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English Studies Forum
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Bone-White Light & The Silent Room: The Center of Postmodern Fictional Space Neil Murphy But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. --Virginia Woolf, "Street Haunting"
Beginnings Much like all fictional universes—from the first etchings on cave walls to the psychological impulses behind the geographical imagery of 19th-century fiction—postmodern fictional ontologies provoke, imply, and contain ramifications. The topology of postmodern fiction has a recognizable aspect, a characteristic shape frequently resembling what Brian McHale calls a “disorientated paradox-ridden interior space” (Constructing 157). Implying confusion and claustrophobic anxiety, McHale’s description reveals a familiar perspective on the landscapes of postmodern fiction; however, these landscapes are intensely complex interior spaces with enormous epistemological implications for the meaning of the postmodern. Of course, the suggestion that textual landscapes substantially contribute to meaning is nothing new. The peculiar qualities of postmodern fictional topologies and architectural spaces create a distinctly different kind of meaning, greatly contributing to the suggestion that we reconstitute what we even mean by meaning. Rather than being random spaces of indefinite appearance, postmodern novels are frequently composed of highly recognizable images and familiar motifs, all suggesting similar kinds of significance. In addition, many writers nominally use the quest motif to frame their fictional worlds. Ways in which such traditional elements are manipulated greatly contribute to the intellectual core of postmodernism. Owing to the particularly resistant, anti-representational nature of the postmodern impulse, these invented worlds often seem diverse in appearance, even if regular in their subversive logic. The post-Kafkaesque labyrinthine maze—replete with its potent metaphorical suggestions of anxiety, disorientation, repetition, and exhaustion—is a favored construction of Jorges Luis Borges (“The Library of Babel”), Alain Robbe-Grillet (In the Labyrinth), and Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman). Similarly, the Chinese box, or mise-en-abyme, offers endless destabilizing possibilities to Vladimir Nabokov (Despair), Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies) and Italo Calvino (If on a winter’s night a traveler). Both the maze and the Chinese box subvert any ontology that might resemble what we call the “real,” to erect a world that operates by a series of rules not regulated by conventional notions of temporality or encyclopedic geographical space. This desire is even more evident in Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, which presents a highly unconventional body of images in an effort to comprehend a universe which will not yield to the exactitude of language: “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing there to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out” (7). The difficulty with such an arbitrary set of images is that the text flirts with incomprehensibility, and the logic that underpins the fantasy landscape is lost in the process. Alternatively, Beckett’s fictional and theatrical works empty their spaces of such clutter. Except for an important but limited number of highly symbolic props, Beckett’s fictional universes are sparse, verging on silence, hardly there at all. Confounded by the unmeaning of their own memories, language, and activities, Beckett's narrators have little time for distractions like those Brautigan offers. Many of these authors position their characters on some kind of quasi-journey, in part to emphasize the absurdity of journeying towards meaning or knowledge (hence the fascination with labyrinths and worlds within worlds, essentially digressive forms), but also because such motifs generate qualities of circular and/or nonsequential imprisonment, suggesting the confinement of that meaning or knowledge. The ensuing journey to nowhere assumes nightmarish qualities when the maze has no exit or, in a Beckettian sense, the waiting has no end. Journeys, Houses and Empty RoomsArguably a formal precursor for this kind of writing, Beckett’s fiction generates various instances of what might be termed claustrophobic movement. Molloy, for example, embarks on a journey only to inform us of its inconsequential nature and, more problematically, to tell us that reaching anywhere is impossible: "But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wheresoever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely" (61). Thus, with the effective erasure of the concepts of change and destination, the journey is undone and the prospect of meaning is degraded. Furthermore, throughout the Trilogy, the exact nature of the narrators' ontological make-up deeply compromises the readers' grasp of landscape. Malone informs us that he is the creator of Molloy and Moran, yet his grasp on his own ontological status grows increasingly tenuous as his dialogue progresses. After all, the title of the text, Malone Dies, refers to his own death. While relating his story about Macmann/Saposcat, the text ends without Malone ever resurfacing. Is the primary world then Malone’s, Macmann’s, or neither's? In this way, Beckett renders the world projected in Malone Dies highly ambiguous. Readers are uncertain of either narrative's ontological status. Malone’s ultimate problem is that he, like Beckett, is trapped within the walls of his imaginative fortress with nothing but words and surreal memories. No matter how many ontological levels he constructs, no matter how many Molloys, Morans, Merciers or Camiers he might invent, the actuality of existence cannot be reached. Implicit in Beckett’s response to the traditional fictional strategies of the journey and the reliable narrator is a rejection of the ways in which such narrative elements contribute to meaning. His reason for doing so hinges on a deep skepticism at the validity of received narrative stratagems, at least in terms of the assumption that temporal and spatial aspects of form are somehow fixed emblems of truth. Alternatively, though exhibiting analogous skepticism, John Banville chooses to retain, at least in principle, conventional narrative elements, in particular the metaphor of the house. Throughout his fictional oeuvre, Banville places this image at the center of his work and erects therein a complex series of self-reflexive statements about the artistic process. Hence, the house becomes an ontological space in which the author plays out a perpetual, increasingly sophisticated debate about the meaning of art and the feasibility of communicative acts. For example, in Eclipse, Banville's narrator returns to his childhood home only to gradually discover the insubstantial nature of his own being or consciousness: “The presence of living people in it has robbed the house for me of an essential solidity. The Quirkes have made me too into a ghost—I am not sure I would not be able to walk through walls, now” (24). Ironically, the presence of real people erases the fictional house’s solidity. More important is Banville’s persistent use of the house as a topos from which meaning radiates. Again, in Mefisto, the interior of the house acts as a labyrinth of hidden, never-to-be-realized possibilities: “The attic was a warren of little low rooms opening on to each other like an image repeating itself into the depths of a mirror. It was hot and airless up here under the roof” (44). Used in tandem with another recurring postmodern motif—the mirror—the warren of attic rooms acts as a locus of unmeaning, the endless similarity of things and places. From the outset, Banville’s works retain the conventional fictional device of the house, but he radically alters its décor and allows strange inhabitants and postmodern logic to take up residence: Perhaps I shall leave here. Where would I go? Is that why they all fought so hard for Birchwood, because there is nowhere else for them to be? Outside is destruction and decay. I do not speak the language of this wild country. I shall stay here, alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever known. (174) The ancestral home Birchwood becomes an image of tradition, and Banville's rejection of less-defined spatial images, like the “wild country,” registers his discomfort with an absolute break with the past. Instead, Banville's work returns to a house dramatically reordered to resemble many other ghostly postmodern domestic spaces. Largely representative of a radically diminished faith in the validity of epistemological systems, these formal responses are only a few of the rich variety of technical constructions explored by postmodern fiction-makers (McHale, Postmodernist). Nevertheless, a significant imagistic consistency proliferates the architectural ontologies of postmodern fiction. Close analysis of these interior spaces, specifically with regard to domestic dwellings and other architectural structures, reveals an astonishing consistency and regularity of design. For the postmodern imagination, the primary significance of this recurring patterning lies in the deep correlation between spatial design and what Ihab Hassan and George Steiner, among others, name postmodern silence. Essentially rejections of the representative act, dwellings that recur in many postmodern novels bear similar traces of interior design; hence, the combination of empty rooms, unnatural blinding light, endless corridors, and locked/unlocked doors reconstitutes our understanding of a feasible ontology. Readers can use these fictional images to excavate meaning, as opposed to non-meaning. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendia dreams of “going into an empty house with white walls [ . . . ] upset by the burden of being the first human to enter it” (217). However, rooms like Buendia’s are a permanent fixture in many otherwise impermanent postmodern ontologies. Beckett's The Unnamable conceives a room “low of ceiling, thick of wall, why low, why thick, I don’t know” (373). Robbe-Grillet’s unnamed narrator in Topology of Phantom City reveals his spatial claustrophobia: “faced with the row of closed doors, down the endless empty corridor, unalterably neat and clean” (142). In “Numbers in the Dark,” Calvino describes a house whose “windows reveal a series of empty rooms, immersed in the chalky whiteness that reverberates from fluorescent tubes on walls [ . . . ] on bare polished desks” (79). More recently, Albert Wendt entraps the narrator of Black Rainbow in a windowless room, “odourless and full of bone-white light” (106). A continuous thread connects the minimalist imagery in these recurring fictional rooms and corridors. After traveling circuitous routes to arrive in what is effectively the center of meaninglessness, or the empty space beneath layers of epistemological phantasmagoria, various bewildered narrators finally discover themselves in ontological spaces at the centers of their universes. For example, Black Rainbow tells a tale within the tale of a woman (without name, personality or appearance) who is instructed to wait before a door to an Interrogation Room. She eventually tires of waiting, embarks on an endless journey through various doors, and dies “years later,” never reaching any meaningful destination. Wendt’s mise-en-abyme exemplifies the logic of the inconsequential journey and the terror that arises when one discovers that what she thought was meaningful proves otherwise. The narrator finally tells us she would have found the “meanings” to her life if she had bothered to read the doors, upon the backs of which were inscribed the following words: ALL DOORS ARE ABOUT OTHER DOORS THEY ARE THEMSELVES These lines imply that the nature of the search, the journey, is the true problem: if the narrator had read the signs, “she would have gone home to her husband and children and not wasted her life chasing hope, salvation, meaning, through doors and doors and more doors” (108). The search for meaning is fruitless because there is no meaning, and some variation on this suggestion lies at the center of many postmodern fictions. Banville’s Gabriel Swan finds the hallucinatory center of his travails to be utterly indeterminate: And it seemed to me that somehow I had always been here, and somehow would remain here always, among Mammy’s things, with her little unrelenting eyes fixed on me. She signified something, no, she signified nothing. She had no meaning. She was simply there [ . . .]. And would be there, waiting in that fetid little room, forever. (Mefisto 230) Bereft of what is best described as a conventional realist canvas, this topos acts as a symbolic center of unmeaning in many postmodern fictional worlds, and in it one can discern what Roman Jakobson calls the dominant, or “the focusing component of a work of art” (105). The secret of Gabriel’s quasi-quest is that at the center of Banville’s textual universe—the “fetid little room”—lies nothingness. This quality of nothingness, or more precisely, the quality of the inarticulate, is the central resonant metaphor in postmodern fiction. Fetid rooms, empty corridors, closed doors, and sparse houses comprise the central architectural topos in many postmodern fictions; thus, the various “heroes” must eventually confront this hidden center of silence.
In the Silence Echoing a plethora of Beckettian voices, John Barth’s anonymous writer/narrator of “Title” writes from a pit of self-conscious “loathing”: “What has it been from the first? Don’t ask me. What is there to say at this late date? Let me think; I’m trying to think. Same old story. Or. Or? Silence” (106). More revealing is Beckett’s The Unnamable, which extends the intellectual and communicative bewilderment of its immediate fictional predecessors in the Trilogy: "how can I say it, that’s all words, they’re all I have, and not many of them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it, I know that well, it will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries, the usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice" (380-381). The silence of which Barth and Beckett speak represents a pivotal point in their work, stripping away the systematic layers of conventional Western knowledge to reveal an emptiness at the heart of articulation. Fittingly, Beckett’s fiction famously ends on an apparent paradox: “in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (382). Unresolved as ever, the author abandons us in that same hidden space, that room of the inarticulate that we repeatedly find in work of this ilk, with little more than an insistence that he will persevere. Hence, the deeply self-conscious, non-representational, often farcical, fictional journeys (or more properly, non-journeys) that we perpetually encounter in postmodern fiction engender little more than faint murmurs from the center of silence. These bizarre raids on the inarticulate offer unmeaning instead of meaning, silence rather than sound, and deathly “bone-white light” in place of vivacious color. Colorless, odorless, and always silent, the rooms are devoid of objects, traces of life, sensual stimulation, and meaning. These journeys into nothingness hardly seem worth the effort. Implicitly foregrounding the purely systematic nature of human modes of knowledge, the silent rooms of postmodern fiction suggest a communicative divide between humans, a retreat from the communal, and the concurrent possibility of abrogation of moral responsibility. All form is unnatural, though the concept of the natural too is unnatural. Language is a system of signs, not the grammar of the soul. Thus, as the argument generally goes, this is symptomatic of the final decadent impulses of art for art’s sake. Representative art, or the act of decorating one’s house of fiction with conventional imagery, is a process not easily relinquished. Dick Hebdige’s concerns represent this spirit of resistance: However, the consequences of the assault on representation for ecrivants and image-makers are, on the whole, rather more mundane. First the referent (the world outside the text) disappears. Then the signified and we are left in a world of radically "empty" signifiers. No meaning. No classes. No history. Just a ceaseless procession of simulacra. (268-269) Hebdige’s anxiety stems from an inability or unwillingness to recognize a different kind of interiority, a failure to read the metaphorical signs of the postmodern. Expressing the value of the “incalculable potential of the negative,” Hassan offers a more lucid and calm perspective: The negative, then informs silence; and silence is my metaphor of a language that expresses with harsh and subtle cadences, the stress in art, culture and consciousness. The crisis is modern and postmodern, current and continuous, though discontinuity and apocalypse are also images of it. Thus the language of silence conjoins the need both of autodestruction and self-transcendence. (12) For Hassan, silence is a metaphor for the “stress in art, culture and consciousness,” a kind of negative artistic suggestion of the ineffability of language. In this sense, the silent centers of postmodern fiction—via a negative dialectical gesture—represent an intellectual core, absent positive concepts of meaning. The metaphor proves powerfully resilient, resisting the illusion of exact linguistic meaning and undermining the suggestion that language can provide coherent utterance for human experience. George Steiner suggests as much in his reading of silence: “And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these, for how should speech justly convey the shape and vitality of silence?” (30). Unlike Hassan, Steiner’s silence is not simply metaphorical. He suggests that the roots of the deep Western anxiety about silence lies in the fundamental Greco-Judaic primacy of the word, a kind of absolutist faith in the articulate that engenders a need to linguistically possess. Contrasting this desire with Buddhism and Taoism, Steiner makes a powerful case for the validity of silence as a state of consciousness, perhaps even of knowledge: The ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word. It is only by breaking through the walls of language that visionary observance can enter the world of total and immediate understanding. Where such understanding is attained, the truth needs no longer suffer the impurities and fragmentation that speech necessarily entails. It need not conform to the naïve logic and linear conception of time implicit in syntax. In ultimate truth, past, present and future are simultaneously comprised. It is the temporal structure of language that keeps them artificially distinct. (30-31) Notwithstanding the religious aspect, Steiner’s evocation of a world beyond language—of non-linear, non-temporal existence—has clear resonance for postmodern fictional spaces, replete as they are with subverted chronologies, awareness of language's synthetic nature, and deep suspicion of language's value. Evoking the central Buddhist doctrine of the koan—what is the sound of one hand clapping? silence—Steiner posits the belief that language is a deceptive veil that we vigorously maintain because we fear the inarticulate, nothingness. Hassan and Steiner represent a desire to read recurring images in postmodern fiction, a desire not always present in contemporary criticism. Their intent, however, is mirrored more frequently among fiction-makers. Robbe-Grillet, although certainly no conscious promoter of Buddhist values, occupies similar ground to Steiner: "And the man of today (or of tomorrow . . .) feels no sense of deprivation or affliction at this absence of meaning. He no longer feels lost at the idea of such a vacuum. His heart no longer needs to take refuge in an abyss. For if he rejects communion, he also rejects tragedy" ("Snapshots" 292-293). Essentially rejecting the humanist enterprise to pursue knowledge or render life meaningful, Robbe-Grillet asserts the postmodernist position. Anxiety is itself a self-generated fiction of fear—lost meaning that was never really there—simply embedded in the fictions of meaning with which humanity has kept the silence at bay. The communicative desire that words represent is complicit in that defensive act. One speaks in order to be heard, to generate a communal gesture of some kind, but consequently the silence is drowned. Film-maker and novelist Neil Jordan engages this issue in his Sunrise with Sea-Monster, evoking the ritualistic movement of nightline fishing as a metaphor for silence: "There was a shocking relief in the silence there, in the knowledge that we could abide together amidst this ritual, and as with the nightlines, not have to blunder towards speech. So I came to think of God as a great mass of quiet, a silence that was happy with itself, a closed mouth" (17). Jordan has long been intrigued with the closed mouth, the silent significance. In his earlier novel Dream of a Beast, a rewriting of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Jordan's narrator undergoes both a radical transformation of consciousness and a Gregor Samsa-like physical mutation before he can approach the center of silence: I stood on the landing, listening to the new quality of this silence. Slowly it came to me that silence was not what for years I had supposed it to be, the absence of sound. It was the absence, I knew now, of the foreground sounds so the background sounds could be heard. These sounds were like breath - like the breath of this house, of the movement of the air inside it, of the creatures who lived in it. They seemed to wheel around me till I heard a piece of furniture being pulled somewhere, too much in the foreground, and the spell was dispersed. (28-29) Jordan’s postmodern imagery speaks of silence not as a negative quality, but as part of the actual world submerged beneath fictions of conventional reality, beneath reason's unswerving belief in man’s systems of knowledge. However, Jordan’s optimism is not representative of all postmodern writers. It would be misleading to suggest that the interiority of postmodern houses, with their silent centers, is a resolved matter. Beckett reveals a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the silence about which he so frequently writes: The Silence, a word on the silence, in the silence, that’s the worst, to speak of silence, then lock me up, lock someone up, that is to say, what is that to say, calm, calm, I’m calm, I’m locked up, I’m in something, it’s not I, that’s all I know, no more about that, that is to say, make a place, a little world, it will be round, this time it will be round, it’s not certain. (373) Halfway to unachievable comprehension, the narrative voice flounders yet again. Beckett’s silence is a far less inviting state of consciousness than the tranquility of the Buddhist koan. Robbe-Grillet's narrator extends Beckett’s distress: “We are bored. We make bouquets that fade immediately. We are together all the time. There is no more time. We have not spoken for days and days. I think we have lost the power of speech” (Topology 98). In the grimness of not knowing, the narrator edges towards silence, hardly aware of his own ontological status. Such is the anxiety Steiner theorizes. Not knowing is devastating precisely because it amounts to a loss of control, or more accurately, perceived control. Rooms in fictional ontologies conventionally reveal historicity, contain emblems of social value, and bear fingerprints of humans in communion with society and its inhabitants. More than simply dwellings, houses act as physical memoirs of lives that mean something. In postmodern fiction, indistinct corridors beguile, rooms offer no domestic solace, and light blinds us to the “real.” If we accept Hassan's metaphor for silence as the meaninglessness that resides at the heart of these fictional spaces, then silence is primarily a way of saying what cannot be said. Yet the desire to utter the inarticulate remains. This is the crucial point. Embracing silence means registering our disquiet at what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms “the nostalgia of the whole” (81) and illustrating our capacity to reconsider the meaning of knowledge, perhaps in its bleakest sense. The problem is not that postmodern writers are constructing edifices without meaning. According to Aidan Higgins, even Beckett strives to “keep the void from pouring in” (7). The problem is our incapacity to recognize meanings that do not resemble the illusions we believe as reality. Postmodern novels typically offer landscapes and metaphors that do not resemble conventional reality; in fact, they often self-consciously proclaim their unwillingness to do so. Postmodern fictional ontologies are frequently
characterized by absence of color, sound, domesticity, meaningful activity, and
communication. Their significance emerges in non-meaning because meaning is an
illusion. Adorno’s study of dialectics helps clarify this issue: “What we
differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just so long as the
structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity” (5). The desire
for unity—to locate a way of knowing—results in the very anxiety Steiner
theorizes. If we enter the postmodern house searching for armchairs and
comforting fireplaces, we will discover only dissonance. Alternatively, if we
consider the bare walls of these unrecognizable rooms without a domestic map—a
map of unity—we may discern significant patterns. Yet, perhaps by even using
the word pattern we are already undone since our desire to know, to
discern connecting threads, is already resurfacing. Old habitats. Old habits. Works Cited Adorno, Theodore. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 1990. Banville, John. Birchwood. London: Panther Books, 1984. ---. Eclipse. London: Picador, 2000. ---. Mefisto. London: Paladin, 1987. Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Anchor Books, 1968. Beckett, Samuel. The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Picador, 1979. Brautigan, Richard. In Watermelon Sugar. London: Picador, 1973. Calvino, Italo. Numbers in the Dark & Other Stories. Trans. Tim Parks. New York: Vintage, 1996. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Higgins, Aidan. Introduction. Samuel Beckett Photographs. By John Minihan. London: Secker & Warburg, 1995. Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. 105-110. Jordan, Neil. The Dream of a Beast. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. ---. Sunrise With Sea-Monster. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992. ---. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1996. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “Snapshots and Toward a New Novel.” Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature. Ed. Patricia Waugh. London: Arnold, 1997. 292-293. ---. Topology of Phantom City. Trans. J. A. Underwood. London: John Calder, 1978. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966. London: Faber, 1967. Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Essex: Prentice Hall, 1998. Wendt, Albert. Black Rainbow. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1942: 23-29.
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