Brian McHale

Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry

My title is frankly presumptuous. To imply that reflection on narrative in poetry begins here and now, with this essay, is to dismiss out of hand a huge body of precedent. Narrative theorists have been thinking deeply about poetic narratives since ancient times. Arguably, there would be no tradition of systematic reflection on narrative at all, at least not in the West, without the Homeric poems, which, from Plato on down to Genette and Sternberg and beyond, have continuously served as touchstones of narrative theory. Many important theoretical developments have hinged on analyses of poetic narratives; for instance, it would be hard to imagine Bakhtin finding his way to a theory of discourse in the novel without the example of Pushkins Onegin. Nevertheless, presumptuous though it may be, my title does draw attention to a blind spot in contemporary narrative theory. We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry-or perhaps to resume thinking about it-because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component. Contemporary narrative theory is almost silent about poetry. In many classic contemporary monographs on narrative theory, in specialist journals such as the one you are now reading, at scholarly meetings such as the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, poetry is conspicuous by its near-absence. Even the indispensable poems, the ones that narrative theory seems unable to do without, tend to be treated as de facto prose fictions; the poetry drops out of the

Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts: Linguistics and Poetics Revisited

Critique de la theorie du recit chez Ann Banfield (Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, 1982).

Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but its all theater. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But its night. Hes afraid of the way the glass will fall soon it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing (GR:3).

Transparent Minds Revisited

Those who have not reread Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) lately ought to do so, if only to remind themselves of how wide-ranging, how judicious, how nuanced, and how stimulating narratological analysis can be. In the hindsight of thirty-some years, Cohn’s book surely ranks among the half-dozen magisterial achievements of what we now call “classical” narratology—which, I realize, might amount to damning with faint praise in certain doctrinaire “post-classical” quarters (an issue I address below). On the occasion of Dorrit Cohn’s receipt of the 2010 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, I took the opportunity to revisit Transparent Minds for the first time in years. This is not to say that I do not regularly consult certain parts of it, or assign specific chapters in courses, or discuss the book with graduate students; I do all of these things. But I do not recall having reread the entire book cover-to-cover with close attention since about 1980. The reason I read it with such care at that time was that I had been commissioned to produce an article-length review of the book, which duly appeared in Poetics Today in 1981. So I also took advantage of the occasion of Cohn’s Lifetime Achievement Award to reread that review article of mine—an experience that proved to be a good deal less gratifying than that of rereading the book itself. Who was this youngster, still in his twenties, who seemed to speak with such authority about what an adequate theory of consciousness in fiction ought to look like, and how it would fit into the larger

Thinking Some More about Narrative in Poetry: A Brief Reply to Bruce Heiden

My friend and colleague Bruce Heiden and I disagree on fewer matters than he seems to think we do, or in any case our respective positions can often be reconciled; but where we do genuinely disagree, we seem to disagree profoundly. Heiden thinks that analyzing verse in terms of the interruptions that lineation, stanza breaks, etc., introduce in the flow of language—as I propose to do in “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry”—is misguided. In his view, versification produces not interruption but combination and continuity: “phrases are modules of combination, and phrase-boundaries are not ‘breaks’ but junctures where phrases connect. . . . Verses are rotations, and every end is another beginning.” I concede that I favored the model of interruption in describing the segmentivity of verse precisely because it is somewhat counterintuitive, and so potentially (I hoped) illuminat-

Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism

Opportunistically, I seized on Katz’s wittily unpretentious figure of speech as a convenient metaphor for the literary-historical mechanism that I thought was responsible for the emergence of postmodernism in fiction. Resisting the model of Zeitgeist that McCaffery had offered him, Katz suggests that a number of American writers, independently of each other, had all arrived at the same aesthetic threshold at about the same time, not because they were implementing some theoretical project—ideas “in the air”—or because they were in communication with each other (which would not happen until sometime later, after the fact), but as a consequence of the shared literary-historical situation in which they all found themselves. According to this account, the breakthrough to postmodernism in fiction—or Katz’s breakthrough, any-

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literatutre

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of he field, from its emergence in the mid twentieth century to the present. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media and the visual and fine arts have characterised the historical development of postmodernism.

The Major Phase: Peak Postmodernism, 1973–1990

Rebranding Another big bang: on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m. (according to Charles Jencks), several high-rise blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, were demolished, signaling (not for the first or last time) the failure of International Style modernist architecture to deliver what it promised – safe, healthful, inexpensive, and above all rational housing for the masses. Waiting in the wings to supplant modernism was a new mode of architecture, one hospitable to such un modernist qualities as popular appeal, historical allusion, legible symbolism, and pleasure: postmodernism. The outlines of this new mode could be glimpsed in a book of that same year, the manifesto Learning from Las Vegas by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. That, at least, is Charles Jenckss story about the (literal) implosion of modernist architecture and the timely rise of postmodernism. It is a compelling one, especially in light of the fact that Pruitt-Igoes prize-winning architect, Minoru Yamasaki, also designed New Yorks World Trade Center, the North Tower of which opened in December 1972; the dedication of the entire complex would follow the next year. Buildings whose destruction almost thirty years apart frames the postmodern era, both designed by the same architect – the coincidence is uncanny (Paperny, 2010; Williams, 2011, 94). As compelling as it is, Jenckss story is perhaps too good to be entirely true. For one thing, as Jencks admitted all along, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe is only one of a multitude of symptoms of modernist architectures exhaustion in the late sixties and seventies, if a strikingly iconic one. Moreover, the specific time of Pruitt-Igoes destruction – 3:32 p.m. – which contributes so much to the storys air of circumstantial precision, turns out to have been fabricated (Jencks, 2011, 27). In any case, the demolition of the complex, though begun on that day in 1972, actually continued into the next year, 1973 (Killen, 2006, 211).

Other titles in this series

BENiOFF et al.—Contributions in Geophysics S W I N E FORD—Clays and Clay Minerals {Sixth Conference) GIN z B u R G—Principles of Geochemical Prospecting WAIT—OvervoUage Research in Geophysical Applications S W I N E FORD—Clays and Clay Minerals [Seventh Conference) T Y U T Y U N O V — A n Introduction to the Theory of the Formation of Frozen Rocks K RIN o V—Principles of Meteoritics NALIVKIN—-The Geology of the U.S.S.R. SwiNEFORD—Clays and Clay Minerals [Eighth Conference) PoKORNY—Principles of Zoological Micropalaeontology S W I N E FORD—Clays and Clay Minerals [Ninth Conference) SwiNEFORD—-Clays and Clay Minerals [Tenth Conference) BRADLEY—Clays and Clay Minerals [Eleventh Conference) RosENQVisT and GRAFF-PETERSEN—-International Clay Conference 1963 COLOMBO and HOBSON—Advances in Organic Geochemistry BREGER—Organic Geochemistry HELGESON—Complexing and Hydrothermal Ore Deposition B A T T E Y and TOMKEIEFF—Aspects of Theoretical Mineralogy in the U.S.S.R. BRADLEY—Clays and Clay Minerals [Twelfth Conference) PoKORNY—Principles of Zoological Micropalaeontology [Volume 11) Vol. 21. RosENQVisT and GRAFF-PETERSEN—International Clay Conference 1963 [Volume II) Vol. 22. YERMAKOV—Research on the Nature of Mineral-forming Solutions Vol. 23. BRIDGE and BRIDGE—Clays and Clay Minerals—Index to the Proceedings of the Ist-lOth National Conferences Vol. 24. HOBSON—Organic Geochemistry, 1955 Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol.