Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (review)

One of the latest entries in the debate over the politics of postmodernism, Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting is an extended argument for postmodern fiction’s ongoing engagement with the narratives of history. Marcel Cornis-Pope attempts to reclaim postmodernism from its critics, particularly those who dispute or ignore its political content, and to reunite some of its wildly divergent characterizations. To that end, his arguments generally fall into a number of variations upon the same basic theme: postmodern or “innovative” fiction is always pulled between its subversive and reconstitutive functions, between the deconstruction and resuscitation of narrative. In his preface, Cornis-Pope suggests that this “‘agonistic’ consciousness . . . is to a large extent a reflection of criticism’s own divided response to norm-breaking art” (xi). Thus, he elaborates on these binary tensions not to further divide postmodern literature, but to reconcile its conflicting impulses and its conflicted critical representation.

The idea that postmodernism negotiates binary divisions informs Cornis-Pope’s work on every level, from his discussion of individual narrative practices to his contextualization of larger cultural debates over the political valences of postmodern literature. These arguments may seem familiar enough when applied to narrative technique: he discusses rewriting, for example, as a transaction between repetition and erasure that interrogates old narrative and cultural orders while simultaneously creating new ones. But Cornis-Pope’s bifurcated scheme truly comes into its own when he applies it to politics and to postmodernism’s place in the political sphere. He argues that critics from the left and right alike reduce postmodernism to a solipsistic caricature, though for different reasons—they censure it, he maintains, either for a “self-reflexive indulgence” that refuses to engage with politics or for an “excessive cultural disruption” (8) that destroys all literary tradition. Cornis-Pope defends postmodernism on the grounds that it does neither and both; he proposes a transactive model in which postmodern fiction destroys narrative practices in order to recreate them, and engages with its culture in order to question its dominant ideologies.

Cornis-Pope offers this transactive postmodernism as an alternative not only to the dichotomous accounts of critical theory, but also to the polarized rhetoric and Manichaean narratives of the Cold War. This lends an implicit political context to postmodernism, as Cornis-Pope argues that its transcendence of binaries is anything but apolitical in an age of binary, mutually destructive historical narratives. Regrettably, however, he tends to leave this particular context unclarified after his two introductory chapters; some of the book’s most intriguing and exigent claims disappear in the author-specific chapters that could be demonstrating them. And in general, his arguments are often burdened by less relevant references and citations as he seeks to allude, it seems, to every postmodern novel he can name.

This attempt at an encyclopedic reach is most prominent in the opening chapters. Beneath the enumerations of experimental novels and scholarly citations, however, Cornis-Pope builds several shrewd distinctions and triangulations, offering a lucid assessment of postmodern fiction’s place in post-Cold War America. He carefully differentiates, for example, between the “innovative fiction” of his study and a “midfiction” that has absorbed some of postmodernism’s stylistic techniques and conventions, but none of its cultural critique (17–20). He also decries the neoconservative marginalization of experimental fiction, explores postmodernism’s partial alignment with critical race theory and identity politics, and most encouragingly, he distinguishes postmodernism from the “postclass, postfoundationalist, postemancipatory . . . post-festum’ thinking” (43) that associates global capitalism with a purported “end of history.” Indeed, Cornis-Pope suggests that postmodernism can counter this last discourse, though he concedes that it has also contributed to the myths of this recent master narrative.

Subsequent chapters narrow in focus, exploring various subgenres by surveying the works of one or two exemplary authors. Cornis-Pope first examines what he terms “polysystemic fiction,” fiction that undermines singular or totalizing systems of knowledge by multiplying them to include alternative narratives and...