Postmodern Narrative/ Biographical Imperative

Abstract The novels we have considered thus far depict personages whose social marginalization results in a range of symptomatic psychic effects: the waywardness that distinguishes West’s characters; the fragmentation that plagues Nin’s and Barnes’s women and Ellison’s Invisible Man; the consumerist logic that drives Brooks’s Maud Martha. That these same effects can be discerned in examples of postmodern ism “proper” suggests the need to examine these latter works for the potential implication within them of the politics of marginality, in order to determine the extent to which they conceive such marginality as constitutive of the psychosocial phenomena they represent. This undertaking may have a tautological appearance, insofar as identifying these effects in the works I am about to examine seems to entail merely enumerating precisely the qualities that constitute them as postmodernist, thus begging the question of how we are to recognize postmodernist literary practice in the first place. In fact, however, I derive my authority for claiming these works as postmodernist from the extensive theorization of such practice that has been undertaken by numerous commentators from the 1970s through the mid-1980s. Indeed, many of these commentators themselves have-conveniently enough for my purposes hereactually drafted lists of artists whose work they take to embody most strongly a postmodernist impulse. My objective, then, is not to identify various textual effects as postmodernist but rather to examine more closely the effects that other observers have already identified as postmodernist in order to interrogate their relation to the aesthetics of marginality that I have traced in the foregoing chapters. And, as regards selecting the works that we might examine toward this objective, it seems to me that the aforementioned lists of postmodernist practitioners provide us with a good place to begin.