Miniatures and Monstrosities of Recursive Valorization: On Barthelme and Gaddis

DIETER PAUL POLLOCZEK Miniatures and Monstrosities of Recursive Valorization: On Barthelme and Gaddis The canon debate has bordered in recent years on a more general critique ofvalues. Building on deconstruction's disfigurements ofaesthetic value and the grand narrative ofemancipation, critics have described canonical texts as endorsing the hegemonic values of dominant social groups (Smith 51). While it is not entirely clear that, conversely , noncanonical texts will prove politically effective enough to function antihegemonically, the way canonical and noncanonical works are currently made to confront one another in our curricula reflects a question concerning the larger social order: whether nonhegemonic subcultures form subordinate, subaltern, and/or subversive relationships with a given dominant culture (Thomas 82-83, 101-2). As a result, readings of canonical texts that are sympathetic to pluralist rationales, such as the reading I will be presenting, will have to consist of exposing those texts' hegemonic values. However, the theoretical basis for such readings must not emerge as a cultural value which would itselfstand in need to be exposed as hegemonic elitism. Thus, the tension between included and excluded texts continues to be seen from the mutually exclusive perspectives of the canonical and the noncanonical, while the theories of representation that dismantle identity politics and the politics of representation that endorse it have begun to move in quite different directions. Those criticizing the literary canon on a pluralist basis have frequently advanced a dismissal of aesthetic value from critical discourse Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 98Dieter Paul Pottoczek and, by the same token, subsumed the aesthetic under the political. To reduce, however, the aesthetic to an expression of the economic does not mean that one can similarly reduce cultural transvaluation to the tensions between canonical and noncanonical texts (Guillory 302, 339-40). To be sure, Barthelme's and Gaddis's texts need to be considered canonical, if only for the fact that their white male authors represent certain hegemonic features within our now internally divided curricula. Nevertheless, as an alternative to readings that expose such hegemonic values and that locate texts along the canonical-noncanonical scale of the valorizations typical of the canon debate, I will show how those texts enact cross-overs between the discourses of the aesthetic and the economic which anticipate some of the limitations of identifying cultural transvaluation with the current momentum ofcanon critique. To call the manifestations of such cross-overs miniatures and monsttosities is to not emphasize any notion of intrinsic value, but the valorizations implied in narrative scope. Therefore, I will underscore Barthelme's and Gaddis's similarities rather than the more obvious differences between them. Scope, however, has its own ideological implications, as Susan Stewart demonstrates for narratives of the miniature (for instance miniature book, micrographia, and tableau) and the monstrous (for instance extended hyperbolic forms like the tall tale or gigantifications of landscape as carnivalesque narratives since Rabelais and as contemporary "earth art" or postminimalist sculpture). Stewart analyzes how those narratives participate in Western culture's generation of the subject, in engendering a significant other, and how the aesthetization of commodities and the commercial exploitation of sexuality through an immateriality of signs praised by traditional aesthetics become subject to ideological formations of late capitalism. Rather than representing the complexity of those cultures which produced them, as organic historicism had it, such texts form part of the contingent valorizations carried out by specific communities: "The semiotic universe is an abstract and interpretive universe constructed by means ofconcrete social practices" (32). In consumer culture, Stewart maintains, the function of supplementarity "replaces its generating subject as the interior milieu substitutes for, and takes the place of, an interior self" (xi), whereas interiority 's relation to the monstrous is expressed in the relation to abstract authority (71). Thus both the miniature and the monstrous testify to On Barthelme and Gaddisgg narrative's desire to shape worlds by bringing closure to them through the ideology of a visual and linguistic multum in parvo. Although Barthelme's and Gaddis's texts are certainly part of the Western consumer culture delineated by Stewart, critics agree that these postmodernist texts deconstruct miniature and monstrous ideologies...