The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

A Conclusion . . . Perhaps

137 Writing of the Ghost (Again) postmodern relationship to the spectral remainder that animated the aesthetic strategy of metafiction, this current movement away from the recent hegemony of postmodern narrative strategies is, in short, the latest attempt to “deal with” the specter of postmodernism—which is, quite simply, the specter of “a still incomplete project of modernity,” the essential specter haunting both Marxism and deconstruction. A Conclusion . . . Perhaps One final example. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the concept of the specter —of the ghost, of the repressed—is pivotal. For this reason, Beloved can help us to clarify two distinct yet intimately related concepts. On one hand, the text exemplifies a distinctly renewalist aesthetic; its narrative strategies overtly endorse and embrace the ironic spectrality of the mimetic promise. On the other hand, Beloved, like Hamlet, offers us a very specific model of the specter, a model that speaks to the very narrative in which it is articulated. And it seems more than a mere accident that the spectral negotiation that determines the plot of Beloved comes to highlight the distinctly renewalist negotiation that defines the text’s overall aesthetic. Like all of the renewalist texts discussed above, Beloved redeploys a series of overtly postmodern stylistic devices. Most obviously, Beloved (like Morrison’s later novel, Jazz) approaches its central animating event—that is, Sethe’s protective, yet brutal, slaughter of her child, Beloved—again and again via a spiral-like series of narrative returns. Indeed, the event is recounted several times and from a series of different perspectives. As in O’Brien’s texts, this repetition comes to suggest the impossibility of the certainly accurate narrative act, the certainly right narrative decision. However, and as we see in a text like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the event’s essential inexplicability (or, rather, the specter’s essential spectrality) becomes the very thing that animates the narrative act. Ryan P. McDermott puts it like this: The “unspeakable scene(/seen)” of Beloved is not only an unwittingly productive critical construction—it is symptomatic of the novel’s own desire to break and yet preserve the fungibility of its pervasive silence through the production and reproduction of the image outside of the symbolic order of language. As such, the “unspeakable scene” works a structural device that both appeals to and frustrates our attempts to translate this silence into narrative. (77) 138 The Passing of Postmodernism The promise of complete narrative apprehension is made possible by the fact that the event—or rather, the impossible “Real”—continually resists narrative apprehension. We see this paradox—that is, the paradox that the impossibility of the certainly right narrative act allows for the possibility of such an act—in Sethe’s own circular attempts to tell her story: “Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask” (163). Like O’Brien’s narrators, though, Sethe empathically yields to the belief, however contradictory it may be, that her story and, thus, the reality of her trauma can be made manifest; she yields to the belief that, eventually, she will no longer be haunted by the past. Put differently, and in a manner that speaks to the ethical imperative that defines renewalism, Sethe determinedly and ironically opposes the paralysis of narrative indecision (i.e., the effect of knowing that no finally correct decision is possible) with the certainty of indecision (i.e., the belief that there is, indeed, an absolutely correct decision). This ethics of indecision is doubly stressed via the actual event that Sethe, among others, repeatedly tries to apprehend/understand. The text’s emphatic willingness to undergo “the ordeal of indecision” is, in short, mirrored by the impossible decision with which Sethe was faced: to kill her children or to let them be taken as slaves. As deplorable as her ultimate decision might appear prima facie, the fact that she makes a decision at all can be read as a clear endorsement of the ethical imperative animating the entire text: the ethical imperative that any decision or narrative act must endure both aspects of indecision, that any decision must, respect both the possibility and the impossibility of the spectral promise. Of course, this “ethics of indecision”—or rather, this apparent endorsement of the renewalist imperative to respect the specter—is also mirrored by the text’s theme of...