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Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative
Mark Edelman Boren
Abortographism and the Weapon of Sympathy in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of A Sleepwalker
Robert E. Kohn
Pynchon’s Transition from Ethos-based Postmodernism
to Late-Postmodern Stylistics
Roi Tartakovsky
E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as
Poetic Device
Review Essay
Julian Wolfreys
Everyday Modernities
Our intuitive notion of time comprises four fundamental beliefs: (1) time flows in a fixed direction; (2) you cannot fight this flow and go back in time; (3) causes always precede their effects and (4) the past is written once for all. This paper examines narratives that create alternative visions of time through the violation of one or the other of these four principles, focusing on the consequences of the violations for narrativity. The denial of (1) occurs in narrative that reverse the direction of time (Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World), but after reviewing several possible definitions of time’s arrow, I argue that in order to maintain narrativity these stories should not invert the cognitive arrow. The violation of (2), constitutive of time-travel narratives, is shown to potentially result in causal loops (Audrey Nifenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife). Time travel can also lead to causes preceding their effects and rewriting the past, but here I discuss stories that create these paradoxes without the benefit of movement across time (D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel and Emmanuel Carrère’s La Moustache.) Against logicians who claim that a single contradiction in a system results in the destruction of the entire system, I argue that temporal paradoxes do not completely block the construction of a fictional world, but rather, invite the reader to imagine a “Swiss cheese” world in which contradictions occupy well-delimited holes of irrationality surrounded by solid areas about which the reader remains able to make logical inferences.
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Mark Edelman Boren. “Abortographism and the Weapon
of Sympathy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of A
Sleepwalker”/ 165
Conceived when the United States was in its infancy, facing an unknown
future, and with dangers on all sides, Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of A Sleepwalker
has traditionally been read as a gothic novel that reflects the dire issues
and chaos facing the new nation, and as giving birth to and defining the
literary character of the American frontiersman. This essay focuses on
the novel’s darker side, exploring Edgar Huntly’s machiavellian ambition
and how the character uses an unusual rhetorical gift to cause the women
around him to miscarry and thus secure his own financial future. Edgar
Huntly reveals what happens when the power of empathy is recognized by
someone with a gift for eliciting feeling and not shy about manipulating
it for unethical ends. This novel should also be seen as the masculine
colonization of the novel of feeling, a psychological cautionary tale that
underscores that in certain hands, empathy can be an extremely dangerous
weapon.
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Robert E. Kohn. “Pynchon’s Transition from Ethos-based
Postmodernism to Late-Postmodern Stylistics” / 194
The Crying of Lot 49 was written while the postmodern ethos was developing.
The essence of that ethos, which Pynchon helped shape, was the repudiation
of modernity’s unconditional faith in the inevitability of human betterment
through scientific, technological, moral, and cultural advancement, the
rejection of modernity’s penchant for sweeping totalizations, particularly
about right versus wrong and good versus evil, the refutation of modernity’s
scrupulous separation of fact from fiction, and its disavowal of modernity’s
cultural elitism. In the present essay I argue that The Crying of Lot 49
influenced the postmodern American art of the 1980s, specifically that
of Robert Longo, David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Keith Haring, which in turn
influenced Pynchon’s shift to late-postmodernist stylistics in Against
the Day. Whereas the ethos underlying The Crying of Lot 49 is onerous,
the stylistics inspired by that ethos render Against the Day relatively
light-hearted. Not only is style in itself more light-hearted
than revisiting historical trauma, but Pynchon’s era benefited by the abating
fear of total nuclear destruction and scientists’ shift from concern for
the increasing thermodynamic entropy of the solar system to the celebration
of decreasing entropy at the worldly level.
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Roi Tartakovsky. “E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses:
Punctuation as Poetic Device” / 215
Punctuation, M. B. Parkes writes, is part of a text’s pragmatics.
Originating with a need to assist unskilled readers, punctuation communicates
an interpretation of a written text, but is itself the object of interpretation,
in conjunction with historical shifts. As semantically fuzzy, marks of
punctuation offer a particularly rich repository for artistic exploitation.
The poetry of E. E. Cummings seizes upon this opportunity with unparalleled
rigor. This paper maps the usage of one mark of punctuation, parentheses,
appearing in the vast majority of Cummings’s hundreds of poems. Treating
parentheses as a poetic device, the paper divides their usage into seven
categories, providing representative examples from throughout Cummings’s
writing. Taken together, these categories aim to show that punctuation
is able to perform crucial poetic tasks, and should therefore be read with
at least as much attention and consideration as other poetic elements.
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Julian Wolfreys. “Everyday Modernities” /
248
In this review, two markedly different critical works are seen to converge
in their attention to a revised sense of modernism¹s attentiveness
to the everyday, and to small local acts, events, or behaviour. In focusing
on such otherwise unremarkable quotidian instances and freeing them from
mimetic subservience to reality, Ebbatson and Rabaté reveal how
modernist aesthetic modes are fundamentally phenomenological in orientation,
and, in this, do not show the world so much as they disclose the nature
of being.
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