From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen

Transcription

1 Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung August 2011 Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics and Literature: Dutch English by Dries Vermeulen

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3 I followed the course From chaos to art Desire the horse Depression the cart LEONARD COHEN reciting The Book of Longing

4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I was five years old, I felt like I was the only person in the world who could not read. Being able to decipher the unlimited combinations of those twenty-six peculiar signs that filled pages upon pages, was what distinguished the grown-ups from the children. Something had to be done. My mother was my first teacher. She taught me to read, although she likes to remind me that I did it all on my own. I spent the following twelve years of my life thinking I was good at it. And yet I arrived in Ghent an illiterate. Here I learned that there is much more to literature than I imagined. I was taught new and more thorough ways of reading books. I can only hope the following pages succeed to prove that I have paid attention. I wish to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung, for his help, and for allowing me to write a dissertation on two novels hardly anyone in the English Department had even heard of. I know he really preferred William Beckford s Vathek as a subject. I also wish to thank Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels. I borrowed heavily from her course on English- Canadian literature for the first chapter of this dissertation, which she was kind enough to read and correct. Most of all, I wish to thank my mother, without whose care and support I could never have graduated. Her work is done. I can read. Dries Vermeulen Ghent, 12 August 2011

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. LITERARY CONTEXT: POSTMODERN CANADIAN FICTION The postmodern paradox Transgression of boundaries The postmodern writer: trickster, traitor, priest and prophet Irony, parody and intertextuality Characterization: the split subject Subjectivity and the linguistic turn The double The colonial subject Narrative frames Multiplication of narrative levels Frame-breaking and metafiction Historiographic metafiction THE FAVOURITE GAME: A PLAY ON THE WORD MADE FLESH Narrative voices The tyranny of fact: the author in the novel Narrative frames and frame-breaking Metafiction The creative process The rhetoric of games The word made flesh HISTORY AND BOUNDARIES IN BEAUTIFUL LOSERS Historiographic metafiction Reading Canadian history How it happens Boundary crossing 53

6 Intertextuality and parody The pornographic sublime 56 CONCLUSION 60 WORKS CITED 62 Primary sources 62 Secondary sources 62 Articles 62 Books 63 Websites 64

7 INTRODUCTION Not often is Leonard Cohen introduced as a postmodern novelist. After his rise to fame as a singer-songwriter in the second half of the 1960s, Cohen s music has been celebrated by thousands of people around the globe, but, remarkably, it is still a little-known fact that Leonard Cohen was once a less-than-famous poet, who tried to make a living from his writing in the Canadian city of Montreal. Before picking up the guitar in an attempt to address an economic crisis, 1 Cohen had written and published several volumes of poetry, as well as two experimental novels: The Favourite Game, in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, in Cohen s poetry and song lyrics are characterized by a set of recurring themes, many of which can be called postmodern: the essential loneliness of the individual, the chaos of existence, and history, religion, sexual desire, and art itself as man s ways to fight these menaces. In all of Cohen s writing do these themes recur, but nowhere so radically as in the novels. Fans who come to Cohen s novels hoping to find in them the prose equivalent of his music, can be surprised to be confronted with what Cohen himself has called the frenzied thoughts of [his] youth. 2 In this dissertation I will examine the ways in which both of Leonard Cohen s experimental novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, represent the literary movement of their time, namely the rise of postmodernism during the Canadian literature boom of the 1960s. One of the most important principles of postmodernism is the realization that a literary work does not exist in a vacuum. Every author is influenced by the place and the time in which he or she was born, as well as by all literature, or indeed all language, he or she ever came across. All literature engages in dialogue with its literary context. Therefore, I will dedicate a separate chapter to a theoretical analysis of the literary context in which Cohen s novels were written, namely the Canadian literature boom of the 1960s, which 1 Leonard Cohen, P.S. in The Favourite Game, 2009, 2. 2 Leonard Cohen, P.S. in Beautiful Losers, 2009, 12. 1

8 provided a jumpstart for the rise of postmodernism in English-Canadian 3 fiction. I will explain the way in which postmodernism paradoxically both sets up and converts literary conventions, discussing the relationship between that paradox and the importance of boundaries in the Canadian postmodern, as well as the several ways in which these boundaries are transgressed. In this context, I will provide a characterization of the postmodern writer as an essential boundary crosser, and a discussion of the various methods he has at hand to subvert the traditional conventions of literature, such as irony, parody, and intertextuality. Subsequently, I will elaborate on the methods of characterization in the postmodern novel, and the related concept of the split subject. I will first explain the influence of the linguistic turn on postmodern subjectivity, followed by a discussion of the concept of the double and the importance of the colonial subject in the search for a Canadian identity. I will also discuss the postmodern methods of narrativization, focusing on the multiplication of narrative levels, frame-breaking, and metafiction. Finally, I will focus on the importance of colonial and postcolonial history in postmodern Canadian fiction. In this context, I will explain the postmodern concept of historiographic metafiction, as established by Linda Hutcheon. In the second chapter I will propose a postmodern reading of The Favourite Game, Leonard Cohen s debut as a novelist, using the first chapter as a theoretical framework. I will discuss the novel s intricate use of various narrative voices, focusing on the multiplication of narrative frames and the various methods of frame-breaking. In the context of its complex narration, I will examine the extent to which the postmodern intrusion of the author justifies a reading of The Favourite Game as an autobiographical novel. Subsequently, I will discuss the level of metafiction in Cohen s debut. Although it is considered, by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, a less self-referential novel than Beautiful Losers, The Favourite Game does contain a number of aspects that are typical of postmodern metafiction. Not only does the novel have as one of its central themes the 3 From this point onwards, I will use the terms Canadian [fiction/literature/novels ] and English- Canadian [fiction/literature/novels ] interchangeably, unless otherwise indicated. 2

9 act of writing itself, it also makes extensive use of storytelling as a typically postmodern method of characterization, resulting in the incorporation of various embedded texts. I will also analyse the novel's rhetoric of games, in respect of the thematization of artistic creation as a self-referential process. Finally, I will elaborate on the motif of the human body, and the importance of sexual desire as a creative energy. In the final chapter of this dissertation I will focus on the importance of history and boundaries in Cohen s second novel, Beautiful Losers. I will discuss the novel s thematization of history and historiography, as an early example of historiographic metafiction in Canadian postmodernism. I will examine how the first-person narrator s reading of Canadian history symbolizes the role of the reader in postmodern literature, and how his troubled relationship with the character of F. reflects the postmodern relationship between reader and writer. Subsequently, I will examine the several ways in which Beautiful Losers, as a highly experimental novel, subverts literary conventions, both on the formal and the content level. I will first focus on the ways in which the novel parodies a number of artistic genres, examining, in that respect, the typically postmodern incorporation of various intertexts. Finally, I will provide a more detailed elaboration on the parodical confrontation of religious texts with an erotic content, discussing Robert Stacey s notion of the pornographic sublime in that context. 3

10 1. LITERARY CONTEXT: POSTMODERN CANADIAN FICTION 1.1. The postmodern paradox The 1960s are generally characterized as a golden decade of social revolution in the Western world. A period of increasing individual freedom, welfare, and economic as well as demographic growth, the sixties gave way to a generation in which minorities and formerly marginalized voices were heard. Giving rise to new movements such as feminism and the sexual revolution, those groups who were marginalized on the basis of class, gender, or race, claimed their own stake in society. Projecting an identity of their own, these new collectives turned their self-awareness into a questioning of the authority of the establishment and society as a whole, not necessarily to overthrow it, but to engage actively in it in a new way. According to Linda Hutcheon, this general challenge of authority in the 1960s left an important mark on the postmodernist movement that would come to full development in the following two decades. 4 Whereas the self-reflexivity and the selfconsciousness of art as art was already present in the modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century, this new engagement of the sixties, this challenging of the establishment without destroying it, is exactly what postmodernism did to the function of art in society. 5 Like modernist literature, the postmodern shows itself as literature, aware of its indebtedness to the literary past as well as the social present. 6 The difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the latter, using literary devices such as irony and parody (which I will discuss in more detail further on in this chapter), also reveals the mechanics and inevitable flaws of intricate systems like society and literary history. Postmodern literature, therefore, leaves us with a paradox, as it both sets up and subverts the powers and conventions of art. 7 4 Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1988), Ibid., Ibid., 1. 7 Ibid., 2. 4

11 In Canada, the rise of minority movements, which Hutcheon collectively labels excentrics, 8 went hand in hand with nationalist politics and an outcry for an independent Canadian identity and culture. In a country that was, at the time, finally shedding off the postcolonial remains of British and American cultural dominance, the public mind seemed to be ready for a postmodernist movement in the arts. According to Hutcheon, this particular moment of Canada s cultural history made it ripe for the above-mentioned paradox of postmodernism, which combines those contradictory acts of establishing and then undercutting prevailing values and conventions in order to provoke a questioning, a challenging of what goes without saying. 9 For the first time, writers such as Margaret Atwood and Robert Kroetsch came to criticize openly the marginalized position of English-Canadian literature, as well as the correlated restraining influence of American neo-colonialism. A new generation of authors endeavoured to tell the story of English-speaking Canada, which brought about the burgeoning of Canadian fiction 10 that came to be known as the literature boom of the 1960s. Moreover, the postmodern predilection for small stories, as opposed to the big ideologies of the modernist era, seemed to resonate with the existing Canadian emphasis on regionalism. 11 In the postmodern novel, the realist concern for the local, the particular and the occasional, is translated into a general celebration of all that is considered different. In the multicultural mosaic that makes up Canadian society, this new perspective resulted in an appreciation of literature as a forum for ex-centric voices, and the success of outspoken women writers, such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro Transgression of boundaries The above-mentioned tendency towards self-reflexivity in art is in fact part of a more general trait the postmodernists inherited from their modernist predecessors. Both 8 Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: Fiction in English since 1960 in Studies in Canadian Literature. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson (New York: MLA, 1990), Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, Hutcheon, 1990, Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 19. 5

12 movements showed a predilection for experimenting with boundaries, always searching for ways to defy them. Self-reflexive art, admitting awareness of its own artifice, emphasizes the boundary between art and reality, thereby, paradoxically, coming closer to reality. Whereas modernist art was much about asserting its own autonomy, celebrating its difference from real life with surrealist and absurdist experiments, postmodernism attempts to blur this distinction, allowing a slippage between life and art. 12 This caused, for instance, Canadian fiction from the sixties onwards often to be engaged fiction, dealing with issues ranging from the Canadian identity to gender politics. 13 In postmodern literature, this engagement, the crossing of the borderline between art and reality, is the most manifest in the frequent mixture of fiction with nonfiction, which often results in an interweaving of fantasy, historiography and (auto)biography, and the incorporation of other literary and non-literary genres, from poetry to newspaper articles. Here, the postmodern challenges the conventional boundaries between the arts and between genres, both transgressing them and, in doing so, admitting their undeniable existence. This is a clear example of the postmodern paradox, namely the simultaneous setting up and subverting of artistic traditions. Again, postmodernism in English-Canadian literature seems to echo an important aspect of the Canadian identity. In this context, Canada has often been called a border country. Linda Hutcheon admits that [Canada] is a vast nation with little sense of firm geographical centre or ethnic unity [ ] In fact, [Canadians] might be said to have quite a firm suspicion of centralizing tendencies, be they national, political, or cultural. In literature there is a parallel suspicion of genre borders. 14 Because of Canada s unique combination of Aboriginal or Native Canadian with postcolonial cultures, and of an English-speaking culture with a strong French-speaking minority, it has become a multicultural mosaic, divided on various levels by boundaries that are waiting to be transgressed. Canada can indeed be said to be a country of ex-centrics and of regions, with the absence of any real centralization. Moreover, the country traditionally holds a 12 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, Ibid., Ibid., 3. 6

13 marginalized position in international terms 15, into which it was forced by the superiority of Great Britain and the United States. As mentioned above, writers in the 1960s became very much aware of these dominant cultures, and reacted with a revaluation of Canadian identity in literature. Therefore, Canadian identity can be said paradoxically to both acknowledge and challenge centrality, whether that centre is seen as elsewhere (Britain, the United States) or as localized in, say, Ontario. 16 Hutcheon argues that this marginal existence makes Canada fertile ground for postmodernism, as [t]he margin or the border is the postmodern space par excellence, the place where new possibilities exist. 17 Their national history, as well as their split sense of identity, both regional and national, 18 provides Canadian writers with a natural feeling for the paradoxes and the boundary crossing that are typical of postmodern literature. The flowering of, for instance, women writers and feminism in Canadian literature is partly due to their challenging of the gender divide, and their dwelling on the boundaries between what is male and what is female The postmodern writer: trickster, traitor, priest and prophet The postmodern predilection for marginalized voices, and the exploration of boundaries and transgression zones searching for new possibilities, make the postmodern writer a fundamental ex-centric 19 : he fulfils a privileged function as an observational outsider. In the following section I will discuss how, in this capacity, the postmodern storyteller has been linked to both the mythological trickster figure and the function of priest or prophet within a community. In his book Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde describes the figure of the trickster in terms of a number of characteristics reminiscent of postmodern storytelling. A trickster is a human or anthropomorphic character who, in old mythology, plays the role of guide, traveller, or messenger. He is an ambivalent character in that he often acts as a 15 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, Ibid., Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 3. 7

14 teller of devious stories, which can both enlighten and deceive the hero of the myth. Examples of travellers and messengers who function as tricksters are the classical gods Hermes and Mercury, and Coyote in Native American mythology. 20 Being an ambivalent character, the trickster is an in-between figure, always on the road between heaven and earth, or between life and death. 21 As such, the trickster can function both as a guide (e.g. Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes) and as a thief (e.g. Prometheus). In his ambivalence, the trickster figure seems to embody the paradoxes and the boundary crossing of postmodern storytelling: In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. [ ] He [ ] attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. [ ] Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. 22 Whereas the mythological trickster figure defies the boundaries between our world, the world of the gods (heaven), and the underworld of the dead, postmodern storytelling, inspired as it often is by Sigmund Freud s psychoanalysis, tends to cross the line between the conscious and the unconscious. It is, in this respect, important to note that the trickster is not only a boundary crosser, but also a boundary creator. 23 As it was a trickster figure who created the great distance between heaven and earth 24 and therefore the concept of heaven itself the postmodern storyteller discloses in the unconscious a treasure-trove of hidden desires, emotions, and memories. Always dwelling in twilight zones, the transgressive figure is the author of changes and new possibilities. Hyde argues that, for this reason, the trickster should be regarded as a creator and an artist, rather than a liar and a thief: 20 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World. Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998), Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. 8

15 When Pablo Picasso says that art is a lie that tells the truth, we are closer to the old trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this word seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form. 25 In his study of alterity in the work of Leonard Cohen, Winfried Siemerling elaborates on another metaphor for the postmodern storyteller, originally posited by Cohen himself. In a speech about Canadian poet and novelist A.M. Klein given in Montreal in 1964, Cohen discussed the ambivalent function of the writer as an internal opposition between priest and prophet. Cohen states that A.M. Klein, as a Jewish Quebecer, attempted to speak both as a prophet to, and as a representative for, the community. 26 Echoing the postmodern paradox, Cohen describes Klein as an engaged writer, who as a priest represents his community, but as a subversive prophet is forced, by that community, into an exiled position in which poetic speech [is] moved from the centre to a margin that implies loneliness. 27 According to Cohen, it is in this ex-centric position of the prophet that the poet is most needed, and he predicted that it is also the position future writers would prefer: They will prefer exile, the dialogue of exile, a dialogue which seems to be very one-sided, but which is still the old rich dialogue between the prophet and the priest, and the larger idea of community includes both of the parties. The nominal community will continue to dismiss its writers and award them the title of traitor. 28 In this imposed position as a traitor, Cohen s idea of the writer is highly reminiscent of that of the trickster figure: The traitor is a crosser of boundaries who delivers a person, a value, or information from the inside to the outside. 29 Always maintaining contact with the conventional in his capacity as a priest, the writer as traitor-prophet discloses the 25 Hyde, Winfried Siemerling, Hailed by Koan: Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss, in Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), Ibid. 28 Ibid., Ibid. 9

16 outside, translating the unknown to make it understandable. The accusations of treason, then, originate in the fact that a disclosure of the unknown forces the community to question the validity of its own conventions. It is, however, in the transgression of these conventions that new possibilities are created: The space between these two moments of understanding brings forth an emergence of the unknown that does not destroy it as unknown, and surfaces in Cohen s text as an energy he calls idea Irony, parody and intertextuality As an observational outsider who both sets up and subverts the conventional, the postmodern writer is equipped with a number of literary devices to topple genre conventions. Firstly, postmodern writing is often ironic on many levels. By means of irony (i.e. manifestly stating the opposite of what one actually means to say), the postmodern writer enables himself to subjectively distance himself from the text as an object. Moreover, creating this ironic distance between subject and object, the writer grants himself an observational position that allows him to adopt a combination of various, often opposing, perspectives. The trope of irony is therefore a crucial device in the typically postmodern concepts of fragmented subjectivity and metafiction, which I will discuss in the next two sections of this chapter. In the context of the postmodern subversion of conventions, it is important to note that, as Siemerling states, irony challenges the certainties of a self that unconditionally relies on systems and their truths. 31 Postmodern writing gratefully makes use of literary conventions and traditions, but criticizes them at the same time, ironically implying that they are far from perfect or absolute. Often postmodern authors create this ironic distance from literary traditions by means of parody, which consists of the imitation of certain genre conventions in a new, foreign context, marking, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, the critical difference. 32 As an example, Hutcheon mentions the importance of biblical structures in Canadian literature, 30 Siemerling, 1994, Ibid., Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1987), 7. 10

17 which many postmodernists parody, exploiting and undermining their undeniable cultural authority. 33 In this way, parody becomes a standard mode of criticism 34 that allows the postmodern writer to speak to her or his culture from within it but without being totally co-opted by it. 35 The ironic distance that the critical mode of parody inevitably involves, should, however, not lead us to conclude that postmodernism radically breaks away from tradition. As Siemerling puts it: [I]rony breaks the circle of absolute knowledge and self-knowledge without necessarily resulting in bitter freedom. 36 On the contrary, as much as it is an act of generational rebellion, postmodernism s intertextual play with literary conventions paradoxically shows an acknowledgement of its depending on them. 37 Parody is, in fact, only one instance of the various intertextual modes the postmodern applies. As Foucault already pointed out, a book has no clear-cut frontiers; it inevitably is a node within a network. 38 What characterizes postmodernism is that it embraces the inevitability of this network, and endeavours to explore it. Transgressing the boundaries between texts, the postmodern makes conscious reference to other nodes in the network part of its style. Therefore, the fact that postmodern literature incorporates intertexts is at least as important as the parodical way in which it often is done. To put this seemingly disrespectful treatment of literary legacy in a more positive way, postmodernism could be said to recycle literary genres and styles. As a link in an infinite system of language and texts with no internal boundaries, the postmodern writer feels free to use old material in a different way and create something new: [A]s there truly is no hors texte (to speak with Derrida) in-novation in literature for the postmodernists becomes a matter of re-novation: a self-conscious exercise in the hierarchical realignment of conventions. 39 Theo D Haen argues that, in postmodern 33 Hutcheon, 1990, Linda Hutcheon, Intertextuality, parody, and the discourse of history, in A Poetics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), Hutcheon, 1990, Siemerling, 1994, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, Ibid., D Haen, 1989,

18 fiction, many literary subgenres that hitherto occupied peripheral positions, such as science fiction, fantasy, the detective and the gothic novel, are granted a new life by parody and intertextual reference. 40 Indeed, postmodern intertextuality, ironical though it is, is to be seen as a matter of revaluation of, rather than rupture with literary tradition Characterization: the split subject I have already mentioned the distinction between the modernist belief in ideology and the postmodern preoccupation with small stories. Whereas the modernist artist was still looking for ways to impose order on chaos by means of, for instance, mythology, postmodernism accepted and embraced the inevitable existence of chaos. No longer trying to cover in his writing the general or universal, which he accepted to be impossible, the postmodern author focuses on the particular, the local. As to psychology and the nature of the human subject, both modernism and postmodernism were greatly influenced by Freud s psychoanalysis and his theory of the unconscious, and ensuing reinterpretations by Jung and Lacan. Many modernists believed the individual subject to be something that could be understood and even summarized; the unconscious was the storage of repressed thoughts and emotions, disclosure of which provided the key to stability of the unified self. Postmodernists, on the other hand, accepted the fragmentation of the self; they came to terms with the impossibility of stability and control, and explored the unconscious as a treasury of secret desires and stories to be told. This view of the human subject as fragmented and unstable has important consequences for the methods of characterization in postmodernist fiction. In the following three sections I will discuss subjectivity and its fragmentation in the postmodern novel. 40 D Haen, 1989,

19 Subjectivity and the linguistic turn Aleid Fokkema, in her study of characterization in postmodern fiction, states that [t]he conventions of characterization in modernism and realism (both as a genre and as a period) are relevant to understanding the critical reception of postmodern character, as postmodernism seems to break away radically from the two most important aspects of realist characterization: coherence and psychological motivation. 41 However, after confrontation with other arguments, Fokkema concludes that, [a]lthough it is obvious that something happens to character in the hands of postmodern writers, 42 claiming that postmodernism single-handedly eradicated the conventions of characterization in literature would be an exaggeration. Modernism, according to Fokkema, continued the classic realist conventions of character in a more or less truthful manner. The shift from classic realist to modernist characterization mainly entailed a change in focus: More than in realism, the modernist text concentrates on the self, the inner reality of character. 43 Modernist fiction was indeed preoccupied with the psychology of its characters. Relying on the findings of psychoanalysis, it applied techniques such as stream of consciousness to explore and learn to understand the depths of the human subject, which it admitted to be complex and even incoherent, but not disintegrated. Modernism discovered the problematic nature of identity and the boundaries between self and other, but, in retrospective comparison to postmodernism, it is important to note that the possibility of objective representation of the self was not yet questioned. 44 This changed under the influence of new philosophic developments that came to be known as the linguistic turn. After the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure had pointed out that reality is only conceivable via a linguistic system, literature began to question the authority of art to represent the psychology of a character truthfully. Whereas in realist fiction characters, when first introduced, are described in detail by their 41 Aleid Fokkema, Conventions and Innovations: a Critical Survey in Postmodern Characters. A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

20 traits, and given a coherent identity, making them more or less predictable, postmodern fiction gives up on the ideology of the self, and presents characters that are merely constituted [ ] by linguistic signs. 45 Fokkema treats this linguistic determinism as a perspective that is juxtaposed to the fragmentation of the postmodern character. Arguably, it would make more sense to place the two in a causal relationship. As the subject s entire concept of reality is laid bare as a product of language, the identity of the subject itself is also inevitably revealed as a linguistic construct. The subject therefore disintegrates into the multiple selves and unstable, fleeting identities 46 that compose the fragmented postmodern character. The replacement of psychological summary by discourse or even stories (as a result of the narrative turn, on which I will elaborate in the next two sections of this chapter) as methods of characterization, causes postmodern fiction often to be highly metafictional. Moreover, stressing the role of language in literature, the postmodern novel revaluates the role of the reader. As the postmodern character is a fragmented one, consisting of multiple selves and a shattered identity that can only be reconstructed via language, the reader is given an authorial function, or, put otherwise, is given the opportunity to create his or her own version of the story: [T]he idea that postmodern novels in general, and more particularly postmodern characters successfully engage the reader and leave room for his or her own fantasies, is quite persistent in the postmodern critical debate. That debate is of course heavily influenced by Barthes differentiation between readerly and writerly texts, a distinction which soon came to mean, for Barthes epigones, that the writerly text [simply put, texts that leave room for interpretation by the reader] was the exclusive privilege of postmodern fiction. 47 The postmodern disintegration of the subject allows two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it can be seen to imply the non-existence of subjectivity: as the subject s identity and conceptions are revealed to be nothing but linguistic constructs, its representation of reality is rendered meaningless. On the other hand, if reality itself is 45 Fokkema, 1991, Ibid. 47 Ibid.,

21 only a concept created, through language, in the subject s mind, all is subjective, and the creative mind is the highest authority. We are confronted with another paradox by the nature of language itself: In one view, language is inimical to the free development of the self and characters in [postmodern] texts are ultimately grounded in language, cut off from anything that might be experienced as natural or real reality. On the other hand there is the Heideggerian view of language that enables one to expand one s consciousness and to transcend ordinary experience. 48 Adding to that the above-mentioned paradox that postmodern fiction simultaneously sets up and subverts the traditions of, in this case, characterization in literature, Fokkema convincingly concludes that the paradox is central to the postmodern paradigm as a whole 49 and that in fact, the paradox as paradox may lie at the heart of postmodernism. 50 Linda Hutcheon adds: These contradictions of postmodernism are not really meant to be resolved, as the postmodern partakes of a logic of both/and, not one of either/or The double The importance of contradictions and paradox as essential components of the postmodern paradigm is at the basis of another prominent stock-in-trade of postmodern characterization, derived from Freudian theory: that of the double. In his study of the double in postmodern American fiction, Gordon Sletaugh points out that, throughout the history of literature, an important role has been played by the double or Doppelgänger as the antagonist or the counterpart of the main character. Both resembling and opposing the protagonist, the double is the personification of paradox, ambivalence and dualism think of the standard role of the nemesis in, for instance, the comic book: the hero and his arch-enemy often share a lot of similarities and a certain inexplicable understanding for one another, and yet they are each other s opposites. 48 Fokkema, 1991, Ibid. 50 Ibid., Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, 47,

22 Fundamentally constituted upon difference, 52 the double symbolizes binary oppositions such as good and bad, life and death, body and soul, male and female. Embodying all that is other than the protagonist, the double is often considered to represent the bad pole of these oppositions. Rosemary Jackson, discussing otherness and the fantastic in literature, states that all that is other or different, is usually automatically considered to be evil or demonic: A stranger, a foreigner, an outsider, a social deviant, anyone speaking in an unfamiliar language or acting in unfamiliar ways, anyone whose origins are unknown or who has extraordinary powers, tends to be set apart as other, as evil. 53 Jackson further observes that, in nineteenth-century fantasy stories structured around dualism, the internal origin of the other is often revealed. 54 Here, the demonic Other is no longer a supernatural embodiment of evil, but an aspect of the character s own identity, a manifestation of unconscious desire. 55 This dualistic concept of the evil other as internal to the self is particularly important for the role of the double in postmodern fiction. As Jackson already suggested, the confrontation of a character with its double can be interpreted as an outside representation of the internal Freudian conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Freud posited that the literary double should be seen as a projection of a character s (or even the author s 56 ) repressed unconscious. In Freudian theory, this external projection of repressed desires is explained as a method to maintain the psychological stability of the self. In his essay on das Unheimliche, Freud briefly touches upon the theme of the double, quoting Otto Rank: Originally, the Doppelgänger was an insurance against the destruction of the self, an energetic denial of the power of death. 57 The confrontation of a protagonist with his or her double therefore symbolizes not only the psychological conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, but also 52 Gordon Sletaugh, The History of the Double: Traditional and Postmodern Versions in The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Southern Illinois: UP, 1993), Rosemary Jackson, The Fantastic as a Mode in Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (New York and London: Methuen), 1981, Ibid., Ibid. 56 Sletaugh, 1993, Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur. Ed. Klaus Wagenbach (Eschwege: Poeschel und Schultz, 1963), 63. My translation. 16

23 that between eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death drive. As a result, the process of doubling in postmodern fiction is a dual as well as a composite 58 one: the double both acts as a complement and as an opposition of the split subject. In the theory of Carl Gustav Jung the double or shadow represents the emotional, instinctive side of the personality, which is forced into the unconscious by the rational, socially adapted subject. 59 Whereas the Freudian double particularly accounts for the physical, sexual drives, Jung s view addresses a broad range of personality situations disintegration, alienation, insufficient integration, and wholeness itself of which sexuality is but one aspect. 60 Furthermore, Jung considers the dream to be a manifestation of the double, in which all the characters are personifications of different aspects of the dreamer s own personality. Ursula K. LeGuin paraphrases Jung as follows: [T]he shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don t want to, can t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used. 61 Here, Carl Jung s shadow, in its capacity as a boundary crosser between the conscious and the unconscious, between reality and the world of dreams, becomes highly reminiscent of the above-mentioned trickster figure. This makes the Jungian interpretation of the double a rich source of inspiration for the psychological development of the postmodern fictional character. Moreover, Gordon Sletaugh convincingly links the concept of the double, with its paradoxical combination of resemblance and opposition, to the postmodern methods of irony and parody: Linda Hutcheon suggests that parody, itself a double, which insists upon linking its self-reflexive discourse to social discourse, is intrinsic to postmodernism. In the postmodern transgression of convention there is a signalling of ironic difference at the heart of similarity Sletaugh, 1993, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

24 The colonial subject In his study of subjectivity in postmodern literature, Simon Malpas adds to the split between the conscious and the unconscious and between rationality and desire two cultural implications that lie at the heart of the fragmentation of the postmodern subject. Firstly, there is the sexual difference as discussed by Hélène Cixous. 63 She argues that, in Western culture, all oppositions are tied up with power relations, which all come to rest on the gender divide, inevitably having a crucial effect on the production of subjectivity. The second and more political implication Malpas mentions, however, is of greater importance to an understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the Canadian postmodern. Malpas draws on postcolonial criticism and the writings of Frantz Fanon to examine the identity of the colonial subject. According to postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, the colonial subject is not so much split between the self and the Other as it is confronted with the Otherness of the Self. 64 Malpas writes: The colonial subject, caught in the oppressor s gaze, is split, distorted, breached and disturbed, unable to reconcile her or his self-image with the images that are projected back by others. Equally, although in different ways, the coloniser s identity is shaken by the relation with a colonised subject whose common humanity is at once denied and invoked by the politics of colonial discourse. 65 In its search for a collective identity, English-Canadian literature from the 1960s onwards was deeply concerned with the country s colonial history, and the internal heterogeneity of its population. Therefore, the strongly felt American and British cultural dominance, as well as the European settlers early oppression of Native Canadian peoples were important factors in the production of postmodern subjectivity. Malpas concludes: [T]he self-centred, self-certain universal subject is impossible: subjectivity is generated through the interactions with others that take place in the realm of culture, of the Other, and if that culture is 63 Simon Malpas, Subjectivity in The Postmodern (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2005), Ibid., Ibid. 18

25 itself as disjointed as it is in the colonial and postcolonial world then identity too will necessarily be fragmentary Narrative frames Related to the split subject in postmodern fiction is the fragmentation of the narration into multiple narrative instances. As a result of the above-mentioned narrative turn, characters in the postmodern novel are typified not only by discourse, but also by the stories they tell. Using the story as a method of characterization, the fictional characters themselves become storytellers. The significance of stories and the act of storytelling are therefore frequently recurring themes in postmodern fiction, adding to the noted selfreflexivity of the genre, as well as the strong tendency of metafiction within the postmodern novel Multiplication of narrative levels Using the model of narrative levels introduced by Gérard Genette, Ulla Musarra explains the multiplication of narrative levels in postmodern fiction in two directions. On the one hand there is the multiplication of the extradiegetic instances, and on the other hand the multiplication of the intradiegetic and hypodiegetic ones. 67 The multiplication of the extradiegetic instances accounts for an extension of the outer frame of the novel. 68 Truthful to the postmodern paradox, this extension incorporates a self-conscious return to certain pre-modernist literary conventions as well as an introduction of innovations. Most manifestly, the postmodern novel reintroduces the extradiegetic narrator, resulting in a revaluation of obsolescent frame-story genres such as the epistolary novel, or the eighteenth-century convention of le manuscript 66 Malpas, 2005, Ulla Musarra, Narrative Discourse in Postmodernist Texts: The Conventions of the Novel and the Multiplication of Narrative Instances in Exploring Postmodernism. Ed. M. Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), Ibid.,

26 trouvé, 69 in which the story is enclosed by a frame narrative, commenting on the text as a historical document. The innovative aspect of this use of an extradiegetic frame is that it is not always clear whether it is to be considered fictional or nonfictional. The postmodern novelist often claims the right to intrude into his own novel, resulting in a subversion of the traditional hierarchical distinction between author and (extradiegetic) narrator. 70 The borderline between reality and fiction can therefore sometimes become very thin, which evidently accords with postmodernism questioning the very existence of such a line. The introduction of an extradiegetic narrator is often accompanied by a multiplication of the intra- and hypodiegetic levels, which Musarra calls an expansion [ ] toward the centre of the narrative, 71 as opposed to the extradiegetic outer frame. This multiplication often results in novels not only containing an extra- or intradiegetic narrator (sometimes combined with an intruding author), but also one or more characters functioning as narrators of embedded texts on a hypodiegetic level. These embedded texts can be excerpts of letters (cf. the epistolary novel) or diaries in which cases the same character functions as a narrator on different levels or they can be an entirely different fictional or nonfictional genre that, at first sight, seems in no way related to the main narrative Frame-breaking and metafiction Musarra notes that, in many cases, it is very difficult to distinguish between the various narrative levels. The postmodern novel not only experiments with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, those between frame and narrated story and between the story and the story in the story, are often obliterated as well. 72 Both the extension of the outer frame and the expansion of the narrative towards its centre are typically postmodern methods of self-reflection. 73 Often, the embedded texts are made significant 69 Musarra, 1987, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

27 to the main narrative by symbolism and analogy, and are commented upon by an instance on a higher level. This revealing the instability of narrative frames, crossing the boundaries between them, is called frame-breaking. 74 A typical device that is often used to achieve this sort of self-reflection is the mise en abyme. In heraldry, mise en abyme denotes the image of a shield containing, in its centre, a miniature replica of itself. 75 Much in the same way, the postmodern novel incorporates embedded texts which it then reflects upon as metaphors for itself. Metafiction is a method similarly related to the crossing of narrative levels. It is a self-reflexive technique rather than a typically postmodern textual genre, and is therefore used as a literary device in other literature as well. According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction is not so much a sub-genre of the novel as a tendency within the novel which operates through exaggeration of the tensions and oppositions inherent in all novels: of frame and frame-break, of technique and counter-technique, of construction and deconstruction of illusion. 76 Self-consciously drawing attention to its own existence as an artefact, metafiction examines the nature of fictional writing, narrativity, and the relationship between fiction and reality. In short, all writing that is metafictional, can be said to explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction. 77 Postmodern fiction is metafiction because the metafictional oppositions are inherent to the postmodern paradox. It adheres to the conventions of fiction in creating an illusion, but it also lays bare that illusion, ironically revealing the linguistic and literary techniques with which it is constructed. In this way, metafiction resembles intertextuality. Musarra states: [T]he multiplication of narrative instances contributes to the self-reflexive character of most Postmodernist fiction. Every narrative instance may pronounce a metalingual comment on its own activity or on the activity of other instances. In most Postmodernist texts this procedure is 74 Musarra, 1987, Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text. Transl. by J. Whiteley and E. Hughes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), Patricia Waugh, What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it? in Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), Ibid., 2. 21

28 extended to the relation of the text to other texts: the novel then presents itself as a network of intra- an intertextual cross-references. 78 As intertextuality transgresses the boundaries between different works and genres of literature, metafiction transgresses the boundaries between narrative frames within the novel. Both metafiction and intertextuality reveal the novel s place within a broader system, acknowledging and subverting the workings of that system at the same time Historiographic metafiction I have already explained how the search for a Canadian identity caused English-Canadian literature in the 1960s to be preoccupied with the country s colonial and postcolonial history. As history became a central literary theme, the difference between literature and historiography became less distinct. The narrative turn had revealed that history is always told in the form of a story, from a certain perspective, using the same techniques of narrativity as, for instance, literary fiction. Historians such as Hayden White argued that historiography is no less a poetic construct than fiction, and that the novelist and the historian share emplotting strategies of exclusion, emphasis, and subordination of elements of a story. 79 Indeed, the postmodern historical novel critically questioned the scientifically objective authority of historiography as opposed to the subjectivity of literary fiction. According to Linda Hutcheon, this new approach to history resulted in a substantial difference between the postmodern historical novel and traditional historical fiction. Because of the intense self-consciousness about the way in which historical facts are dealt with, and the awareness of the subjectivity that is inevitably involved, the postmodern is to be considered an entirely new way of narrating the past, which Hutcheon names historical metafiction. 80 Combining a critical, consciously subjective approach to history with the techniques of metafiction, the postmodern historical novel 78 Musarra 1987, Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988,