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THOMAS CARMICHAEL A Postmodern Genealogy: John Barth's Sabbatical and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym For those who would seek to define a distinctly postrnodern discourse, no question is more vexed than the relationship of postrnodern culture to the claims of tradition. Ihab Hassan, for example, has urged upon us the view that 'we are all ... a little Victorian, Modern and Postmodern at once: but this conciliatory attitude is not typically postmodern; more representative is the remark, attributed to John Lennon, that forms the epigraph to Arthur Kroker's Panic Encyclopedia: 'Before Elvis .. .there was nothing." Taken together, these assertions are characteristic of a postrnodern ambivalence with respect to the presence of the past, which often finds its expression through parody. The same impulse motivates the interrogation of authority and tradition in postrnodern discourse, and it is also reflected in strategies of representation in postrnodern narrative, particularly those we find in the postmodern fiction of John Barth. Through ten volumes of fiction and a handful of important occasional essays, John Barth has established his claim to a pre-eminent position among American postrnodernists, but with a difference. In contrast to those theorists who would proclaim a postrnodern critique that sits outside the contamination of history, Barth's work has demonstrated a consistent preoccupation with the situated, worldly dimensions of postmodern discourse. This may seem a surprising assertion on behalf of an author whose narratives have often been charged with trivializing the mimetic contract, but Barth's characteristic self-reflexivity is ultimately a sign of his desire to call into question the strategies of narrative representation, while at the same time insisting upon their necessity. In his recent essay 'Postmodernism Reconsidered: Barth describes the desire to have 'it both ways with illusionism and anti-illusionism ' as typical of the postmodern aesthetic and representative of a larger postmodern interrogation of the notions of authority and tradition.' As Barth himself acknowledges, this description restates his own earlier prescription for a postmodern literature of replenishment, and his insistence upon 'having it both ways: of affirming the artifice in art while appropriating its traditional mimetic claims, has been perhaps the most consistent feature of his critical theory and practice.' Like other cultural labels, postrnodernism operates within the field of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 60, NUMBER }, SPRING 1991 390 THOMAS CARMICHAEL cultural discourse as a term of discrimination and exclusion. Attempts to offer a genealogy of postmodernism or to trace its patterns of affiliation are always efforts to appropriate the postmodern impulse to a particular metahistorical vision, and Barth's own reflections upon the postmodern are premised upon perhaps his best known assertion that 'art and its forms and techniques live in history and certainly do change: and thus 'Beethoven's Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing." On one level, Barth's remark is an affirmation of the parodic dimensions of the postmodern enterprise; however, his view is also part of a larger concern with a postmodern renegotiation of the possibilities of order and value. This concern provides Barth with a postmodern perspective that separates him from those, on one side, who greet postmodernism with opprobrium and those, on the other, who celebrate postmodernism as the cultural vanguard of a liberation narratology. In one of the earliest literary essays devoted to the question of a postmodern culture, Irving Howe asserts that postmodernism is both conspicuously self-conscious and adolescently sceptical: 'there is indeed a continuity with modernism, but a continuity of grotesque of parody, through the doubles of fashion." Much the same position is later echoed by Gerald Graff and subsequently elaborated in Fredric Jameson's reading of the postmodern as the cultural sign of late consumer capitalism, particularly of its frenetic desire for novelty and its total amnesia.' Among enthusiasts, however, the postmodern impulse is not symptomatic but subversive, a form of resistance to the dominant discourses that legitimate the late capitalist world. The work of JeanFran ~ois Lyotard is perhaps our best example of this view; Lyotard's insistence that an 'incredulity toward metanarratives' is fundamental to the postmodern condition and his celebration of the petit recit as the postmodern mode of knowledge that escapes...

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