Gatsby's Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative by Patti White (review)

Book Reviews269 nie group. In an interesting discussion of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Wong also attempts a broader definition of the genre, "autobiography." The essay most likely to provoke controversy is Raymund Paredes' "Autobiography and Ethnic Politics: Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory," which constitutes an attack on what Paredes sees as Rodriguez's willingness to abandon his Mexican heritage in order to join "mainstream" American life. Paredes calls Hunger of Memory "an academic's book" (281) and assails Rodriguez for using a version of the conversion narrative to describe his own conversion to Anglo life. The final essay, Jose David Saldivar's "The School of Caliban: PanAmerican Autobiography," recalls Stephen Greenblatt's recent text, Marvelous Possessions, in its analysis of the relationship of the colonized to the colonizers. Saldivar defines an autobiographical category he calls "Calibanic history" (311) and then discusses several autobiographies under this rubric. He too thinks Rodriguez's Hunger ofMemory presents undesirable accommodations to Anglo institutions and thought. Occasionally the index to this collection is a bit confusing. Some texts are indexed under the author and title, while others are listed only under the author. Sometimes authors cited in the essays are not indexed. Otherwise, Multicultural Autobiography's textual apparatus seems in order. The collection is a welcome addition to ethnic studies. SUSAN E. GUNTER Westminster College ofSalt Lake City PATTI WHITE. Gatsby's Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1992. 187 p. jr atti White's Gatsby's Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative represents an important contribution to the much needed project of synthesizing systems theory, poststructuralism, and the postmodern novel. Finding the point at which systems theory, poststructuralism, and literature intersect is no easy task, but White cleverly employs the guest list in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to do just that. The guest list serves as a paradigm for White's exploration of systems theory in general and narrative and discourse structures in particular. Throughout Gatsby's Party, White examines, in alternating chapters, specific aspects of systems theory and then shows how the list can function as the means by which systems theory can contribute to a new understanding of narrative in Don DeLillo's White Noise, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. White opens her study of the relation between systems theory and narrative with an anecdote of a man who once memorized the entire list of guests at Jay Gatsby's party. The anecdote is used to establish a necessary rela- 270Rocky Mountain Review tionship between lists as receptacles of information and the larger, more complex informational system at work in Fitzgerald's novel. The Gatsby list appears throughout White's book whenever an example of a particular aspect of systems theory is required. For example, in Chapter 3, "The Narrative Supersystem," White provides a general introduction to systemic construction and operation and shows how the Gatsby guest list serves as a node linking other systems (author, reader, and critic) to the Gatsby supersystem and "as an intrasystemic interchange, a place where both the injection of critical energy into the narratological subsystem and subsequent restructuration of both the critical and the textual systems might occur" (33). In Chapter 4, "Surprise Roast," White then examines in detail how Pynchon's characters Mexico and Bodine use a list—the menu at the dinner party—to deconstruct a dominant power base by linking together two competing systems. The two gain "control of the construction process" (46) by creating their own dinner menu consisting of cannibal dishes that "overwhelm the host after using the information structure of the host as their point of entry" (47). But the scene does more than provide White an opportunity to discuss the function of lists. She skillfully moves from an analysis of the function of the list in the scene to the function of the scene in the narrative of the novel. The scene "is a model for the type of resistance to system Pynchon seems to advocate, a resistance that combines the efforts ofthe oppressed into an oppositional...