JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. http://www.jstor.org THOMAS CARMICHAEL Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo's Libra, The Names, and Mao II n its specific address to history, contemporary fiction has mostfrequently exploited the resources of intertextuality to make plain Hayden White's contention that there is no history without a full-blown metahistory, or equally, through the practices of what Linda Hutcheon has termed "historiographic metafiction," to call into question the claims to authority in historiography by uncovering history's status as narrative and unmasking its claims to an unmediated access to the real (Hutcheon 124-40). Don DeLillo's postmodern fiction participates fully in these projects, typically by setting a destabilizing narrative self-consciousness against a supposedly stable history that is represented or misrepresented in the fictional text. But DeLillo's fiction also invites us to read a prior text not as suppressing its instability, nor as site of textual authority to be subverted, but as representative of the very instability his fiction portrays as the generalized context of the postmodern condition. In this sense, the intertextual relationship in DeLillo's fiction is one neither of oedipal rebellion nor of grateful affiliation, but of incontestable dissemination, of endless trace and diff&rance.The general field of intertextuality has long been understood as the transformation of a prior text by a later one; this is of course the very definition of hypertextuality as it was presented by G rard Genette in his formalist survey of the possibilities of intertextual relations (14). But this signaling of an inescapable belatedness as the condition out of which every text is engendered suggests perhaps too static a model. These transformative interactions might well be read as creative rather than contingent; as John Frow points out, Contemporary Literature XXXIV, 2 0010-7484/93/0002-0204 $1.50 ? 1993 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System CARMICHAEL * 205"The identification of an intertext is an act of interpretation. The intertext is not a real and causative source but a theoretical construct formed by and serving the purposes of a reading" ("Intertextuality" 46). The intertextual relation is one in which origins are designated retrospectively, and this act of designation, again following Frow, transforms "the unity and self-presence of the text into a structure marked by otherness and repetition," a network of cultural codes and...
To return to the work of Louis Althusser in the present conjuncture is, as Jacques Bidet noted a decade ago, to confront a discourse that seems to come from another age, but one which still retains an unassailable and singular power of theoretical provocation (Bidet, 5). The power of this discourse to speak and to intervene in the current post-poststructural, post-postmodern, post-postcolonial, and always already globalized critical climate is perhaps all the more surprising when we are remin..
In his reflections upon the spirit of place in recent fiction, John Barth remarks that the setting as metaphor is a function of the discourse within which it is situated. Perhaps predictably, Barth insists that the proper function of the trope of place in contemporary fiction is to be found in a postmodern reconciliation of competing claims: "realism and antirealism, linearity and nonlinearity, continuity and discontinuity"; however, as the narrator of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," reminds us, to decipher the figurai truth in an urban landscape might well mean the pursuit of a text that will "not permit itself to be read."1 Nevertheless, Barth's reflections suggest the ways in which, in both his own fiction and in the work of Don DeLillo, the site of the narrative's unfolding is always the sign and context of a particular postmodern attitude. As the scene of the dead repetitions of history and of the dispersal of the self, the city in the fiction of both authors is an exemplary sign of the anxieties of the postmodern condition, one which surely echoes the panicky amnesia of the culture of the simulacrum and the "[postmodern] fascination with a degraded landscape."2 But this is only one side of the postmodern rewriting of the city; in postmodern fiction we also confront the ironic encoding of the city as a positive site of resistance to the master tropes of cultural authority, and particularly those of the modernist tradition. Both these attitudes can be found in postmodern fiction, and often they are found together in the same text as signs of the ambivalence that resides at the heart of postmodern culture.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.