A POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM A POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM HISTORY, THEORY FICTION LINDA HUTCHEON New York and London First published 1988 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Transferred to Digital Printing 2003 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 1988 Linda Hutcheon All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-35885-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37141-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-00705-4 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-00706-2 (pbk) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Preface ix PART I 1 Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics 3 2 Modelling the postmodern: parody and politics 22 3 Limiting the postmodern: the paradoxical aftermath of modernism 37 4 Decentering the postmodern: the ex-centric 57 5 Contextualizing the postmodern: enunciation and the revenge of “parole” 74 6 Historicizing the postmodern: the problematizing of history 87 PART II 7 Historiographic metafiction: “the pastime of past time” 105 8 Intertextuality, parody, and the discourses of history 124 9 The problem of reference 141 vi A Poetics of Postmodernism 10 Subject in/of/to history and his story 158 11 Discourse, power, ideology: humanism and postmodernism 178 12 Political double-talk 201 13 Conclusion: a poetics or a problematics? 222 Bibliography 232 Index 259 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No text is without its intertexts, we have been taught. This one is no exception. The finely honed readings of postmodern texts by two colleagues in particular deserve mention right at the start: those of Alison Lee and Janet Paterson. Not only have they offered worthy examples to follow but also both have been provocative critics of various parts of this book. So too has been Graham Knight, the most critical and acute reader one could ever wish for. For listening to or reading parts of this study, or for just tossing ideas around with me, I would particularly like to thank Catherine Belsey, Aruna Srivastava, Susan Bennett, Magdalene Redekop, and Pamela McCallum. I owe much as well to the members of three graduate classes at McMaster University and the University of Toronto, for they were the guinea pigs upon which these ideas were tested—and the stimulus for their (sometimes total) rethinking. Over the last few years, a number of university audiences have heard parts of the research that went into this study. I would like to thank those institutions for inviting me to speak and for giving me the chance to work out my ideas in a public forum: Columbia University, Queen’s University, University of Toronto, University of Calgary, University of Alberta, Catholic University of America, University of Saskatchewan, University of Ottawa, Concordia University, York University, McGill University, Université de Montréal, University of Western Ontario. Similarly I would like to thank the professional associations whose conferences also gave an occasion for trying out new ideas on new audiences: the Modern Language Association (and Northeastern MLA), Royal Society of Canada, Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures, Canadian Comparative Literature Association, American Comparative Literature Association, Canadian Philosophy Association (Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought), and the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. viii A Poetics of Postmodernism Similarly parts of this book have appeared in shorter and earlier versions (often with quite different foci) in various journals (Textual Practice, Cultural Critique, Diacritics, Genre, English Studies in Canada) and in essay collections (Gender and Theory: A Dialogue between the Sexes [ed. L.Kauffman], Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction [ed. P.O’Donnell and R.Con Davis], Future Indicative: Canadian Literature and Literary Theory [ed. J.Moss]). To the editors’ interest in and support of work in progress I am greatly indebted. Perhaps the greatest intertextual framework of this study, though, is that of all the current debates on the nature and definition of the postmodern. Though this book would have been finished a lot earlier without them, I can only be grateful that I had such wonderful minds to think both with and against. My particular debts to each will be clear from references in the text, but I would like to single out the ones who most stimulated me and helped me formulate my own notions: Andreas Huyssen, Teresa de Lauretis, Arthur Kroker, Alan Wilde, Charles Russell, Charles Newman, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and especially those theoristpractitioners: Martha Rosler, Paolo Portoghesi, Charles Jencks, and Victor Burgin, to mention only a few. Three particular thanks must end this list. One is to an institution—the Canada Council—whose Killam Research Fellowship gave me the time and the financial support needed to write this book. The second is to Methuen and especially to Janice Price, for having confidence in my work and being so supportive of it. And the last is, as always, to my spouse, Michael, for his constant encouragement, unfailing good humor, fine critical sense, and amazing patience in putting up with my postmodern obsessions. Linda Hutcheon Toronto 1987 PREFACE What will no longer do is either to eulogize or to ridicule postmodernism en bloc. The postmodern must be salvaged from its champions and from its detractors. Andreas Huyssen This study is neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism. You will not find here any claims of radical revolutionary change or any apocalyptic wailing about the decline of the west under late capitalism. Rather than either eulogize or ridicule, what I have tried to do is study a current cultural phenomenon that exists, has attracted much public debate, and so deserves critical attention. Based on the notion that any theorizing must derive from that which it purports to study, my focus here is on those points of significant overlap of theory with aesthetic practice which might guide us to articulate what I want to call a “poetics” of postmodernism, a flexible conceptual structure which could at once constitute and contain postmodern culture and our discourses both about it and adjacent to it. The points of overlap that seem most evident to me are those of the paradoxes set up when modernist aesthetic autonomy and self-reflexivity come up against a counterforce in the form of a grounding in the historical, social, and political world. The model I have used is that of postmodern architecture, as theorized by Paolo Portoghesi and Charles Jencks and as actualized by Ricardo Bofill, Aldo Rossi, Robert Stern, Charles Moore, and others. By analogy, what would characterize postmodernism in fiction would be what I here call “historiographic metafiction,” those popular paradoxical works like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Fowles’s A Maggot, Doctorow’s Loon Lake, Reed’s The Terrible Twos, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Findley’s Famous Last Words, Rushdie’s Shame, and the list could go on. There are also parallel