A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
Author(s): Catherine Burgass
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies , 2000, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (2000), pp.
177-186
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
CATHERINE BURGASS
University of Liverpool
There is perhaps likely to be a general quickening of inte
of time and history towards the end of a millennium.
best-seller, A Brief History of Time (1 988), which explains
the complex physics of time and space, is a manifestation
Without attempting to trace in any detail connections
theories of time and those in the wider cultural cont
working on a theory which posited the dissolution of the
the universe (its beginning and end) in the I970s, the
theorists were deconstructing the idea of linear time and
ing this chronological confusion.' Postmodern fiction i
priately characterized by a concern with ontolog
exploration of the boundaries between fact and fiction
text. Lyotard makes the basic or commonplace distinction
it takes the painter to paint the picture (time of "prod
required to look at and understand the work (time of "
time to which the work refers (a moment, a scene, a situ
events: the time of the diegetic referent, of the story to
stating: 'This principle, childish as its ambitions may be,
isolate different "sites of time".'2 Childish or not, postmo
often too credulous of postmodern literature's ability to
ontological categories, including the distinction between r
in a parallel fictional world, because they fail to put
position of the 'naive' (non-academic or recreational) re
'competence' facilitates the absorption of metafictive
fictional world. The novels discussed below deconstruct lin
thematic and/or plot devices, but it will be argued that w
plot disrupts causality and coherence to a significant exte
meaning both the temporal-causal chain of events and 'ya
will its potential to disrupt ontological-chronological categ
The concept of linear time, or 'classical' time, can be fou
Physics, although its very existence as a divisible entity is
into question: 'The following considerations would make o
either does not exist at all or barely, and in the obscure w
1 See John North, The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology (London: F
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffre
Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 78.
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I78 A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
has been and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet. Yet time -
both infinite time and any time you like to take - is made up of these.'3 This
time can be objectively measured because 'change is always faster or slower,
whereas time is not; for fast and slow are defined by time -fast is what
moves much in short time, slow is what moves little in a long time; but time
is not defined by time, by being either a certain amount or a certain kind of
it' (p. 37I). It is, however, dependent on motion: 'For it is by means of the
body that is carried along that we become aware of the before and after in
the motion, and if we regard these as countable we get the "now"' (p. 372).
This ' "now" is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and
future time), and it is a limit of time (for it is the beginning of the one and the
end of the other) (p. 375). The fact that this 'now' is both 'link' and 'limit' is
highly significant for any deconstruction of time since it functions both to
separate and to mediate the binary opposition of past and future. In fact
Aristotle raises, though he does not finally endorse, the possibility of a radical
deconstruction of linear time, when he remarks:
If coincidence in time (i.e. being neither prior nor posterior) means to be in one and
the same 'now', then, if both what is before and what is after are in the same 'now',
things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what
has happened to-day, and nothing would be before or after anything else. (p. 370)
The argument cited against this notion rests on the relation of time to space:
'The distinction of before and after holds primarily, then, in place' (p. 37I).
The concept of linear time, the progression from past to present to future, is
one which has been challenged by quantum physics, but which remains
dominant in both the scientific and the popular imagination. For Derrida,
however, whose fame rests on combining the spatial difference of
structuralist linguistics with temporal difference in poststructuralist differance,
linear time is no longer tenable because of its reliance on binary
oppositions: 'At the point at which the concept of differance and the chain
attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics
(signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity
etc.) - to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something
present [ . .] become nonpertinent.'4 In 'Spectres of Marx', Derrida
questions the notion that the past and the future are mutually exclusive:
'Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the spectre of the
past and the spectre of the future [ . . ] one must ask oneself whether the
spectrality efect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this
dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.'5 The 'spectre' of
Marx functions rather like differance here, as the mobile force used to
deconstruct the binary of linear history.
3 The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Oxford: Princeton University Press,
I984), I, 370-
4 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 29.
5 'Spectres of Marx', New Left Review 205 (May/June I994), 31-58 (p. 36).
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CATHERINE BURGASS I79
There is a clear connection between theories of time and
for the banal reason that plot represents events which h
Aristotle's theory of plot, as formulated in the Poetics, is
linear theory of time: 'Tragedy is an imitation of an action
in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole may b
to speak of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, mid
is also causal: 'A beginning is that which is not itself necessa
else, and which has naturally something else after it; and en
naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or
and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is b
thing and has also another after it' (p. 2321). Aristotle's mo
structurally similar to his model of time that it appears to
common of plot devices, such as analepsis, and to confine i
the temporal-causal raw material of fiction as defined
Formalists. Derrida's theory of 'writing' can be found in
Heidegger's Being and Time and depends on differance: 'Such
at once, again, give us to think a writing without prese
absence, without history, without cause, without archia
writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology
ontology.'7 This model of writing suggests a radical dissolut
Plot has always entailed arranging or deranging linear
significant disruption of the temporal-causal story, but bef
century this artifice was not generally foregrounded. In m
disruption of linear time is naturalized, for example throu
a character, or is a familiar device like the explanat
omniscient narrator characteristic of nineteenth-centu
modernist fiction, which demonstrated an increasing pr
time in its experiments with plot, did so in the ser
representation. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway contras
objective time: the disjunction between the former and the
by the chimes of Big Ben slicing into Clarissa's consciousne
of her 'tunnelling method', which relies heavily on analepsis
by memory. These plot devices are distinctive, but
foregrounded since their purpose is to render faithfu
sciousness, including the perception of time.
In postmodern fiction, thematic and plot devices are desi
to question linear history and temporality. Gabriel Gar
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the story of the Buend
generations and one hundred years until its final extin
demonstrates a characteristic circularity. At the close of th
Buendia finds a history of his family in the form of a prop
6 The Complete Works ofAristotle, n1, 232 I.
7 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Harve
p. 67.
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I80 A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
hundred years ago of the next hundred years, that is the book the reader has
just been reading. The text Aureliano reads is in code, 'based on the fact that
Melquiades [the prophet-historian] had not put events in the order of man's
conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such
a way that they coexisted in one instant'.8 This is an ideal to which a real
plot cannot conform; although the story is peopled with revenants and
history keeps repeating itself in successive generations of the Buendia family,
it is, like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), conventionally
chronological. As Aureliano, fascinated, reads more quickly, he hastens his
own death as the real and fictional story come to a simultaneous close. This
device could be read as metafictive, but the novel belongs to the tradition of
magical realism and its treatment of time is naturalized within this genre.
The conclusion of the novel does not so much deconstruct the time of the
story as bend it in a circle, effectively sealing the self-contained fictional
world.
Midnight's Children has elements of magical realism but has also been
defined by Linda Hutcheon as an 'historiographic metafiction', a genre
which foregrounds the narrative construction of history in direct opposition
to those early-eighteenth-century fictions, such as Robinson Crusoe, which
claimed to be real histories and were sometimes accepted as such. It is also
engaged in a discussion of narrative technique. As the title Midnight's Children
suggests, time is thematized; the narrator Saleem Sinai was born 'once upon
a time [... .] And the time? the time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's
important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.
Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.'9 (This time is
significant because it was the hour of India's independence.) However, the
narrator muses: 'time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a
thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan
would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts' (p. 459).
Postmodern fiction tends to favour relative time over subjective time and to
question the very possibility of objective time and measurement. Plot is
discussed in metafictional passages; the narrator-protagonist is relating his
story to his consort Padma, the naive reader incarnate who believes Saleem's
narrative to be factual, history rather than story. Saleem particularly notes
Padma's reactions to the metafictive elements of his narrative: 'Padma has
started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious'
(p. 65). He modifies his style of story-telling accordingly: 'I must return
(Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect' (p. 295). These
metafictive passages accurately describe the actual plot structure; although
they represent time out of narrative time and remind the reader that
'distortions are inevitable', the story is related broadly chronologically and
8 Gabriel Garcia MItrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Bard,
1971 ), p 382.
9 Midnight's Children (London: Cape, 198I; repr. Pan, I982), p. 9.
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CATHERINE BURGASS i8i
the present of the telling is fictionalized to the extent th
shatter the boundaries of the fictional world.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1968) also thematizes the writing of
history, this time of the Second World War, particularly the bombing of
Dresden. It opens with a qualified truth claim: 'All this happened, more or
less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.'10 This parodies the
eighteenth-century novelistic convention, as does the title page. Time is
predictably unpredictable, even for the narrator, who experiences a conflict
between subjective and objective time: 'The time would not pass [ . .] The
second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and
then it would twitch again' (p. 20). It is another framed narrative whose end
is prefigured in its beginning as the narrator tells us that the story he is going
to tell begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet? (p. 22)
And so it does.
The narrator proceeds to relate the fantastic tale of Billy Pilgrim, war-
time chaplain's assistant and time traveller. Aristotle's scenario, where
'nothing would be before or after anything else', is dramatized as the hero is
abducted by benevolent Aliens, for whom
all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The
Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments [... ]. They can see how
permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests
them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another
one, like beads on a string. (p. 27)
This picture of time has its origins in Einstein's general theory of relativity
(I915), a radical revision of Newtonian physics, contemporaneous with
modernism, which presents the universe in terms of a four-dimensional
space-time continuum although it does not directly challenge the idea of
linear time. Tralfamadorian plot construction is coherent with four-
dimensional time; their novels are emphatically anti-Aristotelian and bear a
singular resemblance both to Derrida's idea of writing and Melquiades'
fictional technique in One Hundred rears of Solitude. They are laid out in clumps
of symbols which are read 'all at once, not one after the other. There isn't
any particular relationship between all the messages [...]. There is no
beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.
What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen
all at one time' (p. 88). Conventional plot is considered in the initial framing
chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five where the narrator discusses one version of the
story which he has outlined in crayon on a roll of wallpaper:
10 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1968), p. i.
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I82 A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of
the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and
then there was all that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the
red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character
represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on. (p. 5)
The real plot of Slaughterhouse-Five is somewhere between the Aristotelian
plot and Derrida's 'writing' or the narrator's plot diagram and a Tralfamad-
orian novel. The postmodern plot and reading experience cannot match
Derrida's ideal because the 'earthling' cannot read or write the scenes or
symbols of the novel simultaneously. If we were to attempt to draw a real
plot diagram of Slaughterhouse-Five in crayon, it would resemble coloured
spaghetti. But although its jumps in time are more frequent and abrupt than
those in either Midnight's Children or One Hundred rears ofSolitude, the prolepsis
and analepsis is still 'realistically' motivated by Billy Pilgrim's travel
backwards and forwards in time, which is itself naturalized by his abduction
by the Tralfamadorians or, if you cannot stomach that, by his madness,
caused by a bump on the head in an aeroplane crash. The narrator describes
himself 'as a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and
wonderful dialogue and suspense' (p. 5). Slaughterhouse-Five is another highl
'readable' novel where cause and effect still operate and even though t
conclusion is written in the introduction the writer cannot dispense w
suspense, because the reader does not know for sure whether or how th
conclusion is reached until he reaches it in real time.
According to John North, Stephen Hawking's deconstruction of the
boundaries of time can be described in terms of a circular, self-contained
universe which has no beginning or end. Possibly the replacement of linear
time with circular or deconstructed time in postmodern theory and fiction is
a manifestation of the fear of death, and these alternative narratives of time
function to replace the religious narratives of immortality which have been
discredited in a godless world. The Tralfamadorians have no such fear of
death precisely because they can see the fourth dimension: 'When a
Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in
plenty of other moments' (p. 27). Billy Pilgrim tries to spread the Tralfamad-
orian gospel, at one point speaking at a radio conference on the death of the
novel, at another reassuring a little boy he is fitting for glasses that his dead
father is really alive in other moments. Paul Ricoeur suggests in Time and
Narrative that it is through narrative that we humanize time and resolve the
disjunction between our necessarily limited experience and the scientific
idea of time. Both Hawking's theory and the fourth dimension as depicted in
Vonnegut's novel are imaginative constructions to the extent that finity
bounds human experience, but they are read in different ways: one as
scientific exposition; the other for its entertainment value.
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CATHERINE BURGASS I83
Clearly, beginnings and endings have a special functi
metafiction, marking the entrance and exit of the fict
parallel time. There is a structural circularity in th
confounds linear time: the end of Midnight's Children retur
the telling, a not unconventional plot device, but also foret
ending of One Hundred rears of Solitude is more complex a
future in a historical document. The narrator of Slaug
particularly taken with those songs whose last line repeats
so on to infinity', like the story of Billy Pilgrim (p.
deconstruction on narrative time in 'The Law of Gen
Blanchot's La Folie dujour, which includes in its final parag
Derrida reads this as a deconstruction of linear time:
These first words mark a collapse that is [... ] unsuitable within a linear order of
succession, within a spatial or temporal sequentiality, within an objectifiable
topology or chronology. One sees [... .] reads the crumbling of an upper boundary.
[... ] Suddenly, this upper or initial boundary, which is commonly called the first
line of a book is forming a pocket inside the corpus. It is taking the form of an
invagination through which the trait of the first line, the borderline, splits while
remaining the same and traverses yet also bounds the corpus. 1
This symbolizes the deconstruction of narrative chronology. However, this
kind of metafiction could just as easily be read as reinforcing the self-
containment of the fictional world together with its particular chronology in
an infinite 'loop'.
The final novel, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller (I979), is the
most radically and structurally metafictive. On the penultimate page the
reader is asked, 'Do you believe that every story must have a beginning
and an end?'.'2 The novel plays mercilessly with the Aristotelian notion of
plot. It opens: 'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's newv novel, If
on a winter's night a traveler' [sic]. The 'story' is enclosed within a full frame
and ends in the same manner: 'And you say, "Just a moment, I've almost
finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino"' (p. 205). But unlike
the traditional frame which gently leads the reader into and out of the
narrative, Calvino's is structurally closer to Derrida's parergon or chiasmus, a
deconstructed, collapsed, or 'invaginated' frame that is both inside and
outside the body proper of the text.13 Calvino intersperses metafictive
(numbered) chapters with named chapters which parody various genres.
The numbered chapters, which form a continuous narrative, are addressed
to 'you', the Reader and in this metafictional story, 'you' read the first
(named) chapter, 'If on a winter's night a traveller', but find that the book
has been wrongly bound and 'you' have in fact been reading the first chapter
' Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 236.
12 Ifon a winter's night a traveller, trans. by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1982), p. 204.
13 For a discussion of the parergon see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington
and Ian McLeod (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 61; see also Acts of Literature,
pp. 236-38.
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I84 A Brief Stogy of Postmodern Plot
of a different novel. 'You' then return to the publisher for a copy of this book
and are issued with a similarly deceptively bound but different novel, and so
it goes on. The metafictive chapters parody the classic romance as 'you', the
Reader, and Ludmilla, the 'Other Reader', meet, overcome various
obstacles, and finally get married.
There is some debate as to the metafictive power of this text. For Welch
Everman, 'the work goes beyond itself, beyond its printed text and into the
text of the Reader's (real) world. This novel is purposely literary, and yet it
wants to push against the limits of the literary and break through to a place
beyond language'.'4 Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen read the opening
frame in a similar dualistic way: 'The first sentence is both true and fictional
in intent.'15 Elizabeth Ermarth maintains that postmodern novels, unlike
conventional linear narratives, foreground the experience of reading as a
continual present.16 Although the reader of If on a winter's night a traveller is
addressed as 'you', because he is inscribed in the text he can be read as an
entirely fictional character. Linda Hutcheon concedes, 'The reader is [.. .]
a function implicit in the text, an element of the narrative situation. No
specific real person is mean.'7 Elizabeth Dipple more pertinently points to
the fact that the reader of If on a winter's night a traveller is a particular fictional
character.18 In spite of the documented assimilation by a wider non-scientific
public of radical new theories of time and the assertions of literary theorists
that metafiction disrupts ontological categories, in practice it is only
academics who are consistently self-conscious enough to read metafiction as
persistently disruptive. 'Real' readers can often quickly neutralize metafic-
tional devices so that their ontological (and chronological categories) remain
intact. This is something recognized by Lamarque and Olsen, who maintain
that fact is largely irrelevant to literature because factual inference is blocked
by what they call the 'fictive stance' (p. 88). The fact that readers temporarily
suspend disbelief and imaginatively enter the alternative fictional world with
its alternative temporality, renders them immune to metafiction.
Theoretical attempts to establish the ontologically disruptive capacity of
metafiction are doomed to failure because of the primacy of context in
interpretation, but one can predict that the power of metafiction will be
drastically reduced if the reader is already familiar with the technique. Many
readers are, not only because metafiction was a highly popular literary mode
during the I970S and I98os, but because it has a long history, its origins in
14 Who Says This?: The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 122.
15 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, I994), p. 66.
16 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, 'The Crisis of Realism in Postmodern Time', in Realism and Representation:
Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. by George Levine (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 214-24.
"7 Narcissistic Narrative. Th7e Metafictional Paradox (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 139.
18 The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 107.
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CATHERINE BURGASS 185
the British novel being almost contemporaneous with the
At one point in the archetypal eighteenth-century me
Shandy, the narrator parodies the plot devices of the nove
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time
having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my four
farther than to my first day's life -'tis demonstrative that I h
and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I f
instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with w
at it- on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back
Such metafictive devices foreground plot design as If on
traveller foregrounds real (reading) time, but neither effe
the simple fact that realism and reality are not identical,
literal truth are different, and that real time and narrativ
and are therefore separate.
There is one factor that tends not to be considered w
potential of metafiction to disrupt ontological-chrono
where story is subordinated and there is no compensation
readerly pleasure of 'consumption', there is even less l
ordinary reader's sense of separate worlds will be com
such novels are likely to remain unread. The reader of Ca
be able to fictionalize 'you' but for the fact that the nove
other ways. At one point 'you' remark that 'this is a nove
have got into it, you want to go forward, without stoppi
structure prevents this as each false fictional start is arres
then succeeded by another. If on a winter's night a travelle
irritate or frustrate a recreational reader to the point th
going forward and simply puts the book down. A com
Allais's Une drame bienparisien, by Umberto Eco seems ap
text: 'The naive reader will be unable to enjoy the story (h
uneasiness), but the critical reader will succeed only by en
of the former.'20 According to the rather bossy narrator
The dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love
fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajec
disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only i
period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet see
a period that lasted no more than a hundred years. (p. 13)
In spite of some jibes at humourless theorists, If on a winte
neatly illustrates and even incorporates postmodern th
highly innovative arrangement of temporal-causal events,
19 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ( 759-67; repr. N
PP. 295-96.
20 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), p. 0.
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i86 A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot
of old-fashioned story-telling. Slaughterhouse-Five, Midnight's Children, and One
Hundred rears of Solitude, on the other hand, play with time but their respective
stories are neither subsumed nor exploded by their postmodern plot.
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