Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (review)

In this new study Christian Moraru takes on the vast and thorny subject of post-modern representation. Taking his central trope from Borges, he argues for post-modernism as memorious discourse. By that he refers to postmodernism's foregrounding of its own reproducing and representing of earlier representations: "Postmodern representation re-presents, recovers—and thereby operates—inter-textually, retrieving texts from our textual archive" (19).

Each of the book's five chapters has a different and complementary focus. Chapter 1, centered on Nabokov's Speak, Memory, explores the interpenetration of fact and fiction, invention and intertext, and the nature of what the author calls "post-modern memory" in contemporary self writing. Moraru's superb, nuanced account of the ways in which Nabokov structures the story of his life according to patterns in Proust's novel is followed by compelling studies of Eva Hoffman's intertextual memoir Lost in Translation and David Antin's genre-challenging texts, in which identity and the self are two different things (79). Chapter 2 is a rich exploration of the power of names, naming, and the unnamable in contemporary texts and includes a section on Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, and the stories names tell (and retell). Chapter 3 astutely explores the posthuman and goes on to examine the posthumanity narrative and "apocalyptic intertextuality" of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which Moraru suggests may be the most ambitiously memorious in the postmodern canon, as well as posthuman texts by Philip Roth, Joseph McElroy, and Marc Leyner.

The final two chapters directly take on the larger theoretical issues of the study, introduce new areas of investigation such as the postmodern sublime, and engage in lively debate with theoreticians like Jameson, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Nancy, and others. Moraru's postmodernism is not ahistorical, culturally oblivious, or politically apathetic. Indeed, it is precisely its insistent citation and recirculation of earlier texts that acknowledge its cultural debt and mount ideological critiques, and he even allows that "postmodernism's self-acknowledged reprises every so often surprise us with their powerful, unorthodox deviations from their 'model,' with their unexpected plot-twists, media mixes, and other deflections, inflections, and irreverent revisions" (16).

Overall, this is an astute, carefully reasoned, and delightfully wide-ranging investigation of the theory and practice of postmodernism. It is exemplary both for the number of diverse texts Moraru is able to discuss in a compelling fashion and for its deft theoretical sweep. On page after page, Moraru adds substantially to the interpretation of texts and the refinement of postmodern theory. His assessment of the progressive politics of postmodern practices is particularly effective. While it is probably true that those who are unconvinced by the more extreme claims of poststructuralism on topics such as the inseparability of the fictional and the nonfictional will probably remain unmoved by Moraru's arguments, readers can be expected to admire the way in which the author supplely weaves his many subjects into the intricate and illuminating web of memorious discourse.