Becoming Postmodern?

Ursula K. Heise

English Department
Stanford University
<uheise@leland.stanford.edu>

 

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.

 

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time addresses a problem that has been all too long neglected in studies of contemporary avant-garde art and thought: the concept of temporality. Although postmodernism’s relationship to and construction of space, time, and historicity has been discussed with some frequency in more general accounts, there has not so far been any book-length study focused in particular on postmodernism and temporality. In its attempt to fill this theoretical gap, Ermarth’s book must be welcome to any reader interested in postmodern theories and practices.

 

Ermarth analyzes the problem of temporality within the general framework of poststructuralist theory as well as the more specific one of narrative structure. The three theoretical chapters that constitute the bulk of her book explore the ramifications of her central thesis: postmodern theory and postmodern art replace the %historical temporality% which has dominated Western thought since the Renaissance with the concept of %rhythmic time%. Chapter One, “Time Off the Track,” defines historical temporality as a convention that emerged in the Renaissance and came to inform all the most important forms of Western knowledge. As a “realistic” or “representational” device,

 

historical time [is] a convention that belongs to a major, generally unexamined article of cultural faith . . . : the belief in a temporal medium that is neutral and homogeneous and that, consequently, makes possible those mutually informative measurements between one historical moment and another that support most forms of knowledge current in the West and that we customarily call "science." History has become a commanding metanarrative, perhaps %the% metanarrative in Western discourse. (20)

 

Postmodernism radically subverts this convention by relying on a “rhythmic time” which is no longer a transcendent and neutral medium “in” or “on” which events take place as in a container or on a road stretching to infinity. Rather, rhythmic time is coextensive with the event and does not allow the subject to distance itself from it, but collapses the two and binds both of them in language. It is a “time of experiment, improvisation, adventure”:

 

Because rhythmic time is an exploratory repetition, because it is over when it's over and exists for its duration only and then disappears into some other rhythm, any "I" or ego or %cogito% exists only for the same duration and then disappears with that sea change or undergoes transformation into some new state of being. What used to be called the individual consciousness has attained a more multivocal and systemic identity.(53)

 

This new type of identity, the topic of Ermarth’s second chapter entitled “Multilevel Thinking,” renders humanist and Cartesian notions of individuality obsolete, since the subject now exists in an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives and moments of awareness and becomes indistinguishable from the object. Ultimately, it turns out to be a construct of language, as Ermarth details in her third chapter, “Time and Language”:

 

If time is no longer a neutral medium, a place of exchange between self-identical objects and subjects and "in" which language functions, then the language sequence--especially in the expanded theoretical sense of discourse--becomes the only site where temporality can be located and where consciousness can be said to exist. (140)

 

In one of her most interesting theoretical moves, Ermarth describes this innovative linguistic constellation in terms of the medieval notion of %figura%, in opposition to the modern concept of %image%. In contrast to the image, the term %figura% for Ermarth emphasizes an understanding of the linguistic sign as reflexive rather than as representational, as a value within a system rather than as an indicator of some external reality. In the medieval as in the postmodern figura, the sign attains an “absolute” status insofar as it is not separate from the reality it is linked to, but coextensive with it. “[In postmodernism] [t]ime and subject %are% the figure,” Ermarth concludes, “and there is no ‘other side’ to it, except in some other figure” (181).

 

Each of the three theoretical chapters is followed by a “rhythm section” which illustrates the theory through an interpretation of a postmodern novel: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada. In all three, Ermarth emphasizes the amount of reader involvement that is required for the construction of the narrative sequence, to the point where readerly construction comes to form part of the text itself. Rather predictably, she focuses on the repetition and variation of key scenes in Jealousy, the varied reading itineraries of Hopscotch and the repetition and superimposition of themes and motifs in “alternative semantic contexts” in Ada, but all three novels are well chosen to give an idea of how rhythmic time in narrative differs from the traditional linear and “historical” plot. One wonders, however, whether the concept could have been shown to work equally well if Ermarth had included examples of those maybe more typically postmodern texts whose narrative is structured by formal principles not so easily accounted for in terms of repetition and semantic multivalence: Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, for example, the texts produced by the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or some of the novels of Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, or Christine Brooke-Rose, in which the layout of the printed page comes to play a crucial role for the understanding of narrative progression. Neither is it clear how the notion of rhythmic time would apply to the novels of, for example, Ishmael Reed or Kathy Acker, whose “storylines” are far more radically disrupted than those of Jealousy or Hopscotch. Ermarth here seems to have chosen her examples from that particular brand of early postmodernism that can be made to serve as support for her theoretical approach, to the exclusion of later, more radical experiments that present a much greater challenge to any notion of rhythm.

 

Nevertheless, Ermarth’s general claim that postmodernism implies a reconceptualization of time is in itself an innovative and promising one. But it is also obvious from the start that her definition of historical time as a realist convention dependent upon the Cartesian %cogito% leads her straight back to two of the most well-beaten tracks of postmodern theory: the critique of subjectivity and the critique of representation. The strength of this approach is that it makes the entire methodological and terminological arsenal of poststructuralist theory available for the study of time. But precisely as a consequence of this, time turns out to be just another metaphysical convention, another meta-narrative to be dismantled in terms that are by now familiar. I am not objecting to this on the basis of those reproaches that the more “historicist” camp of postmodern theorists has frequently leveled at the more “deconstructionist” camp–for example, that an account such as Ermarth’s, which opposes postmodern temporal notions to earlier forms of historical reasoning, relies on historical reasoning even in the process of announcing its demise; that the radically discontinuous “rhythmic time” she describes seems to preclude any notion of individual morality and any possibility of meaningful political thought or action; and that such a temporality makes it impossible for socially repressed groups to articulate their “histories” against the dominant “History” of the elite. Ermarth is aware of these objections, and answers them–tentatively, as she herself concedes–by arguing that social reform in the postmodern age must proceed through the construction of new forms of discursive mediation, and that the reformation of language is itself a political act (112-14, 156-57). To repeat the arguments against such a view would be merely to rehearse once more one of the most well-worn–though admittedly crucial–controversies over postmodernism. Instead, I would like to discuss briefly three central points of Ermarth’s account that seem to me to weaken its theoretical grasp: the absence of any discussion of already existing literature on temporality, the construction of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and the connection of time and language which, according to Ermarth, underlies the notion of “rhythmic time.”

 

Whereas the strength of Sequel to History lies in its familiarity with and survey-presentation of various theories of postmodernism, especially feminist ones, its maybe most serious shortcoming lies in its failure to engage any strand of previous research on temporality. Ermarth mentions Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative and Fraser’s Voices of Time in passing, but does not once refer to David Carr’s or Hayden White’s explorations of the connection between historical time and narrative.¹ There is no reference to any of the recent studies of time as a social dimension by Eviatar Zerubavel, Michael Young, David Landes, Paul Halpern or Stephen Kern, nor to any of the more specific studies of the contemporary experience of time by Jeremy Rifkin or David Harvey. None of the classical studies of literary and narrative temporality by Jean Poulet, Georges Pouillon, Hans Meyerhoff, A.A. Mendilow or Frank Kermode finds its way into her study, not to speak of much more recent ones such as Gerard Genette’s, Peter Brooks’s, or Suzanne Fleischman’s. Ermarth does not quote Roland Barthes’s critique of narrative time as a purely representational convention, or Thomas Docherty’s recent concept of a postmodern “chrono-politics,” both sources that are highly relevant to many of her considerations; neither does she mention Philippe Le Touze’s claim that in the %nouveau roman%, temporality has shifted from story to discourse, a hypothesis that anticipates her own claim that in the postmodern novel, time becomes a function of language. But maybe most surprising, given Ermarth’s attempt to develop a non-transcendental concept of time, is the absence of any engagement with Derrida’s suggestion that time itself is an irrecuperably metaphysical concept, and David Wood’s extensive discussion of this hypothesis in The Deconstruction of Time (1989). In a book which justifies its existence by the absence of theoretical considerations of time and postmodernism, this large number of omissions cannot but weigh heavily.

 

It does so not only at a purely theoretical level. Practically, Ermarth’s lack of concern for earlier analyses of time leads to the disappearance of high modernism from her historical map. The only current of pre-World War II literature she discusses is surrealism, but the more crucial precursors in questions of temporality–Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis’s rebellion against the “time school in modern literature,” and Gertrude Stein’s experiments with narrative time and timelessness, to name only a few–are left out of consideration. In fact, since Ermarth defines as “modern” the period from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century, one is left with the impression that novelists such as Proust or Faulkner would have to be considered postmodernists in her terminology. Is there any difference between them and the postmodernists she discusses –Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, Nabokov? Nowhere does Ermarth spell out whether she sees any fundamental break between the high modernist and the postmodernist conceptualization of time, or whether she views them as essentially homogeneous in their break away from Cartesian rationalism and realist forms of representation.

 

This is more than quibbling over labels, since her central theoretical notion, “rhythmic time,” can be applied to a number of modernist novels as well as postmodernist ones. Rhythmic time, according to Ermarth, manifests itself in narrative as a structure that no longer consists of linear plot development, but the repetition of identical motifs, details and descriptions with slight but disturbing variations, or as repeated and incompatible accounts of what the reader must take to be the same events. These variations and distortions make it impossible for the readers to construct a rational, representational picture of the novel’s world and events. Rather, they are invited to perceive the text as a figural pattern of elements which can be arranged and rearranged, “[e]mphasizing what is parallel and synchronically patterned rather than what is linear and progressive” (85). Thus, Ermarth argues, the structuring principle of the postmodern novel is paratactic rather than syntactic, relying on a style which “thrives by multiplying the valences of every word and by making every arrangement a palimpsest rather than a statement, rather as poetry does when it draws together a rhythmic unit by means of repeated sound or rhythm” (85). This is, on the surface, a valid enough account of the functioning of many postmodern stories and novels. But the emphasis on synchronicity, multiple meanings, and a structure closer to poetry than to traditional narrative also characterizes the late novels of, for example, Joyce, Woolf or Stein. In what way, then, is rhythmic time typically postmodern?

 

Furthermore, Ermarth’s definition of rhythmic time raises the question of why one would even insist on still calling this kind of narrative “temporal” at all in a sense other than the superficial one that it takes time to read. One cannot but remember that Joseph Frank used a very similar argument when he characterized the novels of Proust and Joyce as “spatial” in his influential essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”: overcoming the linearity of the 19th-century plot, Frank argued, the modernist novel invites the reader not so much to follow an evolving story, but a gradually spreading network of images which must be perceived in simultaneity. This simultaneity of perception he calls “spatial form.” Like Ermarth, then, he sees a paratactic patterning to be perceived in parallel or in simultaneity as the structuring principle of the 20th-century novel–only Ermarth does not call this “spatial form,” but “rhythmic time,” a concept she herself explains by means of other, sometimes quite distinctly spatializing terms such as “pattern,” “arrangement,” or “figura.” In this context, she quotes Robbe-Grillet’s programmatic statement from For A New Novel to the effect that “in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer completes anything” (155; Ermarth 74). But she seems unaware of how easily this could be used to support a concept such as “spatial form” rather than any specifically temporal approach.

 

Ermarth’s reference to poetry adds another twist to this: if the postmodern novel is configured on the basis of rhythm, repetition and patterns, then indeed how %is% it different from poetry? Given this affinity, could one not argue that postmodernism’s rhythmic time constitutes no real “reformation of time” at all, but simply the extension of a concept of time that has been present all along in the poetic tradition? I hasten to add that this is not at all a conclusion that I find satisfactory; I am quite prepared to accept that postmodern narrative does innovate our construction of temporality. But Ermarth’s account does not really explain why and how we do still read postmodern narratives as narratives rather than as extended poems. Hopscotch is %not% like long poems such as Pound’s Cantos or Hejinian’s My Life, but one cannot tell by Ermarth’s theory why that is so.

 

Even discounting these difficulties of applied narratology, though, Ermarth’s theory of time remains problematic. It follows logically from her critique of historical temporality as a representational convention that she ends up describing both postmodern time and consciousness as anchored in the differential signifying system of language. This final emphasis on the crucial role of language may appear at first like a staple of much poststructuralist theory. But the exclusivity which Ermarth attributes to language as the ground and site of all discursive formations, be they philosophical, esthetic, or ethical (“all thought is discourse and all discourse is language” [156]), turns into a serious problem for her theory of temporality. Let us assume for the sake of argument that our conception of time, and in general our cultural, social, and political practices do indeed “take place” principally in and through language, and that changes in these practices must be based on changes of or in language. But then how does language change? How do we get, for example, from the discursive formation that grounds historical time to the one that opens up the possibility of rhythmic time? How do–or did–we become postmodern? I do not see how Ermarth’s account can solve this dilemma: by situating time “in” language, she makes it virtually impossible to situate language “in” time.

 

This question cannot be brushed off by saying that it is a “historical” one of the kind Ermarth condemns (and even if it were, this would not eliminate the necessity of an answer, since Ermarth herself admits that her account cannot in all respects avoid historicity). Rather, it is a question regarding the very nature of change, of Becoming– that is, regarding the very “processual” character of time that Ermarth herself considers crucial. Possibly, Ermarth would argue that this question cannot be answered in general terms, since we would in this case be again reduced to a “neutral and homogeneous” temporality of some sort. But this is really conceding that there simply can be no non-metaphysical concept of time–a conclusion which leads Ermarth’s idea of a non-transcendental “rhythmic time” %ad absurdum%. A concept of time that is coextensive with the event cannot explain the process that leads from one event to another, and hence evades one of the most central questions in any theory of temporality.

 

These, in brief, are some of the difficulties Ermarth’s account of postmodernist time encounters, and which might have become, if not solvable, at least more manageable through an engagement with those texts that have already discussed them. My own prediction would be that a successful reformulation of the concept of time will only become possible once we rethink the postmodern notions of “metaphysics” and “transcendence.” Time will tell.

 

Note

 

1. I am indebted to Shirley Brice Heath for pointing the latter omission out to me.