127 notes introduction: Remarks on Postmodernism 1. Larry McCaffery, like Fokkema focusing on literary fiction, locates “the postmodern awakening” in the period 1960–75 (1986, xix). 2. Fokkema adds wealth to the conditions necessary for the emergence of postmodernism in a society: “Postmodernism . . . is linked to a particular way and view of life, common in the Western world and increasingly common in the affluent societies of East Asia and Latin America. . . . The Postmodernist preference for nonselection as a principle of text production coincides with an embarras de choix originating in favorable material conditions and seemingly unlimited technological potentialities” (1987, 234). 3. Dowe Fokkema considers McHale’s use of the term ontological “misleading ” because it “has the connotation of traditional philosophy, of serious and explicit reflection on ways of being, and very little of this can be found in postmodernist writing” (1997, 20–21). However, McHale obviously does not have in mind traditional philosophy’s “reflection on ways of being.” Rather, he takes the phrase ontological problems from the framework of possible worlds, where ontology means choices from numerous alternative possible worlds. Steven Connor, who explores the radical experimentation in postmodern culture, maintains that postmodern narratives are “inseparable from the nested proliferation of different worlds or orders of reality.” He says that literary fiction took “the ‘ontological’ interest in creating and exploring other and multiple worlds” over from science fiction ([1989] 1997, 115, 134). 4. According to Hans Bertens, Hutcheon’s theoretization marks an encounter between the postmodern and the postructuralist debates. It has been so influential that we can speak about “a Hutcheon school” (1997, 12). 5. In Russia, Julija Rajneke echoes this view. She constructs a “model” of postmodernism , suggesting as its main feature “play” (igra): “Postmodernism plays with forms, signs, discourses, codes of various periods, styles, trends. The author plays with the text, with the readers. A playful attitude towards the word makes it possible to search for, and find, new senses hidden in it. . . . The postmodern- 128 Notes to Pages 9–12 ists love to play with virtual reality, use its means, they love to model rather than reflect reality” (2002, 36, 37). 6. There is no lack of critical arguments against the foundations and consequences of deconstruction by scholars young and old (see, e.g., Abrams 1977; Savan 1983; Rose 1984; Freundlieb 1988; Ellis 1989; and Pavel 1989). But Christopher Norris may be right when he claims that in “many passages” of his writings “Derrida says just the opposite” of what he originally claimed and that “his recent essays have laid increasing stress on this need to conserve what is specific to philosophy, namely its engagement with ethical, political and epistemological issues that cannot be reduced tout court to the level of an undifferentiated textual ‘freeplay’” (1988, 12). Derrida’s philosophy would thus neatly fit into Hutcheon’s image of postmodernism—courting contradictions, loving paradoxes, but leaving them unresolved. But how do we argue with a self-contradictory philosophy? Anything can be derived from a contradiction. 7. As Thomas Pavel pointed out, the epistemology of deconstruction implies that “the debate is concluded and the file has been closed” (1989, 9). This was not the first time that rational inquiry into poetic art had been declared finished. Referring to German aesthetic idealism of the beginning of the nineteenth century , Boethius proclaimed without blushing: “The history of poetology is hereby brought to its end, even though it seems to continue an armchair existence in the theories of literary scholars harking back again and again to the claims of the Enlightenment” (1973, 133). 8. Catachresis is Miller’s master figure, a manifestation of the very workings of meaning in language: “All words are initially catachreses. The distinction between literal and figurative is an alogical deduction or bifurcation from that primal misnaming” (1976, 29). Ironically, Miller thus arrives at a “unified totality” (Rimmon-Kenan 1980–81, 187), much grander than the structuralist totalization he had criticized. 9. Miller does exactly what all close analyses of poetic texts, including the structuralist poetics of the Prague school, have been doing: he describes the poetic text as an aesthetic phenomenon. The similarity between deconstructionist poetological praxis and Prague school poetics is not accidental; it has hidden roots in a common perception of what constitutes the basic features of poetic language . To my knowledge, this connection was first pointed out and documented by Peter Nesselroth in a paper presented, significantly, at the first post-Communist conference on the Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský, in...