Toon Staes

The reevaluation of the past in Don DeLillo’sUnderworldandCosmopoliscan be seen as a valuable counterargument to Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalistic claim that contemporary society heralds the end of history. The sublime multiplicity of history in both novels illustrates how time eventually collapses in the eternal present of capital and technology. Consequently, it appears that postindustrial society draws in the individual to create a system with no outside. DeLillo’s historiographic metafiction nonetheless shows how rewriting the past can prevent history from being conclusive and teleological. Narrative therefore provides an alternative to established History — in which all events connect in light of the inevitable — but it also resists the solipsistic void of speculation and hearsay.

With specific reference to the David Foster Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center, my essay illustrates how the manuscripts and drafts reassembled as The Pale King can be used to address some of the loose ends that remain in this unfinished novel. Genetic criticism thus provides a number of hints of the directions in which Wallace may have been taking the book, and I will demonstrate that point both with regard to content and form. In a first part, the essay shows how the novel's representation of information overload corresponds with some of Wallace's reading material. I then go on to consider the issues of authorship in the book from the perspective of narrative theory.

In what for many scholars amounts to his most significant essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993), David Foster Wallace contended that television and advertising had come to adopt the trademark strategies of postmodernist metafiction. As a result of this appropriation, these strategies were no longer useful to “literary” authors who liked to imagine they were flying under the radar of the market and thus had something to say. If it wanted to regain this (perhaps illusionary) relevance, contemporary fiction needed to steer away from irony and other empty forms of self-reflexivity such as intertextuality and metalepsis. Most critics still agree, often all too easily, that Wallace implemented his own programme. Setting himself off against writers such as Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, he went on, especially in Infinite Jest (1996), to produce a high-octane evocation of reality in which irony and the self-relativizing moves it engenders are resolutely dropped in favour of a linguistic bravado that serves to investigate the tiniest details of moment-to-moment experience. The resulting intensity made earlier attempts at realism (including the celebrated depictions of the interaction between mind and reality in the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner) look like child’s play, and Wallace became one of the most successful writers of his generation. It is important to note that, in the public eye, the feat of his verbal sophistication was always matched by what seemed genuine ethical concerns. A sprawling and difficult novel, Infinite Jest is set in a near future where the programmed maximization of pleasure affects the lives of characters to the point of severe addiction and even catatonia, with no real remedy in sight apart maybe from genuine attention to one’s fellow

Recent narrative studies of complexity theory have shown that so-called ‘emergent complexity’ does not accommodate to narrative form. Complexity theory is an interdisciplinary field of study that researches how large-scale phenomena emerge from simple components without the guidance of a plan or a controlling agent. Emergence happens by chance, through decentralised interactions at lower levels. Its lack of clear causal chains makes the process difficult to conceptualise in narrative so this article turns to a fictional narrative to demonstrate how complexity theory has trickled down into contemporary literature: the historical novel Pfitz (1995) by Scottish novelist and theoretical physicist Andrew Crumey. While there have been a spate of publications on complex narratives in film studies, literature studies has lagged behind. As a counter, the article revives Tom LeClair’s notion of the systems novel (1987, 1989) as one useful model for thinking about narrative complexity in prose...

This essay focuses on the many different perspectives on past, present and future inAgainst the Dayto illustrate Thomas Pynchon's defence of Luddite fiction. By juxtaposing the anarchist conflicts of the early 1900s with the radically new scientific insights of the period, the novel exemplifies how the historical convergence of knowledge, capital and power in advanced industrial society has reshaped space-time into its own singular reality. The alternative views on time held by the anarchists, shamans and Quaternioneers inAgainst the Dayillustrate how the metaphysical or irrational might serve as counterweight to the rationalized worldview of rampant capitalism. It consequently appears that Pynchon's fictional re-imagination of time and space questions our all-enveloping and self-sustaining culture by problematizing the notion of historical knowledge.

This essay focuses on the many different perspectives on past, present and future inAgainst the Dayto illustrate Thomas Pynchon's defence of Luddite fiction. By juxtaposing the anarchist conflicts of the early 1900s with the radically new scientific insights of the period, the novel exemplifies how the historical convergence of knowledge, capital and power in advanced industrial society has reshaped space-time into its own singular reality. The alternative views on time held by the anarchists, shamans and Quaternioneers inAgainst the Dayillustrate how the metaphysical or irrational might serve as counterweight to the rationalized worldview of rampant capitalism. It consequently appears that Pynchon's fictional re-imagination of time and space questions our all-enveloping and self-sustaining culture by problematizing the notion of historical knowledge.