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3. Styles of Quantum Leaps
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
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Styles of Quantum Leaps Visions or intimations of the quantum realm not only haunt the structure of much postmodernist fiction but also affect the style of many of these writers. Just as that structure can be episodic, fragmented, discontinuous, and disrupted, just as it can raise questions about the relationship between separate parts and the uncertain possibility of a larger whole, and just as it can suggest randomness and chance, as opposed to causality and consequence, so can a writer’s style. “Often science,” suggests George Steiner, “will mask, by mathematical formalization, the verbal, the metaphoric suggestions of a prior epistemology” (118), just as style can often unmask its own roots in quantum ontology. A radical indeterminacy lies as much in a writer’s style as in his or her vision of the world. Such a style creates and participates in postmodernism as a point of view with its multiple perspectives, unresolved contradictions, often corrosive skepticism, its self-conscious mix of irony and the apocalyptic , its intimations and clash of catastrophe and comedy, and its polyphonic web of entanglement and hidden connections. It often reflects what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” the idea of separate entities—characters, episodes, events—being somehow forever entangled with one another in no causal or recognizable way and unable to act autonomously no matter how distant they appear to be in time and space, as if the self and the “system,” however at odds, had so thoroughly interpenetrated one another that one cannot exist without the other, that one’s very existence depends on this unrelenting entanglement. After a discussion of style in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, DeLillo’s The 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 94 : quir ks of the qua ntum Body Artist, and Didion’s Democracy, this chapter not only links Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 to Inherent Vice in terms of the similarity of their styles but also explores his broader vision of entropy and the episodic nature of his fiction, a kind of quantum leap to the next level of literary analysis from structure and style toward vision. This also leads to a charting of similarities between Didion’s and Auster’s styles and to Auster’s quantized vision in terms of the dissolution of the individual self. At this point in the chapter we can see more clearly, as the separate strands of analysis merge, quantum theory’s influence, for example, on Auster’s structure, style, and vision before chapter 4 directly focuses on specific quantum themes and quandaries. Our discussion culminates in the final revelation of the quantum realm in chapter 5 in DeLillo’s Underworld and Pynchon’s Against the Day. Styles, of course, vary. DeLillo and Didion often create sentences and paragraphs that strike the reader as atomistic and epigrammatic, built from details and images that linger obsessively in the text but seem to exist outside any context that could help to ground or identify them to make them recognizably significant in some fashion. Images float as if carved out of some wider but hidden perspective, sharp-edged and clear, shimmering but disconnected from any apparent meaning. DeLillo at times explores the process of consciousness itself, while Didion focuses on particular shards of “evidence” in search of some larger human context. Pynchon overloads his paragraphs with so much information that the reader is never sure how to distinguish significant details from the detritus of daily life or contemporary civilization. Auster creates tapestries of long paragraphs webbed with details, thoughts, speculations , habits, and concentrated, step-by-step logistics, as if his characters were creating a carapace of linguistic armor to protect themselves from an eternal dread and meaninglessness that haunt their every move, an obsessive lucidity —akin to that in the work of DeLillo, Didion, Pynchon, and others—that reveals its own uncertain grounding in the continuous and puzzling flux of existence. Julio Jeha has suggested that postmodernism posits “enigma as knowledge ,” asking, “What happens with the search for answers when there is a change from a paradigm that stresses questions about knowledge to a regime where questions about existence prevail” (263), where epistemological issues give way to ontological ones? In his consideration of the fiction of Auster, [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:29 GMT) Styles of Quantum Leaps : 95 Robert Coover, DeLillo, and Pynchon from the certainty of hidden truth, such as Henry James’s “figure in the carpet” in modernism to the uncertainty of...