The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique (review)

In his lucid and well-argued contribution to the SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture, Paul Maltby takes as his focus the brief, precarious, and assumedly transformative literary moments of insight—what William Wordsworth called “spots of time,” Thomas Hardy labeled “moments of vision,” James Joyce referred to as “epiphanies,” and Virginia Woolfe noted as “exquisite moments.” As many critical studies have already demonstrated, these textual events are an intrinsic part of many Romantic and high-modernist works. Yet what makes The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique so significant is not only Maltby’s impressive application of postmodern theory to the epiphanic phenomenon, but his investigation into how this particular literary convention continues to thrive in works of some of our most contemporary writers. Specifically, he uses the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Alice Walker, Raymond Carver, Paule Marshall, Saul Bellow, and Don DeLillo to demonstrate the ways in which these visionary moments (as Maltby calls them) are not only culturally pervasive, but ideologically loaded as well.

At issue here are those apocryphal events in literature where the protagonist supposedly gains unique insight, becomes inspired, sees the light, or experiences that “a-ha!” moment of comprehension that smacks of the spiritual. Maltby characterizes the visionary moment as a sudden, momentary, and precarious experience that is inherently private. It is different from a purely aesthetic experience, one that privileges the moment for its own sake, in that it suggests an interior linkage to a higher knowledge—Truth with a capital T—that is unmediated by any social or political forces, and as such, provides the means to redemption or transfiguration. In setting the stage for his postmodern critique, Maltby traces the manifestations of the visionary moment through the conversion narratives in Western religious writing, the Romantic expressions of a nonrational epistemology, the ideologies of bourgeois individualism, and the various modernist attempts at transcending the cultural fragmentation of the early twentieth-century. From there he reads several post-1945 texts in ways that demonstrate the tenacity, and the sheer attraction, of the visionary moment as an ongoing literary convention.

To illustrate his point, Maltby refers to narratives such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Seize the Day, On the Road, and Praisesong for the Widow as contemporary (or at least post-high-modernist) configurations of the visionary moment. O’Connor’s self-centered and loquacious grandmother becomes “redeemed” and experiences a spiritual rebirth when she acknowledges a kinship with her murder, The Misfit; Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm becomes transfigured through a mystical moment of love for his fellow passengers in a dark subway tunnel; Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s fictional stand-in, articulates a jazz-inspired and atemporal moment of transcendence; and, in search of a spiritual communion with her ancestry, Marshall’s Avey Johnson experiences an empathic linkage with all the African-Americans around her, regardless of class status and cultural type. And, in an especially astute reading of DeLillo, Maltby delineates the romantic strains inherent in White Noise, a novel widely viewed as postmodern. He argues that Jack Gladney’s mystical insights—such as those involving the huge cloud of toxic chemicals—are characteristic of the Romantic sublime. (In an appendix to his text, Maltby conceptualizes his own version of the postmodern sublime, one that he strongly differentiates from Jean-François Lyotard’s invocation of the unpresentable.) Maltby concludes his reading of DeLillo with the provocative, yet apparently defensible, statement, “The fact that DeLillo writes so incisively of the textures of postmodern experience, of daily life in the midst of images, commodities, and conspiracies, does not make him a postmodern writer” (83). To these readings he counterposes Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas’s final illumination is undercut and held in suspension, metafictionally exposing the visionary moment as being the literary convention it always/already is. And with Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Maltby demonstrates how such moments can even serve a critical function, embodying a progressive political meaning.

Yet...