R M Berry Answers Joseph Tabbi

JSSSL KVlBW ? a jurtnermore. • · R M Berry Answers Joseph Tabbi The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. Jean-François Lyotard In his generous and insightful review in ABR of my novel Frank ("Not Just Another Frankenstein," March /April 2006), Joseph Tabbi has made several important observations about the situation of contemporary innovative writing. Because I consider his observations of widespread interest, I want to bring out somewhat more starkly the stakes of his discussion. Tabbi's boldest comments come in a section of his review that expresses reservations, not so much about Frank (Chiasmus Press), as about its description by the publisher. What Tabbi finds troublesome is a back-cover statement that the novel '"uncovers a more literally untamed America' than either Frank or Rob (the two narrators) could have foretold." Tabbi hears this statement as a version of a sentence within Frank that aligns its narrators' stories with "all our tepid culture has cast out." Noting that a similar claim has at times been advanced on behalf of the fiction published by FC2, the press with which I'm associated, Tabbi makes his most trenchant and sensitive criticism: In my view the claim is disingenuous and even a little insulting, because it assumes that there is another, lived reality that the author knows and that we, the readers, don't. We're asked to accept the idea that an author should be distinguished not by literary and imaginative qualities, but rather by the possession of some, specific information... unavailable to those who read fiction published by conglomerates, get their news from the papers or blogs or network media, and find pleasure where they can. Tabbi goes on to bring out the political and moral stakes at work here, aligning the "more literally untamed" environment Frank putatively uncovers with versions of the cultural other, either "some heart of darkness at the colonial outskirts or some never explored recess of the human heart." His idea is that as long as fiction tries to legitimate itself by access to these versions of outré subjectivity, it will be accorded only a marginal place in cultural life. These are shrewd observations. As I read them, they enact three convictions: ( 1 ) that a novel's claim to liberate readers from a foretold reality is a claim to access some reality outside the culture; (2) that a novel 's claim to disclose this unforetold reality is a claim to represent it; (3) that these claims, taken together, imply a claim by the novelist to knowledge not equally available to everyone inside the culture. In short, Tabbi takes exception to the notion that fiction's capacity for innovation is its capacity to transcend the present. The idea of narrative transcendence, famously associated with Hegel, takes philosophy, art, criticism, and politics to be articulating what doesn't yet exist, but which eventually must exist because of the contradictoriness of what does. The conviction that such contradictions will advance culture gives rise to the concept of an avant-garde. Its underlying faith is that human subjectivity, both collective and individual, is self-critical. Because reality as we presently live it—whatTabbi characterizes, in words from Frank, as "living too peacefully in THIS NOW HERE"— is so self-defeating, humans simply must overcome themselves. I can see two ways of understanding Tabbi's reservations about this Hegelian metanarrative, one associated with Lyotard, the other with Wittgenstein. In Lyotard's famous characterization of postmodernity as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (The Postmodern Condition [1979]), any representation of "an untamed America" or of anything else our culture has "cast out" would depend for its legitimation on Hegel's frame story. However, according to Lyotard, science, technology, and capitalism have obsoleted this way of legitimating innovation. Their postmodern triumvirate has become itself our innovative practice, and their legitimation is not by metanarrative, but by performance. What replaces Hegel's account of transcendence — i.e., special knowledge— is "paralogy," a sequence of new systems subsuming other systems. In other words, there just is no cultural outside. Instead, there is a process of reformulation without historical advance. There seems to be...