Towards New Grand Narratives in Postmodern Fiction

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document in english

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published 07/08/2007

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In Niel Brügger’s essay “What about the Postmodern?” Brügger relates Lyotard’s idea of the narrative of emancipation, writing that “[in such narratives] it is not only important to legitimate denotative statements, which fall into the sphere of truth, but also to legitimate prescriptive statements, which fall into the sphere of justice,” and that such grand narratives are “no longer trustworthy” (80). In this paper I will first examine the function of the grand narrative in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and will then examine grand narratives in a range of short fiction. DeLillo’s characters, although espousing doctrines that would seem to subvert existing grand narratives, are building for themselves sets of new grand narratives, which are often precariously founded upon the old. There is a mediation at work in the text evident not just in the way Jack lives his life in the consumer world, bombarded by information, but also in the way Jack narrates this world. I will focus on how that narration is working.

DeLillo's White Noise, on one layer, resembles Lyotard's emancipation narrative
Both Jack and Murray's style of speech is similar to Jack's view of Hitler's style
But this is not a problem in DeLillo's structuring of the narrative; rather, it is a problem the narrative sets forth
Another example of the hyperreferential style of life occurs in Chapter
The system had blessed my life
I turn again to DeLillo critic Bruce Bawer to finalize my point of Jack's hyperreferentiality
The irony with which Snow Crash is written prevents the Deliverator character from becoming a another Batman, Superman, or Dirty Harry
the language reminds me of a child's simple plotting of a cowboys and Indians game, or the logic of a children's cartoon