On the Notion "Post-Deconstructive Narrative": Text Type or Textual Condition?

Daniel Punday, Narrative after Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. x + 194 pp.

Discerning a "movement from deconstruction to narrative" in the recent work of Jacques Derrida as well as in other literary and cultural theorists, Daniel Punday states his main research question as follows: "how can narrative come out of and also break from deconstruction?" (viii). As the author puts it in chapter 1, "The Narrative Turn" (1–20):

Narrative seems to appeal to critics today as an alternative to deconstructive language of textual deferral, slippage, and indeterminacy. . . . The task of this book is to explain why narrative has reappeared as a way of speaking about textual construction after deconstruction and how narrative can be employed to address the interaction between text and world.

(1, 4)

However, given that a "penchant for perverse temporality" (vii) is one of the hallmarks of deconstructive analysis itself, in both its Derridean and de Manian incarnations, Punday's title should not be taken as implying a simple (or singular) time line. For example, one might note that Derrida's critique of the "metaphysics of presence" drastically complicates the semantics of after construed as a temporal operator. In Derrida's account, presence is an effect generated by mediating representational systems rather than the ultimate bedrock or guarantor of representation; presence is always presence ex post facto. By the same token, in Derridean parlance "post-deconstructive" thinking about narrative represents something of a contradiction in terms. Although such research may be conducted chronologically later than the heyday of deconstruction, it will never get "beyond" the deconstructive project by which it was preceded and structured and with which it continues to engage, willy-nilly, in a more or less critical and reflexive way. Such is the deconstructive logic of "closure" that, as Derrida argues in texts such as "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," compels any discourse to borrow from the heritage of concepts that it aims to critique or supersede.

Testing the scope and limits of this logic, Punday investigates the legacy of deconstructive thought in what he characterizes as narratively oriented frameworks for interpretation as well as in particular fictional narratives. Throughout, the author seeks to steer a course between the Scylla of a punctualist model of intellectual history, which views "deconstruction as a movement past and rejected" (ix), and the Charybdis of pandeconstructionism, which "insists that all criticism that follows from, and attempts to be true to, deconstruction must in turn itself be deconstruction" (x). Under the catchall term post-deconstructive narrative, whose extension in fact becomes increasingly nebulous as the book proceeds (see below), Punday examines a range of textual artifacts, modes of discourse, and paradigms for analysis that he interprets as responding to deconstruction in more or less immediately recognizable ways. Although the chapters seek collectively to demonstrate the existence of post-deconstructive narrative in critical as well as creative contexts, they read less as a sequentially unfolding argument than as a series of case studies in narrative after deconstruction.

Chapter 1 discusses narrative-related implications of work by Jean-François Lyotard as well as of the phenomenological and feminist theories of materiality developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz. (Here the author touches on ideas he has developed in fuller form elsewhere, under the auspices of what Punday terms "corporeal narratology.") Chapter 2, "Deconstruction and the Worldly Text" (21–47), examines recent treatments of the concepts of space, place, and location by theorists that include Elspeth Probyn, Michel de Certeau, and Edward W. Soja, relating this work back to such high-deconstructive analyses as Derrida's "Ousia and Gramme." Chapter 3, "The Search for Form in American Postmodern Fiction" (48–68), examines critical writings by Ronald Sukenick, William H. Gass, and other critics before developing an extended interpretation of Sukenick's 1986 novel Blown Away, which Punday instances as a post-deconstructive fiction...