Postword, Postconcept: Contemporary Fiction and Theory

In the introduction to her new book, The Novel after Theory, Judith Ryan surveys a number of recent critical works that announce the passing of theory and the arrival of a post-theory era in academic discourse. This news—if heard—has no doubt been received with discreet glee by a lot of literature instructors. But just when it appeared safe again to preside shame-free over a classroom without uttering the nonword différance or explaining the nonconcept of undecidability, it turns out that contemporary novelists are themselves so well-versed in poststructuralist thought that, to understand them, the works of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard become required reading all over again. Something like this, at any rate, is the operative premise of Ryan's book. She makes few assumptions about the reader's familiarity with post-structuralist thought and its rise to predominance in the late twentieth century; she does expect the reader to be eager to learn about, rather than turned off by, these and other French theorists. Written in lucid and considerate prose, Ryan's book starts out acknowledging that "theory" covers much more territory than French poststructuralism, but she limits her inquiry to this field because it "had a major impact on contemporary fiction" (2). Her central aim is to document the breadth and examine the nature of this "complex intertextual relation between narrative fiction and poststructuralist ideas" (17).

Ryan's book is nothing if not well-organized and methodical. She divides her materials into three related sections: textuality, psychology, and society. The first section further divides into two parts, one addressing Barthes's idea of the "death" of the author, the other addressing Derrida's ideas of "différance" and "play." The second section focuses, first, on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and, second, on Julia Kristeva's and (to a lesser extent) Luce Irigaray's inquiries into écriture féminine. The third section takes up in sequential order Michel Foucault's social theory of the "carceral network," Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri's figures of nonbinary propositions ("nomads," "bodies without organs," and so forth). After brief synopses of each theorist's central ideas, Ryan examines in discrete subsections a small handful of novels, identifying points of contact between text and theorist. A compendium of endnotes demonstrates Ryan's awareness that most of the novels under discussion have been subject to extensive analyses by poststructuralist critics. As she states at the outset, however, her aim is not to read these works "through the grid of current theory" but rather to "show how novelists themselves engage with theory" (5). This distinction isn't entirely convincing, both because literary critics might well argue that they, too, show how novelists engage with theory and because some of the novelists she discusses— Marilynne Robinson, for instance—do not self-consciously engage with poststructuralist ideas, as Ryan herself concedes (61).

Still, the theory novice should appreciate Ryan's introductory explications, while the theory veteran who specializes in contemporary fiction can admire the range and number of American, European, and Commonwealth novels she discusses. From the renowned (Don DeLillo, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, inter alia) to the more obscure (Patricia Duncker, Camille Laurens, Wolfgang Hilbig, Michael Krüger, inter alia), these novelists collectively demonstrate that knowledge of poststructuralist theory is as important for understanding late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction as, say, knowledge of Darwinian theory is for understanding late-nineteenth-century fiction. Far from passing into the history of rarefied ideas, then, poststructuralism continues to ramify in the literary culture of the present. Ryan further recommends that we view these novels as pedagogical aids: "By clothing theory in the details of material, social, and psychological life, they can often render it easier to understand" (17).

Ryan's book is more successful in showing that novelists make self-conscious nods to "theory" than in showing that their substitution...