism – the study of the working of human disturbed mind.

From the Victorian medical perspectives and psychological associationism on female hysteria, Sarah’s sexual transgression and her addiction to obscure melancholia are the result of imbalance between her mind and body. She is not only stigmatized as a fallen woman but also categorized as a madwoman. Hence, the lunatic asylum is prescribed as the best treatment for her.

However, Dr. Grogan’s perspectives and diagnosis should be queried. By examining Dr. Grogan’s interpretations of Sarah hysterical symptoms, the diagnosis of hysterical women shows the patriarchal dogmatic version and female sexual predicaments. The intertextuality of Victorian medical perspectives on female hysteria – the trial of Lieutenant Emile de La Ronciere – exposes the demonization of female hysteria and sexuality. In the footnote Fowles indicates the truth is that Marie de Morell is not the only person blamed for. The event does not merely result from Morell’s hysterical symptoms. Instead, it is the patriarchal medical domination that arbitrarily attributes the hysteria to Morell’s revenge and that concludes her hysterical perturbations forcing her to bring an accusation against Emile de La Ronciere. Ironically, Dr. Grogan, as an intellectual of medical specialty, seems to ignore the truth of this trial on purpose. His patriarchal dogmatism leads him to make such an improper association between Sarah and Marie de Morell.

From Dr. Grogan’s diagnosis of Sarah, the moral domination in the history of Victorian medical development can be perceived. In the Birth of Clinic, As Michael Foucault argues, the medicine developed its history towards the pursuit of truth of illness and disease.

In Chapter Three, I explore the cultural legacy of virgin fetishism and the powers that manipulate the formation of virginal body – the manifestation of body politics. Contrastive to the feminine icon of virgin, the history of Victorian prostitution is introduced and at the same time discloses the Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Predicated on the feminist perspectives, this chapter examines Sarah’s struggle from the Victorian social and sexual constraints in terms of open denouements. Appearing as a fallen woman, a sexual rebel, in the beginning of the novel and reappearing as a New Woman at the end, Sarah shatters the dichotomy of virgin and whore.

The legacy of virginity, traced back to Queen Elizabeth as a virgin Queen, is highly intensified when young Queen Victoria came to the throne. At that time, she was young, innocent and graceful. The image of her girlhood combined with her queenly person strengthens the social value of female chastity and reinforces the sociosymbolic image of virgin. Queen Victoria’s natural body consequently is transformed into the body politic.

Through the play of intertextuality within the narrative of historiographic metafiction, the issues related to female sexuality are extensively drawn forth and the historical Victorian world is presented to readers of the twentieth century. Fowles’s innovative narrative lies in his creation of a modern novelist-surrogate. With the appearance of the novelist-surrogate in the novel, Fowles responds to Victorian past with the twentieth-century perceptions and at the same time reveals his critique of Victorian sexual rigidity that obstructs the pursuit of existential self.

Throughout the novel, Fowles creates Sarah as an active role in the process of her pursuit of selfhood. Instead of being pinned down in patriarchal frame of Victorian sexual regulations, she is the leading role that initiates all the actions of other characters. As Fowles empowers the reader the freedom to choose the ending, Sarah realizes her autonomy on the process of creation. She constructs her life with the blending of impurity and purity, fictionality and reality. Her fabrication of losing virginity proves the fictionality of every reality.

As the life of humans in the real world contains the element of fictionality, Sarah possesses the same freedom to fictionalize and create the life of her own. The creation of Sarah’s fictional story displays the paradoxical pattern: the fictionality of reality. Through such a creation, she not only asserts her autonomy but also deconstructs the omniscience of Victorian novelists. Moreover, this novel is likewise a response to the realization of the paradox – a fictional world with reliance on documentary realism and social realities. Within this narrative structure, Fowles construct a fictional reality to reveal his critique of Victorian sexual inequality between sexes.

Human emancipation is Fowles’ main concern within the narrative of historiographic metafiction. Fowles criticizes the problematics of Victorian sexuality, particularly the sexual hypocrisy and patriarchal domination over female quest for sexual autonomy through the intertextuality of Victorian sociological and literary sources. With the parody of Victorian romance and his characterization of Sarah Woodruff as a social outcast as well as a unique female emancipator, he achieves a narrative breakthrough in rewriting the Victorian novel.

In contrast to Charles’s yielding to the rigid society, Sarah refuses to be disciplined by Victorian patriarchal policing system of sexual regulations. She struggles to liberate herself with the image of whore. Her freedom consists in her choosing to resist the Victorian constraints on female pursuit of sexual autonomy. By the means of fabricating the loss of virginity to Vagueness, Sarah rebels the Victorian ideal femininity and refuses to be marginalized as a fallen woman.

Sarah’s fabrication of losing virginity manifests the paradox of fictionality and reality in human life. As the novelist-surrogate argues, the blending of fictionality and reality exists not only in the fiction, but also possibly outside the fictional text. Fowles creates a fiction within a narrative of Victorian historical reality. This historical reality is established by its interweaving of Victorian historical and literary sources. Victorian bourgeoisie is demanded and regulated to espouse a set of sexual moral values: sexual repression, non-premarital intercourse, and the strong social decorum between two sexes. The purpose of sexuality in marriage is reduced to the function of procreation. Any sexual transgression, such as prostitution, adultery, or extramarital intercourse, over the procreative delimitation means the sexual impurity and immorality. Sexual indulgence, for the bourgeois class, is considered to degrade personal morality and threaten the social order.

The common destiny of insane woman in Victorian literary works is death, or they would be sent to the lunatic asylum. Bertha Manson in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre manifests this literaryconvention. In order to conform to the storyline in traditional Victorian novels, Bertha should be destined to die at the end of the story not only because of her “dehumanized” insanity but also she destroys what Edward Rochester, a representative of patriarchy, has. She symbolically functions as a woman with passion and is the archetype of a woman who pays the price for her unrestrained affections: “insanity and death, the loss of self.” Her death is regarded as the inevitable result of “gross sexuality,” the crude sexual behavior, and consequently leads to her destruction (Rigney 15-6, 24).

David Lodge commends Malcolm Bradbury’s work “for its witty and acute observation of contemporary life and thoughtful, sometimes dark insights into the plight of the liberal humanist in the modern, or postmodern, world” (Bradbury 2000: ix). Lodge says those words in the year 2000, in a tribute to his close friend referring to all of his work in its extraordinary range from literary history and criticism to novels, radio plays and poems.

Malcolm Bradbury’s standpoint in literary studies seems to have remained stable throughout his extensive career as a man of letters. Martin Hilský sees Bradbury’s campus novels as “studies of liberal attitudes and their changes in the British society of the second half of the twentieth century” (105). What in The History Man (1975) was a satire targeting the fashionable left-wing radical intellectual and academic, became a parody of structuralism and deconstruction in the novella Mensonge (1987). In it, similarly to Lodge’s Small World, Bradbury argues against the “death of the author” and the new “philosophy of absences” expounded by deconstructionists and parodies the way critical theory has replaced literary analysis in universities.

Bradbury’s last novel To the Hermitage (2000) debates many of Bradbury’s views on writing and reading through the narrator, whom David Lodge identifies as “a wry Shandian self-portrait” (Bradbury 2000: ix). The narrator believes in books and writers: “As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great writers – who (despite modern theory) really exist, and provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find” (84-5). On the other side in the debate, there is a Professor of Contemporary Thinking, wearing a designer baseball cap – a funky professor who, according to the narrator, signifies “trouble” (89). Against him and what he stands for, the narrator discourses on writing, writers, biography, graves and libraries. In the face of the large amount of evidence from them, Barthes’s concept of the Death of the Author begins to pale. The author has not died. He has a long life to live after his natural death as the Diderot expedition of the novel proves. Bradbury concedes that we all interpret (“the shadowy theatre where we all bury, disinter, translate, interpret, study, revise, amend, re-edit, parody, quote, misquote, traduce and transcend in a wild anxiety of criticism and influence”, 153) and he also admits that “books breed books” (414), but, for Bradbury, the author is always there, not to be theorised out of existence.

Nevertheless, the notion of the death of the author on everybody’s lips plays but a symbolic role. It has become a synecdoche for all the modern critical theories that seem to sideline the author. Valentine Cunningham with his 2002 critique Reading After Theory is not the first to point out in what ways theory diminishes the author as well as the text to be analysed. In the 1990s James Wood was one of those who defended the traditional pleasures of reading Shakespeare against cultural materialist and poststructuralist analysis (see “Bardbiz correspondence” in London Review of Books 1990-92). Iris Murdoch’s philosophical critique of deconstruction has also literary overtones and debates the impact of its relativism and nihilism in literary terms. In 2003 Rupert Christiansen claims that while theory has ruled the higher study of literature for the last 20 years, “it has proved to be a dead-end street” . He supports his statement by what he calls “some 11th-hour backtracking” on the part of Frank Kermode, Toril Moi and even Jacques Derrida as reflected in conversations with them recorded in Life. After. Theory. (2003, edited by Michael Payne and John Schad).

Although himself a practitioner of contemporary critical theory (e.g. in his study In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts and History, 1993), Valentine Cunningham has recently

subjected postmodern critical approaches to severe criticism in Reading After Theory (2002). He believes that poststructuralist Theorists are characterised by having revolutionary dreams while there is nothing so utterly revolutionary in Theory (29). There is only one history of literary theory which he defines as “merely a history of the varying, shifting preoccupations across the ages with […] three zones […]: a writer, a text, a reader – the act of writing, the thing written, the reading of the written thing” (29). He then goes on to emphatically sum up that “criticism has never been quite new; and the history we’re dealing with is all about swings and roundabouts, about the Big Three items going around and coming around, again and again, in a process of constant reaction, resurrection, rereading, repositioning, revision”.

In contemporary critical Theory, in the very same sense of revision and rereading, “Marx is Foucauldianized. Freud is indeed Lacanianized […] The ‘biographical fallacy’ of the New Critics reappears more extremely as Barthes’s Death of the Author”). What makes Cunningham concerned though is the impact of the spread of Theory. He believes that Theory is bad for texts, because as a result of Theory the text is “disappearing”: due to canon purging – to get rid of all the Dead White European Males; secondly, under Theory’s complex gaze, the text is “seen as eviscerated, holed, fragmented, a set of absences, of not-thereness”thirdly, there is extinction of texts by what Cunningham calls “interpretative excess”– the absolute creative freedom of interpretation by readers.

CONCLUSIONS

Just as structuralists radically attacked phenomenology, existentialism, and humanism, so too did poststructuralists assault the premises and assumptions of structuralist thought. The poststructuralists attacked the scientific pretensions of structuralism which attempted to create a scientific basis for the study of culture and which strove for the standard modern goals of foundation, truth, objectivity, certainty, and system. Poststructuralists argued as well that structuralist theories did not fully break with humanism since they reproduced the humanist notion of an unchanging human nature. The poststructuralists, by contrast, criticized the claims of structuralists that the mind had an innate, universal structure and that myth and other symbolic forms strove to resolve the invariable contradictions between nature and culture. They favoured instead a thoroughly historical view which sees different forms of consciousness, identities, signification, and so on as historically produced and therefore varying in different historical periods. Thus, while sharing with structuralism a dismissal of the concept of the autonomous subject, poststructuralism stressed the dimensions of history, politics, and everyday life in the contemporary world which tended to be suppressed by the abstractions of the structuralist project.

The critiques of structuralism were articulated in a series of texts by Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard, and Barthes which produced an atmosphere of intense theoretical upheaval that helped to form postmodern theory. Unlike the structuralists who confined the play of language within closed structures of oppositions, the poststructuralists gave primacy to the signifier over the signified, and thereby signalled the dynamic productivity of language, the instability of meaning, and a break with conventional representational schemes of meaning. In traditional theories of meaning, signifiers come to rest in the signified of a conscious mind. For poststructuralists, by contrast, the signified is only a moment in a never-ending process of signification where meaning is produced not in a stable, referential relation between subject and object, but only within the infinite, intertextual play of signifiers. In Derrida’s words (1973: p. 58):

‘The meaning of meaning is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signified … Its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest … it always signifies again and differs.’

This production of signification that resists imposed structural constraints, Derrida terms ‘dissemination’, and we shall see the same sort of dynamic emphases in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire, Lyotard’s theory of intensities, Baudrillard’s concept of semiurgy, and Foucault’s concept of power.

The new theories of language and discourse led to radical critiques of modern philosophy, attacking its root assumptions.5 It was claimed that modern philosophy was undermined by its impossible dream of attaining a foundation for knowledge, an absolute bedrock of truth that could serve as the guarantee of philosophical systems (Rorty 1979). Derrida (1976) termed this foundationalist approach to language and knowledge a ‘metaphysics of presence’ that supposedly guaranteed the subject an unmediated access to reality. He argued that the binary oppositions governing Western philosophy and culture (subject/object, appearance/reality, speech/writing, and so on) work to construct a far-from-innocent hierarchy of values which attempt not only to guarantee truth, but also serve to exclude and devalue allegedly inferior terms or positions. This binary metaphysics thus works to positively position reality over appearance, speech over writing, men over women, or reasonover nature, thus positioning negatively the supposedly inferior term.

Many later poststructuralists and postmodern theorists followed Derrida in concluding that a thoroughgoing deconstruction of modern philosophy and a radically new philosophical practice were needed. Precursors of the postmodern critique of philosophy were found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, James, and Dewey, and in writers like de Sade, Bataille, and Artaud (Foucault 1973b; Rorty 1979). In particular, Nietzsche’s attack on Western philosophy, combined with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, led many theorists to question the very framework and deep assumptions of philosophy and social theory (Derrida 1976; Vattimo 1985; Dews 1987; Frank 1989 and Ferry and Renault 1990).

Nietzsche took apart the fundamental categories of Western philosophy in a trenchant philosophical critique, which provided the theoretical premises of many poststructuralist and postmodern critiques. He attacked philosophical conceptions of the subject, representation, causality, truth, value, and system, replacing Western philosophy with a perspectivist orientation for which there are no facts, only interpretations, and no objective truths, only the constructs of various individuals or groups. Nietzsche scorned philosophical systems and called for new modes of philosophizing, writing and living. He insisted that all language was metaphorical and that the subject was only a product of language and thought. He attacked the pretensions of reason and defended the desires of the body and the life-enhancing superiority of art over theory.

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger also provided thoroughgoing critiques of modernity that influenced later postmodern theory. Nietzsche saw modernity as an advanced state of decadence in which ‘higher types’ are levelled by rationalism, liberalism, democracy, and socialism, and where instincts go into steep decline. Heidegger (1977) developed a critique of the modern, representational subject and analyses of the corrosive effects of technology and rationalization.

For Heidegger, the triumph of humanism and the project of a rational domination of nature and human beings is the culmination of a process of the ‘forgetting of Being’ that began with Socrates and Plato. Heidegger undertook to destroy the history of Western metaphysics and called for a new mode of thinking and relating that rejected Western modes of thought in order to attain a more ‘primordial’ relation to Being. His radical rejection of modernity influenced some postmodern theory, as did his advocacy of premodern modes of thought and experience.

Building on the legacy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, poststructuralists stressed the importance of differences over unities and identities while championing the dissemination of meaning in opposition to its closure in totalizing, centred theories and systems. Indeed, later postmodern theory was often to carry through a collapse of the boundary between philosophy and literary theory (see Derrida 1981b; Rorty 1979 and 1989; and the critique in Habermas 1987b), or between philosophy, cultural critique, social theory, and other academic fields. This collapsing, or problematizing, of boundaries has led to more playful and diverse modes of writing, while subverting standard academic boundaries and practices.

The intellectual upheavals were soon accompanied by political upheavals which fostered a further questioning of conventional assumptions. The events of 1968 and turbulent politics of the period brought about a return to history and concrete politics. The dramatic French student strikes in May were followed by a general strike and the entire country was paralyzed. The upheaval signalled desires for a radical break with the institutions and politics of the past and dramatized the failure of liberal institutions to deal with the dissatisfaction of broad masses of citizens. The student radicals called for ‘all power to the imagination’ and a complete break from ‘papa’s’ values and politics. De Gaulle promised new elections and manoeuvred many groups and individuals to return to business as usual; the Communist Party supported this move and attacked the ‘student rabble-rousers’, thus discrediting their own allegedly revolutionary ambitions and alienating many in the radicalized sectors.

It was through such struggles as waged by students and workers that Foucault and others began to theorize the intimate connection between power and knowledge and to see that power operates in micrological channels that saturate social and personal existence.

The force of circumstances made it difficult to avoid conceptualizing the constituent role of history in human experience and the exciting political struggles of the day politicized poststructuralist thinkers who feverishly attempted to combine theory and practice, writing and politics. In addition, more attention was paid to subjectivity, difference, and the marginal elements of culture and everyday life.

While poststructuralists continued to reject the concept of the spontaneous, rational, autonomous subject developed by Enlightenment thinkers, there was intense debate over how the subject was formed and lived in everyday life, as well as the ubiquity and multiplicity of forms of power in society and everyday life.

Both structuralists and poststructuralists abandon the subject, but, beginning with poststructuralism, a major theoretical concern has been to analyze how individuals are constituted as subjects and given unified identities or subject positions.

Poststructuralism forms part of the matrix of postmodern theory, and while the theoretical breaks described as postmodern are directly related to poststructuralist critiques, we shall interpret poststructuralism as a subset of a broader range of theoretical, cultural, and social tendencies which constitute postmodern discourses. Thus, in our view, postmodern theory is a more inclusive phenomenon than poststructuralism which we interpret as a critique of modern theory and a production of new models of thought, writing, and subjectivity, some of which are later taken up by postmodern theory. Indeed, postmodern theory appropriates the poststructuralist critique of modern theory, radicalizes it, and extends it to new theoretical fields.

The discourse of the postmodern also encompasses a sociohistorical theory of postmodernity and analysis of new postmodern cultural forms and experiences. The cultural analysis is influenced by poststructuralist discussions of modernism and the avant-garde by Barthes, Kristeva, Sollers, and others associated with the Tel Quel group, but the later postmodern socio-historical discourses develop more comprehensive perspectives on society, politics, and history.

Postmodern theory generally follows poststructuralist theory in the primacy given to discourse theory. Both structuralists and poststructuralists developed theories which analyzed culture and society in terms of sign systems and their codes and discourses.

Discourse theory sees all social phenomena as structured semiotically by codes and rules, and therefore amenable to linguistic analysis, utilizing the model of signification and signifying practices. For Foucault and others, an important concern of discourse theory is to analyze the institutional bases of discourse, the viewpoints and positions from which people speak, and the power relations these allow and presuppose. Discourse theory also interprets discourse as a site and object of struggle where different groups strive for hegemony and the production of meaning

and ideology.

Discourse theory can be read as a variant of semiotics which develops the earlier project of analyzing society in terms of systems of signs and sign systems. Saussure had proposed developing a semiotics of ‘the life of signs in society’ and Barthes, the early Baudrillard, and others followed through on this to analyze the semiotics of myth, culture, consumption, and other social activities. Eventually, however, discourse theory superseded and subsumed the previous semiological theories, and we shall see that much postmodern theory follows discourse theory in assuming that it is language, signs, images, codes, and signifying systems which organize the psyche, society, and everyday life. Yet most postmodern theorists are not linguistic idealists or pan-textualists, who reduce everything to discourse or textuality.

Foucault, for instance, defines the apparatus that constitutes the social body as ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (1980a: p. 194). While some postmodern theory comes close to positing a linguistic idealism, whereby discourse constitutes all social phenomena, or is privileged over extra-discursive material conditions, there are also countervailing tendencies toward analysis of the pragmatics of language use, materialist analysis of discourses, institutions, and practices which avoid the traps of linguistic idealism.

Postmodern theory, however, is not merely a French phenomenon but has attained international scope. This is fitting because, as noted, German thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger already began the attack on traditional concepts and modes of philosophy. The American philosopher William James championed a radical pluralism and John Dewey attacked most of the presuppositions of traditional philosophy and social theory, while calling for their reconstruction. Furthermore, it was the English historians Toynbee and Barraclough and North American social theorists such as Drucker, Mills, Etzioni, and Bell who introduced the concept of a postmodern age in history and social theory, while North American cultural theorists introduced the term in the arts. It has indeed been in the Englishspeaking world that interest in all facets of the postmodern controversies has been most intense with conferences, journals, and publishing lists proliferating in these countries.

Thus, a diversity of theoretical and political responses and strategies have emerged in the postmodern debates. They took on an international scope and resonance by the 1980s and have penetrated every academic field, challenging regnant orthodoxies and affirming new postmodern perspectives and positions.

Postmodern discourses thus denote new artistic, cultural, or theoretical perspectives which renounce modern discourses and practices. All of these ‘post’ terms function as sequential markers, designating that which follows and comes after the modern. The discourse of the postmodern thus involves periodizing terms which describe a set of key changes in history, society, culture, and thought. The confusion involved in the discourse of the postmodern results from its usage in different fields and disciplines and the fact that most theorists and commentators on postmodern discourse provide definitions and conceptualizations that are frequently at odds with each other and usually inadequately theorized.

There is, in fact, an ambiguity inherent in the word ‘post’ which is played out in various postmodern discourses. On the one hand, ‘post’ describes a ‘not’ modern that can be read as an active term of negation which attempts to move beyond the modern era and its theoretical and cultural practices. Thus, postmodern discourses and practices are frequently characterized as anti-modern interventions which explicitly break with modern ideologies, styles, and practices that many postmodernists see as oppressive or exhausted. The prefix ‘post’, in this prescriptive sense, signifies an active rupture (coupure) with what preceded it.

On the other hand, the ‘post’ in postmodern also signifies a dependence on, a continuity with, that which it follows, leading some critics to conceptualize the postmodern as merely an intensification of the modern, as a hypermodernity (Merquior 1986; During 1987), a new ‘face of modernity’ (Calinescu 1987), or a ‘postmodern’ development within modernity (Welsch 1988). Yet many postmodern theorists deploy the term – as it was introduced by Toynbee – to characterize a dramatic rupture or break in Western history. The discourses of the postmodern therefore presuppose a sense of an ending, the advent of something new, and the demand that we must develop new categories, theories, and methods to explore and conceptualize this novum, this novel social and cultural situation. Thus, there is an intrinsic pathos of the new which characterizes the discourses of the postmodern and its celebrants tend to position themselves as theoretical and political avant-gardes (just as ‘modern’ theorists did in an earlier era).

A postmodernist describes and usually champions imputed breaks in knowledge, culture, and society, frequently attacking the modern while identifying with what they tout as new and ‘radical’ postmodern discourses and practices. A postmodernist thus calls for new categories, modes of thought and writing, and values and politics to overcome the deficiencies of modern discourses and practices. Some postmodern theorists, like Lyotard and Foucault, focus on developing alternative modes of knowledge and discourse, while others, like Baudrillard, Jameson, and Harvey emphasize the forms of economy, society, culture, and experience. Within social theory, a postmodernist claims that there are fundamental changes in society and history which require new theories and conceptions, and that modern theories are unable to illuminate these changes. Jameson, however, utilizes modern (primarily Marxist) theory to analyze postmodern cultural and social forms, while Habermas and many of his associates criticize what they consider to be the ideological nature of postmodern theory tout court. Laclau and Mouffe, by contrast, use postmodern critiques to go beyond Marxism and to reconstruct the

project of radical democracy.

The English syllabus definition of postmodernism drifts away from the issue that postmodernism has included a widespread preoccupation with theory. At the point where the description of the elective might offer a general comment about cultural history and the new syllabus it slides away from confrontation with the historical issues which shape the current “reconceptualisation and expansion” of English as a combination traditional literary study and a study of texts, culture, history, and the evaluation of values. At the point where teachers and students would benefit from a close view of postmodernism the syllabus drifts away from the essential issue that the definition and understanding of postmodernism has been closely associated with the development of literary theory and cultural studies in the universities (so much so that there

has been widespread doubt that the postmodern period has never been more than an academic invention). Here and throughout its presentation the English syllabus would be more helpful if it provided direct comment on the history of literary theory and postmodern culture which shapes it. The failure to provide an account of the intellectual background to the Postmodernism elective is especially problematic as the novels involve a high level of engagement with the history of

culture and literary theory and literary criticism. Fowles draws connections between the nineteenth-century class struggle and existentialism. Byatt writes about Romantic individualism, the history of literary criticism and literary theory, and the fact that one of her postmodern literary critics has learned: to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-work of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones.

The strongest announcements of the end of postmodernism have come from within the universities, where the end of postmodernism has been a topic of discussion since the late

nineteen eighties. One irony is that these announcements of the end of postmodernism have come from within the field of theory, and that the end of postmodernism is defined as a speculative theoretical project (a situation which tends to add to the impression that postmodernism has been an invention of the age of academic theory). This theorising of the end of postmodernism has appeared at the climax of a debate between claims for the aesthetic conditions of literary texts versus the reading of literature in terms of cultural studies and politics.

The debate has been characterised by a highly developed awareness of the history of literary theory and criticism (and a series of polemical overviews of the history of English studies in the universities since the nineteen sixties).

The end of postmodernism includes major recent publications in defence of the idea of literature such as Revenge of the Aesthetic, in which the aim it to oppose a “resistance to aesthetics” associated with “cultural criticism” and “an imaginary projection of work and world into irreconcilable opposites”. In contrast, the theoretical view of the end of postmodernism includes a large number of commentaries based in the revolutionary theory of the second half of the twentieth century, and with the emphasis that the end of postmodernism involves a new stage of global power and global culture. For example, E. San Juan Jr. develops a view based in concern for third world survival within the conditions of American global power which include a global commodity and media culture and strategic military intervention.

As a guide to survival beyond postmodernism he adds a personal testament in which pragmatic pluralism and politics are finally less important than a spiritual project for future culture.

My response to the end of postmodernism is similar in some ways to what Ihab Hassan proposes, but more extreme. It seems to me that English studies needs to encourage interest in the nature of texts as language, and in the literary conditions of texts, and the social and cultural contexts of texts, and the significance of texts in relation to politics, values and belief.

The success of that kind of project depends on an interdisciplinary approach which does not separate English studies from other theory and cultural research (and which includes, for example, the understanding of culture available in recent studies such as The Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu and his associates).

But the immediate issue here is to present the new English syllabus in perspective as a point in a wider process of cultural change which involves an established interest in relations between literature, culture and values, and uneven transmission of understanding within educational institutions and across the educational system. Seeing the new English syllabus in this way stresses the need for improved access to literary theory and the history of English studies, within

conditions where the development of English studies remains complicated, uneven, and a matter of contention. The new English syllabus is a prime example of a need for wider communication about theory and the idea of the field of English studies within the universities and the schools. As the syllabus is put into practice one requirement is to provide teachers, students, parents and the rest of the community with more information about the history of literary theory, literary criticism and cultural studies which is the background to the new developments. There is a basic need throughout the syllabus for more direct engagement with the broad tradition of twentieth-century intellectualism influenced by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud; with the development of twentiethcentury theory and literary criticism which includes poststucturalism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, and new historicism; and with the development of definitions of postmodernism in the nineteen seventies and eighties. Strange as it might seem, that kind of approach in the syllabus and in practice in the schools (and in the universities) is desirable if English studies is to be a field of study rather than an exercise in vague connoisseurship. Theory does not need to be the end of pleasure, and it certainly does not need to be the end of pleasure in novels, movies and television. At the same time, the history of inertia about the teaching of twentieth-century theory has been compounded by the passing of time and the sense of a new stage of history in the future would be part of the intellectual and cultural history designed to provide support for theorising texts, culture and values in new conditions.

In general, it would be an advantage if the English syllabus could respond more promptly to new developments in culture. The “new” view of texts, culture and values has been a long time coming to schools in New South Wales, and the formulations and texts are less relevant to contemporary culture than they might have been.

One of the tests of the new syllabus will be to see whether it will allow students to explore the idea of the end of postmodernism in relation to contemporary texts and the study of contemporary culture. The theoretical announcements of the end of postmodernism need to be balanced by a lot more interest in defining the features of contemporary culture (and

reasonable doubt that the end of postmodernism might not be more than a refinement in the academic invention of the postmodern condition). The global perspective seems relevant given the new combination of media culture, global corporatism, and the direction of the new American administration to military intervention and a conservative version of American imperialism. In any case it seems clear that the games with genre, pastiche, and retro nostalgia of the nineteen seventies, eighties and early nineties have become old fashioned, comfortably mainstream, and down-market.

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