Vladimir Bogievi*

University of Belgrade**
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia

IN SEARCH OF UNPRESENTABLE: DETECTIVES OF SUBLIME IN

(POST)MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL1***

Abstract:

This paper concerns itself with analysis of five representative American novels of XX
century Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Barth's Lost
in The Funhouse, DeLillo's White Noise, and Morrison's Beloved using Nabokov's
Lolita as a reference text and an intersection of certain narrative strategies which
figure in mentioned novels too. Through Lyotard's, Baudrillard's, Ricoeur's,
Hutcheon's and partially Derrida's philosophical postulates we will endeavor to
demonstrate that a common denominator of these texts is search for some modern
unpresentable, and role that in this search play different forms of marginal
perspectives. We shall also outline some provisional (and certainly incomplete)
typology of unpresentable paradox of desire, unreliability of reality and
indeterminacy of identity and determine several different margins psycho-
pathological, racio-cultural, historico-anachronistic and introvertedly-philosophical
at which, in various combinations, are being placed characters who engage
themselves in this search for unpresentable.

*
E-mail address: deklinacije@yahoo.com
**
PhD candidate
1
The texts we deal with in this paper include Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Barth's Lost in
the Funhouse, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and DeLillo's White Noise along with Nabokov's Lolita, as a reference
frame, stylistic landmark and strategic point of departure. Whereat, although Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is 'in fact'
collection of short stories, a number of repetitive motives, themes and procedures integrate these stories into a whole
(no doubt problematic) of its own while some of them also share the same main, and many secondary characters, as
well as common metafictional and metatextual approach, specific to 'experimental' writing which Raymond Federman
will name surfiction in 1973 (and with which Barth's literature of exhaustion, although drawing different
consequences, partially coincides): an American analogue of French nouveau (and nouveau nouveau) roman; i.e. that
which Linda Hutcheon would classify as late modernist radical metafiction. That's why we too, encouraged by
Barth's own insistence on integrity of his extraordinary, intra- and inter-textually networked piece, dare to place it (at
least as a borderline case) in the genre of the novel genre from the very beginnings (that is from its modern times
rebirth with Rabelais, Cervantes and Stern) sufficiently 'open' to embrace its own metamorphoses and 'extravagances'
as an essential feature and aesthetic imperative of its form.
***
This paper was presented as the exam paper for PhD course Modern American Novel held by Prof. Dr. Radojka
Vukevi at Belgrade Faculty of Philology, in March 2014. Translated from Serbian by Vladimir Bogievi.
Key words: contemporary American novel, margin, unpresentable.

1. Cultural-historical and literary paroxysm: from differences to similarities

American novel of XX century has grappled with many challenges those

inherited from European tradition, as well as those of specific, domestic origin.
Accelerated pace, at which the new continent entered into history endowed its moral
and political physiognomy with an abundance of heterogeneous and paradoxical
traits: in continual rivalry between liberal and conservative tendencies, and arduous
reconciliation of disparate settler cultures, young nation passed through all the stages
of spiritual and material fruition from the War of Independence and systematic
extinction of natives, through industrial expansion, institutialization and abolition of
slavery, the Civil War, economic depression, the Cold War and international
hegemony, a certain kind of paroxysm has been and remained differentia specifica of
American way of life. As in public, so in private sphere too, opposites have not
stopped to collide and potentiate each other extravagant individualism and rigid
traditionalism, puritanism and nihilism, populism and elitism, altruism and
utilitarianism allowing us to conclude the same about the US that Deleuze and
Guattari concluded about capitalism in general: a motley painting of everything that
has ever been believed.2 By the most part, this polarity and syncretism are
characteristic of every historical entity, especially in the age of global awareness and
international transactions: but America, compressing that incredible dispersion into
no more than 200 years of its history, became specific epicenter not just of these
universal contradictions, but also of irreducible local aporias, which, thanks to its
cultural domination at the end of XX century, today already constitute a sort of
(intellectual) social property. Providing inexhaustible material for all species of
literary production, and enriching the world literature by numerous autochthonous, or
at least specifically modified foreign literary trends, the most important subject
matters it bequeathed to its great novelists remained, in essence, those typical of
condition humaine in all epochs and climates conflict between the individual and
the system, between spirituality and consumerism, freedom and oppression but to
what extent its local coloring was irresistible can be seen just from all the affection
and meticulousness Nabokov invested in composition of the record of his love affair
with the English language,3 Lolita. Novels that will be treated here will not cross

2
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2000), p. 34.
3
Vladimir Nabokov, Afterword, in: Lolita (1958).
mentioned thematic boundaries either with the exception of Barths Funhouse that,
beside problematics of subject, thematizes the very act and essence of writing but
they all will be, as opposed to earlier American literati, who searched for their
inspiration in Anglo-European environment (James, Hemingway, Miller, Eliot),
marked by recognizable American scenery, motifs and history. Sometimes, the
themes will be those common to whole developed world at a given moment in
history such as racism, slavery and discrimination but which in American
continent underwent specific escalation, resolution and epilogue; sometimes those
that give impression of being both conceived and developed on American soil, but
whose origin and extent in fact reach much further (e.g. regarding media distortion
and recycling of reality, let us just remember Leni Riefenstahl or Stalinist spectacle)
and sometimes those whose universality is not even limited to the particular era,
country or system, and whose American variant is just a special case of one more
general process like when it comes to the decline of the old families, moral
degradation and replacement of old order with the new (what, in its modern form, we
find already in Balzac, Proust, Mann, and which has been there since man had
learned how to speak). Some common denominator that, in spite of such thematic
diversity, we could single out and under whose auspices we would place Faulkner,
Pynchon, Morrison, Barth and DeLillo provided that it will not be reduced to some
humanistic platitude, nor to their joint (though in some ways problematic) affiliation
to postmodernism will not be so easy to find, and we are afraid that our following
analysis will, despite our efforts, end up on equally undesirable speculative heights.
But, certain generalization is inevitable: all the more so since we are dealing with
extremely self-conscious authors not just in the metafictional sense, which
Hutcheon stresses, nor in McHales sense of ontological problematization of the text
(which are, without doubt, the best ways to approach Barths Funhouse),4 but also at
the level of social criticism, playing with literary tradition and procedures,
incorporation of mass culture, complicating reception (making it difficult), etc. In
other words, we are facing authors who play with reader one perplexing, Nabokovian
chess game and whose every move should be monitored with attention and disbelief:
for things rarely are as they look and reader most often will not be even capable to
figure them out to the end.

2. Theoretical backgrounds: analysis of the sublime

4
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction
(1987).
 Thats why our initial thesis, in Lyotardian spirit, will invoke as thorough as
possible let us not beat around a bush Kantian basis, into which we will try to
interweave all scattered narrative threads (though with not quite orthodox Lyotardian
conclusion): as we will along the way use other Lyotards terms first of all
differend and breakdown of metanarratives: already overexploited by now, but
nonetheless appropriate to point out to some unavoidable aspects, which without
them would be much more burdensome to clarify.5 We will not forget Baudrillard
either, whose theory of simulacra, media testing, model and code, although not so
wholeheartedly accepted in philosophical circles, excellently takes its cue from
Jamesons and McLuhans critique of media and consumer society, and almost
functions as a manual for reading DeLillo: but we will try to subsume it under
Lyotards basic dichotomies too and to draw conclusions with which, however,
Lyotard himself would have hardly agreed.6 But, our goal here, at any rate, is
certainly not to devise a coherent philosophical position: only to apply already
existing theoretical concepts, somewhat modified, for the sake of easier interpretation
of specific literary works not oversimplifying complexity of these works, but also
not straying into overcrowded theoretical arguments. We will, finally, make use of
Hutcheons insistence on the voice of the other, i.e. awakening the margin which
is direct descendant of Derridas decentering, but also of feminist, post-colonial and
Marxist criticism and we will make efforts to abuse it, just like Baudrillards
simulacra;7 thereat, we do not expect to encounter some more significant resistance in
making this philosophical mixture, since all postmodern thinkers essentially
proceed from the same, mutually interchangeable assumptions but how fruitful for
our interpretation this blend will show itself to be remains to be seen.
It is, namely, well known that Kant explains sublime as incompatibility of
comprehending faculty of imagination with bordering ideas of the mind (as opposed
to beautiful, which is harmonized play of representations of imagination and concepts
of reason); something that mind can grasp as an intelligible idea e.g. enormousness
of some mountain massif imagination can never fully present to itself: which results
in ambiguous feelings of fear and admiration characteristic of sublime.8

5
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1991); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (1984).
6
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994); Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Theory, Culture &
Society) (1993).
7
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988).
8
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement (2000).
 Sublime is the name given to what is absolutely great beyond all
comparison Precisely because there is a striving in our imagination towards
progress ad infinitum, while reason demands absolute totality, as a real idea, that
same inability on the part of our faculty for the estimation of the magnitude of things
of the world of sense to attain to this idea, is the awakening of a feeling of a
supersensible faculty within us; and it is the use to which judgment naturally puts
particular objects on behalf of this latter feeling, and not the object of sense, that is
absolutely great The sublime is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences
a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense The mere ability even to
think the given infinite without contradiction is something that requires the presence
in the human mind of a faculty that is itself supersensible. For it is only through this
faculty and its idea of a noumenon, which latter, while not itself admitting of any
intuition, is yet introduced as substrate underlying the intuition of the world as mere
phenomenon, that the infinite of the world of sense, in the pure intellectual estimation
of magnitude, is completely comprehended under a concept, although in the
mathematical estimation by means of numerical concepts it can never be completely
thought. Even a faculty enabling the infinite of supersensible intuition to be regarded
as given (in its intelligible substrate), transcends every standard of sensibility as a
broadening of the mind that from [the practical] point of view feels itself empowered
to pass beyond the narrow confines of sensibility.
Nature, therefore, is sublime in such of its phenomena as in their intuition
convey the idea of their infinity. But this can only occur through the inadequacy of
even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an
object... Now the proper unchangeable fundamental measure of nature is its absolute
whole, which, with it, regarded as a phenomenon, means infinity comprehended. But,
since this fundamental measure is a self-contradictory concept... it follows that where
the size of a natural object is such that the imagination spends its whole faculty of
comprehension upon it in vain, it must carry our concept of nature, to a supersensible
substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought), which is, great beyond
every standard of sense. Thus, instead of the object, it is rather the cast of the mind in
appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime.
... But in the contemplation of [the sublime objects of nature], without any
regard to their form, the mind abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason
placed, though quite apart from any definite end, in conjunction therewith, and
merely broadening its view, and it feels itself elevated in its own estimate of itself on
finding all the might of imagination still unequal to its ideas.
 The feeling of the sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising
from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain
to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this
very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with
ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law... Therefore the
inner perception of the inadequacy of every standard of sense to serve for the rational
estimation of magnitude is a coming into accord with reasons laws, and a displeasure
that makes us alive to the feeling of the supersensible side of our being, according to
which it is final, and consequently a pleasure, to find every standard of sensibility
falling short of the ideas of reason.
That is, in short, how Kant explains 'mathematically sublime' (omitting his
detailed description of alternations between faculties of comprehension and
apprehension); and here is what he says about 'dinamically sublime':
Nature, considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion
over us, is dynamically sublime... If we are to estimate nature as dynamically
sublime, it must be represented as a source of fear (though the converse, that every
object that is a source of fear, in our aesthetic judgment, sublime, does not hold). For
in forming an aesthetic estimate (no concept being present) the superiority to
hindrances can only be estimated according to the greatness of the resistance... But
we may look upon an object as fearful, and yet not be afraid of it, if, that is, our
estimate takes the form of our simply picturing to ourselves the case of our wishing to
offer some resistance to it and recognizing that all such resistance would be quite
futile... Provided our own position is secure... aspect [of terrifying objects of nature]
is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime,
because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace,
and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us
courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.
In the immeasurableness of nature and the incompetence of our faculty for
adopting a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its
realm, we found our own limitation. But with this we also found in our rational
faculty another non-sensuous standard, one which has that infinity itself under it as a
unit, and in comparison with which everything in nature is small, and so found in our
minds a pre-eminence over nature even in it immeasurability. Now in just the same
way the irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us the recognition of our
physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty of
estimating ourselves as independent of nature, and discovers a pre-eminence above
nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind from that
which may be assailed and brought into danger by external nature. This saves
humanity in our own person from humiliation, even though as mortal men we have to
submit to external violence. In this way, external nature is not estimated in our
aesthetic judgment as sublime so far as exciting fear, but rather because it challenges
our power (one not of nature) to regard as small those things of which we are wont to
be solicitous (worldly goods, health, and life), and hence to regard its might (to which
in these matters we are no doubt subject) as exercising over us and our personality no
such rude dominion that we should bow down before it, once the question becomes
one of our highest principles and of our asserting or forsaking them. Therefore nature
is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to a presentation of
those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of
the sphere of its own being, even above nature... Sublimity, therefore, does not reside
in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become
conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us
(as exerting influence upon us).
With additional clarification:
The proper mental mood for a feeling of the sublime postulates the minds
susceptibility for ideas, since it is precisely in the failure of nature to attain to these
and consequently only under presupposition of this susceptibility and of the
straining of the imagination to use nature as a schema for ideas that there is
something forbidding to sensibility, but which, for all that, has an attraction for us,
arising from the fact of its being a dominion which reason exercises over sensibility
with a view to extending it to the requirements of its own realm (the practical) and
letting it look out beyond itself into the infinite, which for it is an abyss. In fact,
without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture,
we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored man as terrifying.
... But the fact that culture is requisite for the judgment upon the sublime in
nature (more than for that upon the beautiful) does not involve its being an original
product of culture and something introduced in a more or less conventional way into
society. Rather is it in human nature that its foundations are laid, and, in fact, in that
which, at once with common understanding, we may expect every one to possess and
may require of him, namely, a native capacity for the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e.,
for moral feeling.
Which all amounts to Kant's final conclusion:
 ...Just as we taunt a man who is quite inappreciative when forming an
estimate of an object of nature in which we see beauty, with want of taste, so we say
of a man who remains unaffected in the presence of what we consider sublime, that
he has no feeling. But we demand both taste and feeling of every man, and, granted
some degree of culture, we give him credit for both. Still, we do so with this
difference: that, in the, case of the former, since judgment there refers the
imagination merely to the understanding, as a the faculty of concepts, we make the
requirement as a matter of course, whereas in the case of the latter, since here the
judgment refers the imagination to reason, as a faculty of ideas, we do so only under
a subjective presupposition (which, however, we believe we are warranted in
making), namely, that of the moral feeling in man. And, on this assumption, we
attribute necessity to the latter aesthetic judgment also.
... The sublime is what pleases immediately by reason of its opposition to the
interest of sense... It is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines
the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a
presentation of ideas.
In a literal sense and according to their logical import, ideas cannot be
presented. But if we enlarge our empirical faculty of representation (mathematical or
dynamical) with a view to the intuition of nature, reason inevitably steps forward, as
the faculty concerned with the independence of the absolute totality, and calls forth
the effort of the mind, unavailing though it be, to make representation of sense
adequate to this totality. This effort, and the feeling of the unattainability of the idea
by means of imagination, is itself a presentation of the subjective finality of our mind
in the employment of the imagination in the interests of the minds supersensible
province, and compels us subjectively to think nature itself in its totality as a
presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to effectuate this
presentation objectively.
Lyotard takes over these Kantian definitions, from Critique of the Power of
Judgement, and applies them in much wider context and in different fields (for it
should not be forgotten that Kant in his Critique actually speaks of natural sublime
either mathematical or dynamical)9: to him, determining feature of postmodernism, as

9
Especially since Kant strictly warns against using his arguments about mathematically sublime when it comes to
artistic creations: if the aesthetic judgement is to be pure (unmixed with any teleological judgement which, as such,
belongs to reason), and if we are to give a suitable example of it for the Critique of aesthetic judgement, we must not
point to the sublime in works of art, e.g., buildings, statues and the like, where a human end determines the form as
well as the magnitude, nor yet in things of nature, that in their very concept import a definite end, e.g., animals of a
recognized natural order, but in rude nature merely as involving magnitude (and only in this so far as it does not
convey any charm or any emotion arising from actual danger). Kant, pp. 252253. (The last exclusion being
well as of modernism, is precisely in dealing with presenting the unpresentable, i.e.
with impossibility for imagination to picture what mind must know to exist: the
difference between them being that modernism regrets this inability of imagination,
and is overwhelmed by nostalgia for the unpresentable while postmodernism faces
the same problem in much more serene way, finding in it an impetus for the play of
perpetual approaching and distancing: play in advance sentenced to failure, but no
less interesting for that reason.10 We can easily recognize in what fashion (and to
what purposes) Lyotard decides to refer to Kantian ideas, quoted above as well as
to what extent (and in what direction) he modifies them. Speaking of the lack of
reality (together with the invention of other realities) in technocratic capitalist
modernity the issue he already approached in The Postmodern Condition, through
the analysis of capitalist legitimation through performativity and comparing it
with Nietzschean strain of nihilism, he continues: But I see a much earlier
modulation of Nietzschean perspectivism in the Kantian theme of the sublime. I think
in particular that it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art (including
literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms. His
further exposition (with necessary reductions) amounts to the following:
The sublime sentiment, which is also the sentiment of the sublime, is,
according to Kant, a strong and equivocal emotion: it carries with it both pleasure and
pain. Better still, in it pleasure derives from pain. Within the tradition of the subject
this contradiction develops as a conflict between the faculties of a subject, the
faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to "present" something. Knowledge
exists if, first, the statement is intelligible, and second, if "cases" can be derived from
the experience which "corresponds" to it.
The sublime takes place when the imagination fails to present an object
which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept... We can conceive the

mentioned most likely because it befits more, respectively, judgment of beautiful and of dynamically sublime.) In the
same manner, he partially excludes the penitential religious reaction cases of recognizing divine wrath and
retribution in manifestation of natures devastating forces from his definition of dynamically sublime: Here, instead
of a feeling of the sublimity of our own nature, submission, prostration In religion, as a rule, prostration, adoration
with bowed head, coupled with contrite, timorous posture and voice, seems to be the only becoming demeanor in
presence of the Godhead... Yet this cast of mind is far from being intrinsically and necessarily involved in the idea of
the sublimity of a religion and of its object. The man that is actually in a state of fear because he is conscious of
offending with his evil disposition against [a Divinity] is far from being in the frame of mind for admiring divine
greatness, for which a temper of calm reflection and a quite free judgement are required. Only when he becomes
conscious of having a disposition that is upright and acceptable to God, do those operations of might serve, to stir
within him the idea of the sublimity of this Being, so far as he recognizes the existence in himself of a sublimity of
disposition consonant with His will, and is thus raised above the dread of such operations of nature Kant, pp. 263
264.
10
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism, in: The Postmodern Explained to Children
(1992).
infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to
make visible this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate.
Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible. Therefore, they impart no
knowledge about reality (experience) They can be said to be unpresentable.
So far, Lyotard does not deviate from the beaten track of Kantian aesthetics,
giving us a very concise and well-put overview of both mathematically and
dynamically sublime (as regards the main theses, some would say even more
straightforward and less perplexed than Kant does himself which is, actually, not so
unusual in philosophy); of course, only under condition that we shut our eyes to
Kants express restriction of his claims to the natural sublime, excluding every
teleological, man-made objects, endowed with a distinct purpose and meaningful
form (which means, without doubt, all cultural artifacts: literary works included).11
Lyotard, however, makes his cardinal points precisely by transposing this Kantian
theory to art, and ignoring its original aims:
I shall call modern the art which devotes its "little technical expertise" to
present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something
which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible: this is what
is at stake in modern painting It will be "white" like one of Malevitch's squares; it
will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by
causing pain Avant-gardes in painting devote themselves to making an allusion
to the unpresentable by means of visible presentations. The systems in the name of
which, or with which, this task has been able to support or to justify itself can
originate only in the vocation of the sublime in order to legitimize it, that is, to
conceal it. They remain inexplicable without the incommensurability of reality to
concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.
Starting from this basis, besides successfully determining one of truly
important features of modernity (although its exclusively modern nature is open to
discussion), Lyotard also manages to devise his primary modern-postmodern
dichotomy:
If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and
according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is
possible, within this relation, to distinguish two modes... The emphasis can be placed
on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt

11
Taking a pyramid or St. Peters Basilica as the examples of comprehension-apprehension process does not abolish
this restriction; Kant introduces it immediately after using these examples, and precisely in order to avoid giving
account of impure, mixed delight they cause in the observers.
by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of
everything. The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to
conceive, on its "inhumanity" so to speak since it is not the business of our
understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it
conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the
jubilation which results from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial,
artistic, or any other... The nuance which distinguishes these two modes may be
infinitesimal; they often coexist in the same piece, are almost indistinguishable; and
yet they testify to a difference (un differend) on which the fate of thought depends
and will depend for a long time, between regret and assay.
Here, then, lies the difference; modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime,
though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the
missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to
offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do
not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic combination of
pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain
that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms,
the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the
nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order
to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A
postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the
work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they
cannot be judged according to a determining Judgment, by applying familiar
categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of
art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in
order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.
Question: whether Kant was really necessary for this Lyotards diagnosis,
and what is its general applicability we will leave aside for the moment; we will
take it at face value, and agree that unpresentable is one of the most precious golden
fleeces of literature not, by the way, just since modernism, but already in
romanticism, and even earlier, in various variants of antique and medieval mysticism.
We will add, however, something more important, which will perhaps make
Lyotards dictum more understandable from our contemporary perspective: that the
nature of unpresentable, in regard to those earlier epochs, has considerably changed;
and that this change occurred after one significant standstill, in the time of positivism,
realism and naturalism (which is exactly the time frame Lyotard is interested in). Old
transcendences are demystified; God is already long since dead, as Nietzsche
declared; phenomenology of spirit is just an academic fiction and man just the most
recent episteme, like system of representation that precedes him, or even older system
of similarity.12 All the old Beyonds have been, therefore, in this or that way
disqualified (and it would be nave to return to them): and life yet remained
unfathomable.

3. (Post)modern unpresentable and its chosen ones

Unpresentable that is a subject of modern American novel are no longer

eschatological or subjective-spiritual unknowns God, afterlife, genius, inscrutability
of nature, infinity of imagination and even when they are, they come out more as a
symbolist intimation than as a romanticist metaphysics (e.g. religious moments in
Pynchon or death in DeLillo Heideggerianly purged of any transcendent meaning).
Whole new world of mysteries was opened up by scientific breakthroughs from the
end of XIX-beginning of XX century many ideal constructions were put ad acta,
while that understandable in itself came into focus of interest; meaninglessness of
routine, irrationality of social reality, impersonality of identity, logic of power and
submission, that are just some of the questions that philosophy as well as literature
since then has decided to address. Classical answer of Emerald Tablet (as above,
so below), taken over by Christianity, became unsustainable as soon as
transcendence that supported it was refuted: furthermore, it became clear that to
search for the first cause would mean to get into regressus ad infinitum, and that
dialectics of external and internal is ungraspable, elusive and interminable. That is
why indeterminacy had to take place of certainty, and partial analyses of total
explanations. The world, in other words, became decentered and lost its transcendent
pledge with the same thing happening to the subject, history, language, and even
science. It is not hard to follow that trend of demystification of unpresentable and
exclusion of original and final in structuralism and poststructuralism, just as it is
also easy to follow through great works of modernism and postmodernism; its lowest
common denominator could be described as replacement of chain, root or arborescent
model of conditioning with network, or rhizomatic one the model under which
elements of this world can be determined only by other similar elements, not by
12
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970).
some instance of higher (or lower) order.13 Lyotard, on the other hand, characterizes
same phenomenon as breakdown of metanarratives primarily two most important
metanarratives (of spiritual development and emancipation of man) and repeats the
same story of fragmentation of knowledge and rise of utilitarian, capitalist
paradigm.14 Great stories that give sense to the totality of human existence, in his
opinion, lost their credibility, and narrative space burst into multitude of smaller
narratives, paralogisms and differends that cannot be subsumed under some higher
unity. If any Primum Mobile is there at all, it is not to be found in unfathomable
heights of the Devine spiritual, transcendental, or whatever you call it but in
unsolvable aporias of the real.
In accordance with that change of unpresentable, its champions changed as
well: they are no longer mystics and hermits, ingenious philosophers and artists,
Faust who wrestles with Erdgeist himself. New unpresentable is still being searched
for, but now it has its detectives: random chosen ones, average and maladjusted,
oppressed and rejected all those who precisely because of their marginal position
have clearer view on the realm of the real. Whether it is about some pathological
ostracism or lack of social affirmation, they are the ones who are capable of stepping
out and exposing incomprehensibility of the normal: that is equally the case with
Faulkners Quentin, Morrisons Sethe, Barths Ambrose, Pynchons Oedipa and
even with DeLillos Gladney. This transition in the roles of observers and interpreters
of reality did not, however, happen overnight. It was the final stage of a development
passing through the symbolist aristocratism of social exiles, blessed with still
romantically conceived notion of misunderstood genius, accompanied by decadent
self-destructive glorification of les poetes maudits, and by opposite naturalistic
concept of the author as scientifically oriented experimenter and explorer. Dark
gothic extravagancies and grotesque exaggerations have freely mixed with low
realism (a Fin-de-sicle offspring of sermo humilis et remissus, in the long history of
stylistic evolvement of mimeticwriting, up to Zola, brothers Goncourt, Balzac,
Stendhal and Flaubert)15, visceral (often depraved and criminal) preoccupations and
social criticism leaving, beyond these paroxysms, encompassing simultaneously
striving for empty transcendence and wallowing in ugliness of everyday life, the
average man, one of the many, marginalized, anxious and solitary, to be the new
existential hero, and normality to play the role of the new unknown; unknown which

13
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, in: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1987).
14
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984).
15
See Erich Auerbachs Mimesis.
demanded interpretation, explanation and deciphering in the hope of revealing the
lost sublimity whether it resided, as some were willing to believe, in the red-hot
core of life itself (which we could trace back to Rimbaud, or even Villon), or,
alternatively, as far from life as possible (which could be associated, provisionally,
with Mallarme, Valery and most of the renaissance and medieval religious, love and
reflective poetry). In that sense, putting aside their obvious differences, all mentioned
characters find themselves in the same unraveling (hermeneutic) relation to the real
taking normality as a superior concept, which makes real what it is (as a sort of
Freudian reality principle). So, for example, in spite of their different social status,
level of social adjustment, differences in behavioral, cognitive-perceptive, desiring-
volitional or linguistic focus of narration, and even different degrees of fitting into the
frames of normality taking into account the contrapuntal pairing of subjective and
objective sides of adjustment and overall experience of the real both DeLillos
paradigmatically average, white, male, middle-class intellectual consumer, Gladney,
endowed with a critical bent and fairly developed existential curiosity and self-
awareness, and Morrisons paradigmatically alien, deprived, black, female, racially
and culturally discriminated and marginalized Sethe, involved in supernatural, gothic
and Poesque irresolvable resolution of her sexual and social traumas and guilt-
ridden family tragedy (also readable in the terms of the ambivalent return of the
repressed: the novel itself being, almost to the end, working out of Freudian
unfinishable analysis as well as straight out ghost story), are, for different
reasons, and from different perspectives, capable of experiencing and arousing
amazement as in the reader, so in themselves and other characters before the
worlds they inhabit. And, what is more important, distinguishing them from former,
also alienated romantic heroes, is that with them the well-known artistic technique of
defamiliarization formalist poetical (estrangement) and Brechts
dramatic Verfremdungseffekt has not been directed to the readily exalted, noble,
lofty and imaginative visions of the artists unique and overdelicate, or heroic and
fatal personality (which often carried the danger of degeneration into mere elitism
and vanity), but to the everyday reality of those human, all too human, as Nietzsche
would put it: emphasizing, even when it concerned artistic characters, rather those
features that point up to our limitations, doubts and impasses, than those that bear
witness to our profound spirits and remarkable souls. This is not to say that former
romantic, or even earlier, Enlightenment and humanist ideals were simply forgotten
and lost but now they have been questioned and enacted in more mundane
situations, by more ordinary people.
 This actually made the new characters, such as Gladny or Sethe, closer to the
renaissance heroes, such as Don Quixote stripped off of the latter romantic
interpretations and kept in the light of then-contemporary fashionable literature of
chivalric romances, as fictional canon bestowed with the power of creating the real
and fabricating normality in which respect the scenery of Don Quixotes
adventures might be seen as the prototype of DeLillos world of simulacra,
ubiquitous advertizing, labels, substitutes, and all the hyperreal spectacles of
American XX century consumerism. But same could be said about Sethe and
Beloved, in which many qualities of Shakespearean atmosphere break through the fog
of novels ghostly setting, and in spite of and alongside with influences of modern
psychology, racial and cultural issues, survive in the very structure of Morrisons
characters: in their obsessions and perseverance, the peculiar mixture of firmness,
humanity, roughness and resolve that borders with self-annihilation. In the same vein,
Nabokovs Lolita (whose role will be further clarified below) could, among other
sources, be traced back to the XVIII century literature (Manon Lescaut, Les liaisons
dangereuses not to mention Catullus and more obvious pre-romantic sources);
using at the same time a variety of romantic commonplaces, especially those related
to romantic heroes, which it subjects to a devastating ironic and parodic treatment.
Barth, on the other hand, plays with antiquity, confessional and epistolary forms,
Defoean found manuscript and Sternian tradition, occasionally even adopting the
accelerated pace of Voltairean farce (in order to facilitate his consciousness/language
dissolution). Pynchon, for his part, combines conventions of picaresque novel with
novel of Providence and conspiracy fiction (as well as DeLillo); while Faulkner, as
Barth, draws from antiquity, with heavily mystifying pathos, whose cumulative
effects ultimately converge to parody, as they do in The Funhouse (although, with
Faulkner, of much darker kind);16 but, unlike Barth, who holds to Homeric epic and

16
By the same logic by which orgiastic excess of pent-up emotions (of pity and fear), in medical interpretation of
Aristotles catharsis, results in their purgation: i.e. in climactic relief, comparable to physical purging of excess
humors bodily fluids in old Greek medicine which implies previous excessive accumulation, reaching trance-like,
ecstatic climax (such as exalted fury or divine madness of Maenads), before releasing this unhealthy overabundance
of emotions and restoring healthy, well- balanced state. In other words, moderation and proportion are achieved by
excess and abundance; quantitative disturbance leads to qualitative renewal, disproportion to equilibrium. In similar
manner, Faulkners mystifying pathetic empathy leads to its own opposite, to parodic distance; his irrational
exaggerations reveal a deeper ironic rationality. Readers of Absalom, Absalom experience this psychological reversal
precisely through gradual accumulation of uncanny impressions, their repetition and perpetual amplification, going
beyond any hyperbolical transgression and becoming ironic by the same stylistic devices employed to increase their
sentimental and pathetic quality. Archaic and legendary-mythical tone and imagery start to persistently and steadily
subvert and overturn themselves, reinforced by growing unreliability of narrative voices which slowly reveal their
overall parodic thread, right until the total breakdown of storys coherence, credibility and consistency behind which
emerges its fictional core (as well as still half-concealed meta-fictional structure of the novel). This bravurous
transitions in its textual strategy evoke the line from Hutcheons Poetics (albeit differing from her other views and
lyrical genres, he relies primarily on the Greek tragedy Aeschilean characters,
Sophoclean ethics, Euripidean rhetoric as well as on the Old Testament, from which
he borrows both his storyline and his protagonists psychology: imbuing them with
sediments of Southern gothic of late American romanticism (which we can easily
recognize in Morrisons novel too).
Listing all these sources has just one purpose: to reinforce our claim about
reorientation of modern XX century literature towards the everyday man,
Heideggerian Das Man (if that existential concept could have been incarnated as a
person), giving him central role and position in the text (which would reach its peak
with Joyces Leopold and Molly Bloom) and circumventing topos of romantic hero,
with his exceptional Self; as well as to suggest how this circumvention is performed
by appealing to what traditions allowing for the whole romantic metaphysics to be
deconstructed and turned upside-down. The most important characters tasks have
remained the same, searching for answers and existential meaning has continued to
be the main semantic axis around which events of the plot gravitate: but paths and
outcomes of that search have been fundamentally transformed. And we refer, on this
occasion, to romantic metaphysics because it is closely related to Kantian, Fichtean,
Shellingian and Hegelian notions of subjectivity, subject-object relation, idea and
ideal, imagination, absolute spirit (and other cornerstones of German Idealism),
without which it would be impossible to imagine romantic hero, given his role of
their main exponent and fictional counterpart in romantic literature (resembling the
way in which young Nietzsche spoke of Greek tragedys metaphysical consolation,
brought about by Dionysian affirmative annihilation of tragic heroes themselves). It
is not to say that various other aspects of romanticism are simply skipped over and
ignored: on the contrary, as readers could already noticed, romanticism has left a
deep and permanent mark in all subsequent literature, and among the novels we deal
with, most conspicuously in Lolita, Absalom, Absalom and Beloved: but it was either

qualifications and certainly not exemplifying her thought quite in the way she had in mind): Parody is a perfect
postmodern form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies. It also
forces a reconsideration of the idea of origin or originality that is compatible with other postmodern interrogations of
liberal humanist assumptions. (Hutcheon, Poeetics, p. 11) Putting aside the whole controversy about modern-
postmodern distinction, Absalom brings to the fore a contiguous and implicated reconsideration of reliability and
veracity to avoid the older and overexploited sincerity which are contained, in some respects, in the notions of
origin and originality, compatible with other post-romantic interrogations of pathetics and sentimentality: which, in
similar manner, maintain their transversal connections with liberal humanist assumptions. And what makes it
especially interesting, in this Hutcheonean context, is a preponderance of declaratively modernist stylistic devices
(stream of consciences, overt or mediated, and free indirect speech erlebte Rede being the most prominent clues;
beside characteristically modernist attention to style, baroque-like syntax and epistemological indeterminacy
which, to give a full account, passes into the ontological one), by which Faulkner achieves this particular parodic
and postmodern ambivalence (reminiscent of the way de Man bases his interpretation of Schlegels romantic irony
on the latters defining it as the permanent parabasis: but that train of thought is too convoluted to follow it here).
in verbal and stylistic, atmospheric way, or with a parodic and ironic twist, which
amounts to self-conscious reaction to the original romantic world-view. Mutually
dependent conceptions of romantic hero and his search for transcendental meaning
certainly do not belong to the first kind of romantic residues; they can, at best, be
found in the second, where they are thoroughly problematized and, as a rule, drawn
into destructive and hopeless analysis of disillusionment (such was already the case
with Flauberts Madame Bovary).
To conclude once again, normal is what is strange now: if anything can be
found to redeem this life, after the profound transition we just sketched out, it should
no longer be searched for in obscurities of some extraordinary soul, in direct
connection with irrevocably dubious transcendence, but in even greater obscurities of
everymans worldly plights, by disentangling this convoluted reality.
Fragmentation and multiplication of stories their decenteredness, as Derrida
would call it17 go hand in hand with these new searches: both when it comes to
polyphony and variations of Faulkner and Morrison, and episodicity of Pynchon,
Barth and DeLillo; and with them also agrees that irreducible residue, to which are
condemned new detectives of sublime unlike the old ones, who had their mystical
certainty. Because, the true story of Sutpen and his lineage is impossible to recount,
as well as of Beloved or Trystero: while in Barth and DeLillo the subject himself and
his reality remain indeterminable they are what one can speak about in many ways,
but what cannot be reached. New searchers thus search for their own identity too or
at least for what can be called human nature as much as the old ones: but, that
identity is no longer either basis of itself, or eternal essence, or result of simple
external causes: it is, in much more perfidious way, correlate of one
schizophrenically and paranoically derealized reality and is equally elusive as that
very reality. Lyotard wrote few significant lines, in different context and reflecting on
different (although related) issues, but which we consider relevant enough to quote
them: Capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social
roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can
no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering
rather than for satisfaction. Classicism seems to be ruled out in a world in which
reality is so destabilized that it offers no occasion for experience but one for ratings
and experimentation.18 Baudrillards simulacra provide us with insight in the extent
of this derealization: White Noise is so full of them that nothing but death still seems

17
Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966).
18
Lyotard, Answering the Question What is Postmodernism.
authentic and it too, thanks to dylar, becomes its own simulacrum; but same could
be said about Pynchons Trystero, Barths Ambrose, Helen and Anonymiad: and we
believe we would not go too far if we understood both Morrisons Beloved and
Faulkners demon-ogre Sutpen as simulacra of their own kind.19

4. Simulacra and authenticity, fiction and history

In short, simulacrum is a representation/image/concept that precedes its

referent, a signifier producing its signified or, as Baudrillard would say, the map that
precedes the territory. Let us single out a few defining features that Baudrillard
himself originally ascribed to this peculiar phenomenon in his Simulacra and
Simulation:
[Todays simulation] is the generation by models of a real without origin or
reality: a hyperreal [The] representational imaginary disappears with simulation
whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it
goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its
concept.

19
We already suggested, in a previous footnote, what elements and procedures of Faulkners writing enact the
reversal of overabundant pathos and sentimentality into their own, ironically deconstructive parody. This excessive
stylization functions also as a support for the mechanism of simulacra, animating and reviving mythological
proportions of various, self-sustaining narrative accounts of Sutpen, which tend to pass themselves off as mimetic
representations. They acquire certain degree of persuasiveness, since the very stylistic preferences and techniques of
Faulkners writing blur the distinction between what might be considered realistic and what would be seen as
incredible, illusory or over-imaginative. This is especially the case because in Absalom, Absalom different pathologies,
idiosyncratic traits and discursive manners of characters involved in conveying the story of Sutpen and his families
mutually reinforce their (to them appropriate) deviations, until these take over the dominant place in the foreground,
and push the realistic elements, from which they initially originate, into the background substituting a legend for a
biography. Populating this distorted textual space with irreferential images and archetypal projections, corresponding
with some equally impalpable or repressed emotional or psychological urges, needs or desires, is just the next step in
this de-construction of the real which, curiously enough, passes through all four Baudrillards stages of the sign, i.e.
phases of the image (reflecting the real, perverting the real, masking its absence and losing any relationship to it),
and exemplifies all three types, i.e. orders of the simulacra (as representation of the unique reality, as proliferation of
its copies, which threaten to replace it, and as representation preceding the reality, without any distinction between
them). In Morrison, this derealization and simulation are even more striking, since she, in addition to Faulknerian
stylistic and narrative devices (stream of consciousness, polyphony, pathos, unreliable narrator and specific discourse
instead of Faulkners Southern gentlemens rhetoric, race and class-related slangs and colloquialisms), relies on yet
more conspicuous disintegration of the referent: her Beloved is even more shrouded in the mist of indeterminacy,
introduced from the very beginning as her own simulacrum, and operating both in the direction of self-imposing (as
Sethes real, long-lost daughter) and self-concealing (as a child killed in the bloodshed reader would eventually learn
about) with the possibility of both assumptions being wrong (her being just some random drifter and runaway
slave). In other words, the situation is further complicated by allowing supernatural and fantastical to enter the
novels semantic field, supplementing the succession of different fictions, which already provides the space for literary
simulacra, and is already used by Faulkner and Morrison alike. At any rate, we can see it is not only DeLillos,
Pynchons and Barths postmodern worlds that are brimming with simulacra: historical worlds of Beloved and
Absalom, Absalom are open to them too they just actualize that potential in different ways and by means of other
stylistic and narrative devices.
 In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of
truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials-worse: by
their artificial resurrection in systems of signs [which lend themselves] to all
systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no
longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a
question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to
deter every real process by its operational double... Never again will the real have to
be produced this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of
anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of
death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction
between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of
models and the simulated generation of difference.
Simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between
"real" and "imaginary" truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist...
All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that
a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning
and that something could guarantee this exchange God, of course. But what if God
himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his
existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a
gigantic simulacrum not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what
is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or
circumference.
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. The latter
starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this
equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from
the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as
value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas
representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation,
simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
In this way, presenting the Nietzschean death of God as the irrevocable loss
of the transcendent guarantor of the exchange between sign and its meaning, i.e. of
the analogy between representation and reality (which was the issue already prepared
by Heideggers reexamination of Greek aletheia, and his discarding of the Aquinian
adaequatio intellectus et rei), Baudrillard points up to the aftermath of this
derealization process, which, in more than one aspect, reminds us of Lyotards
findings about (post)modernity.
 When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full
meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-
hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived
experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have
disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential,
above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears
in the phase that concerns us a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal whose
universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
The problem of simulacra actually overlaps with the mystery of unpresentable
in (at least) one point: Derridian slippage of the signified. If signs already conceal
what they signify, and make it impossible to really speak about it, than simulacra are
just the last stage of that cleavage: language is, by the nature of things, merely a veil
of the secret, around which one can circle, evoke it, or falsify it just as in Faulkner
stories circle around one unknown history, in Pynchon around an inextricable (and
maybe non-existent) conspiracy: and in Morrison around a mysterious ghost-
impostor, who at the end disappears with the attributes of one African deity.20
Ineffability of reality, i.e. its insusceptibility to signs whose ultimate expression is
simulacrum, the sign that signifies itself in that way serves to conceal, push out or
camouflage unpresentable: and that is precisely the mechanism of advertizing,
fashion and reality TV themes that occupy both Baudrillard and DeLillo. What
Lyotard said about the avant-garde painting, concerning its strategies of situating
between presentable and conceivable (in order to conjure or at least allude to the
unreachable and concealed unpresentable), could relate literally to the mass-media
culture and artificial landscapes of consumer society: [they] are perpetually flushing
out artifices of presentation which make it possible to subordinate thought to the gaze
and to turn it away from the unpresentable.21 We should, however, bear in mind that,
while presented as thematized, large-scale hyper-reality (as they figure, for the most
part, in DeLillos White Noise) implying political and economic machinations, not
acknowledgeable interests and cover-up world-images simulacra are to be seen as
unambiguously negative phenomena, preventing and obfuscating our access to the
unpresentable, there are, on the other hand, many smaller-scale instances, especially
in arts and literature, when the same phenomenon might serve as a signpost and the
very indicator of the unpresentable. One must not forget that unpresentable cannot be
presented by itself: leaving the strategy of manipulating with simulacra as one of the

20
Teresa N. Washington, The Mother-Daughter Aje Relationship in Toni Morrison's Beloved (2005), pp. 171-188.
21
Lyotard, Answering the Question What is Postmodernism.
possible means to point out to its presence (either by, paradoxically, inserting them
over its absence which is, more or less, role of Tristeros imagery and
paraphernalia in The Crying of Lot 49 engaging the reader in subsequent refilling
the gaps and resolving texts indeterminacies and ambiguities; or, alternatively, by
exposing and betraying their insubstantiality, to the point of complete dissolving and
dissipation which is Barths most common tactics in Lost in The Funhouse
demanding of reader, in return, to reconstruct various layers of the text through
reinterpreting the signifying, writing and narrative processes). Concealment and
camouflage are thus two relations by which simulacra do not have to necessarily
exclude and deny the unpresentable: on the contrary, they are more likely the ways in
which they could make it recognizable and accessible in the fabric of all the other
less unstable literary signs (since none of them as we learned from de Saussure,
Derrida and Kristeva is truly fixed nor firmly linked to its referent).
In the meantime, it would be interesting to notice again that this whole
problematics was already outlined in Heidegger: falling prey, inauthenticity,
forgetting and covering over of being all perfectly correspond to both mentioned
philosophical concepts and thematics of our novels; the important difference being
that Heidegger still believes in pristine and original being (one that, historically and
biographically, i.e. phylogenetically and ontogenetically, posits itself before or
beyond the Western metaphysics which concludes with Nietzsche), which
poststructuralism along with postmodernism does not acknowledge anymore.22 It
is almost impossible to ask what is authentic being of Thomas Sutpen not just
because of unreliability of various narrators, but also because one essential
inauthenticity (Sutpens design) is in the basis of his character; as it is, for
different reasons, impossible to ask about Sethes authenticity, since her whole life
has been shaped by misery, oppression and exploitation; Gladneys, on the other hand,
for other reasons fall prey to inauthenticity, surrounded by artificial reality of
television, supermarkets and simulations, to the extent that even the true real in that
miasma loses its distinctive features (and the question remains whether their
obsession with death really represents genuine step out into the authentic); the same
goes to Barth, who almost everywhere in the Funhouse thematizes inauthenticity: as
conventionality of narration, artificiality of the real, fictionality of personality, etc;
while Pynchon never gets his Oedipa, as well as Trystero, out of dilemma: myself or
the world, lie or truth, madness or conspiracy where boundaries between authentic
and inauthentic are no longer even relevant.
22
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1996).
 Close to simulacra stands Hutcheons historiographic metafiction too
which, unlike her voice from the margin (more precisely, marginal perspective but
we have our reasons to opt for this more active variant), we will not try to stretch
over all five novels, but which doubtless can be recognized at least in Faulkner and
Pynchon (and, in conformity with the extent of this concept we are willing to adopt,
in Morrison too).23 For the precise meaning of the term we must, however, turn to
Hutcheons A Poetics of Postmodernism (from which we are going to quote a couple
of suggestive lines):
By [historiographic metafiction] I mean those well-known and popular novels
which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to
historical events and personagesHistoriographic metafiction incorporates
[literature, history and theory]: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and
fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its
rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past Another mark of the
inherent contradictoriness of historiographic metafiction [is that] it always works
within conventions in order to subvert them There is also a growing concern with
redefining intellectual history as the study of social meaning as historically
constituted... This is exactly what historiographic metafiction is doing
The Brechtian involvement of the reader both textualized and
extratextual is something Eagleton appears to approve of in the modernist
revolutionary avant-garde. But it is also a very postmodern strategy, and here leads
to the acknowledgement, not of truth, but of truths in the plural, truths that are
socially, ideologically, and historically conditioned... Eagleton sees that
postmodernism dissolves modernist boundaries, but sees this as a negative, an act of
becoming coextensive with commodified life itself... But historiographic
metafiction works precisely to combat any aestheticist fetishing of art by refusing
to bracket exactly what Eagleton wants to see put back into art: the referent or real
historical world... What such fiction also does, however, is problematize both the
nature of the referent and its relation to the real, historical world by its paradoxical
combination of metafictional self-reflexivity with historical subject matter
Just to point out an evident theoretical affiliation, Hutcheon here obviously
evokes Foucauldian new historicism and cultural criticism, in conjunction with
Derridean intertextuality, diffrance and deconstruction (irrespective of positive or
negative value she grants to the subjects in question, one might say she goes back
even further to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucaults and Derridas spiritual fathers);
23
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988).
scientific disciplines as conditioned discursive formations, the archive of traces
revealing appropriate episteme, which in turn determines and rules over our way of
thinking, social institutions and human relationships (changeable in accordance with
every successive historical a priori), mechanisms of power providing us with only
applicable criteria of distinguishing the true and the false, words that precedes their
own meaning, world arranged as text, with signs continually shifting in relation to
their signified and to referential reality, organized in structure based primarily on
their horizontal differences, and continuing to be subjected to a never-ending
restructuring, given their lack of the unifying and totalizing center God, essence,
transcendence etc.: these are all necessary prerequisites for the historiographic
metafiction to operate in the way Hutcheon expounds it, and to accomplish desired
subversive, reconstructive and demystifying goals (after all, she openly acknowledges
her debt to psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, semiotics and pragmatics, discourse
analysis, new historicism to structuralism and poststructuralism, gay, black, ethnic,
feminist and Marxist theorists even to analytic philosophy). Of course, nothing tell
us why one fiction (novel) would be better than another (historical account) we just
know that in both cases we deal with various kinds of fiction, and that some of the
methods of concealing this and falsifying the truth have become well familiar to us.
Moreover, we learned to think about the truth always in plural and understood that
there are no pure information (facts): that neutral documents exist only within
scientific mythology. Whether these skills and knowledge exonerate postmodern
literature of certain accusations, some of which Hutcheon mentions in arguing against
Eagleton (Jameson, Gross, Newman and other enemies of the postmodern), is
another question, which belongs to another discussion. However, as regards
historiographic metafiction, a few more explanations from Hutcheons Poetics
deserve to be quoted in addition:
Historiographic metafiction inscribes and only then subverts its mimetic
engagement with the world. It does not reject it nor does it merely accept it A
further postmodern paradox that this particular kind of fiction enacts is bridging of
the gap between lite and popular art, a gap which mass culture has no doubt
broadened As typically postmodernist contradictory texts, novels like these
parodically use and abuse the conventions of both popular and lite literature, and do
so in such a way that they can actually use the invasive culture industry to challenge
its own commodification processes from within. And, in addition, if litist culture has
indeed been fragmented into specialist disciplines then hybrid novels like these
work both to address and to subvert that fragmentation through their pluralizing
recourse to the discourses of history, sociology, theology, political science,
economics, philosophy, semiotics, literature, literary criticism, and so on.
While unresolved paradoxes may be unsatisfying to those in need of absolute
and final answers, to postmodernist thinkers and artists they have been the source of
intellectual energy that has provoked new articulations of the postmodern
condition A poetics of postmodernism [selfconsciously enacts] the meta-
linguistic contradiction of being inside and outside, complicitous and distanced,
inscribing and contesting its own provisional formulations To move from the
desire and expectation of sure and single meaning to a recognition of the value of
differences and even contradictions might be a tentative first step to accepting
responsibility for both art and theory as signifying processes.
And finally:
On the surface, postmodernisms main interest might seem to be in the
processes of its own production and reception, as well as in its own parodic relation
to the art of the past. But I want to argue that it is precisely parodythat seemingly
introverted formalismthat paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation with
the problem of the relation of the aesthetic to a world of significance external to
itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and present)
in other words, to the political and the historical. What I mean by parody here
is not the ridiculing imitation of the standard theories and definitions that are rooted
in eighteenth-century theories of wit. The collective weight of parodic practice
suggests a redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows ironic
signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity. In historiographic
metafiction this parody paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity:
the Greek prefix para can mean both counter or against and near or beside.
As Umberto Eco has said, about both his own historiographic metafiction and
his semiotic theorizing, the game of irony is intricately involved in seriousness of
purpose and theme. In fact irony may be the only way we can be serious today. There
is no innocence in our world, he suggests. We cannot ignore the discourses that
precede and contextualize everything we say and do, and it is through ironic parody
that we signal our awareness of this inescapable fact. The already-said must be
reconsidered and can be reconsidered only in an ironic way.
(The most of these conclusions Hutcheon initially draws from her examination
of postmodern architecture but they prove themselves equally pertinent and
applicable to postmodern literature and other arts and art-forms, as the rest of her
book confirms at least within theoretical framework and perspective in which
Hutcheon chooses to explore and interpret them.)
To return to Faulkner, the Yoknapatawpha County itself, insignia and topos
(literally and figuratively) of the whole of his oeuvre, is just an example of those
rethinking and problematizing of history which Hutcheon talks about; thus in
Absalom, which reformulates this unknowable history in the spirit of Southern
Gothic, fictional places and persons intertwine with real and historical ones: heroes
larger than life, whom we meet through an inextricable compound of revelations
and mystification, stand almost as emblems of moral and political turmoil from the
time of American Civil War and accompanying crisis of values and their historical
specificity and fictional expressiveness at every turn mutually exchange and equate
with each other (raising, along the way, important political and social controversies,
quite apart from authors nostalgic sympathies for the South: e.g. Goodhue
Coldfields moral resignation and apathy, leading to his voluntary incarceration and
starving to death in the attic; Sutpens teaming up with Sartoris and becoming
colonel, even earning General Lees Citation for Valor; ineradicable racial prejudices,
bringing about more than one tragic denouement; a gloomy fate of the white trash
working-class; end so on). Pynchon, on the other hand, invents entire parallel
history, with one dubious underground society being let to figure as the main more
global that it seems at the beginning real or artificial behind-the-curtain puppet
master (for we should not forget that someone must have initiated all the misfortunate
events and series of chance encounters and accidental discoveries following
Oedipa wherever she goes). He (equivocally) places Trystero back in the period of
ascent of Thurn & Taxis, making him a crux of all paranoid projections, over-
interpretations, and conspiracy theories (whereat The Crying could be understood as
exemplary of a close relationship between historiographic metafiction and
paranoia)24: but also right until the end leaves unresolved whether what it is all about
is a genuine conspiracy, some obscure deception dead Pierce Inverarity
immediately comes to mind or vivid imagination of his female protagonist.

5. Lolita and two main types of margin

After giving Foucault the credit for linking the contesting of the unified and
coherent subject to a more general questioning of any totalizing or homogenizing

24
On Pynchons relationship to history in general, and paranoia as a form of cognitive mapping, see: Amy J. Elias,
History, in: The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012).
system and repeating, in a milder tone, the Derridean (already commonplace)
catchphrase The centre no longer completely holds, Hutcheon in The Poetics of
Postmodernism goes on to proclaim that:
From the decentered perspective, the marginal and what I will be calling
the ex-centric (be it in class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity) take on
new significance in the light of the implied recognition that our culture is not really
the homogeneous monolith (that is middleclass, male, heterosexual, white, western)
we might have assumed. The concept of alienated otherness (based on binary
oppositions that conceal hierarchies) gives way to that of differences, that is to the
assertion, not of centralized sameness, but of decentralized community another
postmodern paradox.
For us to better understand what she means by these terms, we will quote a few
more lines:
Postmodernism is careful not to make the marginal into a new center, for it
knows that [what] have expired are the absolute guarantees issued by overriding
metaphysical systems. Any certainties we do have are positional, that is,
derived from complex networks of local and contingent conditions Any knowledge
cannot escape complicity with some meta-narrative, with the fictions that render
possible any claim to truth, however provisional However no narrative can be
a natural master narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we
construct.
Parody appears to have become the mode of what I have called the ex-
centric, of those who are marginalized by a dominant ideology But parody has
also been a favorite postmodern literary form of writers in places like Ireland and
Canada, working as they do from both inside and outside a culturally different and
dominant context. And parody has certainly become a most popular and effective
strategy of the other ex-centrics of black, ethnic, gay, and feminist artists trying
to come to terms with and to respond, critically and creatively, to the still
predominantly white, heterosexual, male culture in which they find themselves. For
both artists and their audiences, parody sets up a dialogical relation between
identification and distance.
The move to rethink margins and borders is clearly a move away from
centralization with its associated concerns of origin, oneness and monumentality
that work to link the concept of center to those of the eternal and universal. The local,
the regional, the nontotalizing are reasserted as the center becomes a fiction
necessary, desired, but a fiction nonetheless Cultural homogenization reveals its
fissures, but the heterogeneity that is asserted in the face of that totalizing (yet
pluralizing) culture does not take the form of many fixed individual subjects but
instead is conceived of as a flux of contextualized identities: contextualized by
gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, education, social role, and so on
This assertion of identity through difference and specificity is a constant in
postmodern thought.
The ex-centric, the off-center: ineluctably identified with the center it desires
but is denied. This is the paradox of the postmodern and its images are often as
deviant as this language of decentering might suggest: the freak is one common
example The multi-ringed circus becomes the pluralized and paradoxical metaphor
for a decentered world where there is only ex-centricity Another form of this same
move off-center is to be found in the contesting of centralization of culture through
the valuing of the local and peripheral In addition [authors collapse] the high/low
art hierarchy of earlier times, in an attack on high art centralization of academic
interest and on the homogeneity of consumer culture which adapts, includes, and
makes all seem accessible by neutralizing and popularizing. To collapse hierarchies is
not to collapse distinctions, however The modernist concept of single and alienated
otherness is challenged by the postmodern questioning of binaries that conceal
hierarchies (self/other) Difference suggests multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality,
rather than binary opposition and exclusion.
In our discussion about concept of normality and new replacements for
romantic heroes (whom we deliberately depicted in the most vibrant colors and
glaring contrasts, applicable only to the youthful and decadent phases of
romanticism; in mature works of great romantic authors, enriched by creative and life
experience which transcends conventions, doctrines and artistic manners, it already
does not hold true anymore at least not to such extent) we touched upon some of
these theses although in not so explicitly established theoretical framework, and
more by revealing their historical emergence than by demonstrating their systemic
connections. Hutcheon, to be sure, repeats for the most part Derridas seminal
thoughts from Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
with the addition of some consumer society critique, regarding capitalisms powers of
assimilation and absorption. Or, in Deleuzes and Guattaris rendition:
When the conjunction moves to the fore in the social machine, it seems that
it ceases to be tied to enjoyment or to the excess consumption of a class, that it makes
luxury itself into a means of investment, and reduces all the decoded flows to
production, in a production for production's sake that rediscovers the primitive
connections of labor, on condition on the sole condition that they be linked to
capital and to the new deterritorialized full body, the true consumer from whence
they seem to emanate (as in the pact with the devil that Marx describes). And:
Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary,
or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel
persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or
recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism a
motley painting of everything that has ever been believed. The real is not
impossible; it is simply more and more artificial.
Hereof the adaptation, inclusion, neutralizing and popularizing
resound in much lower octave, being linked to the global processes of
deterritorialization and retorritorialization, which constitute the main sources of
capitalist recycling and recuperation. But there is no need of going any further
into Lacanian background, nor into intricate theories of schizoanalysis. Hutcheons
ideas alone, without inspecting their origins, will be quite sufficient and sufficiently
useful for our following inquiry into the nature (and role) of the margins.
On the whole, we could say that if there was some unique prototype of all the
five novels we are analyzing here it would be Nabokovs Lolita.25 Standing at the
crossroads of modernism and postmodernism, it was in many ways crucial for novels
that followed, especially in Anglo-American world: and its profusion of local trivia,
plethora of details, picked out with a passion of collector, and animated with
exoticism that only the view of a naturalized alien could provide, made it a kind of
lexicon of American culture, from which many later writers and interpreters would
draw as Americophiles, so Americophobes. The phenomenon of the voice from the
margin, for example, that decentered focus which provides us with a fresh
perspective, exposure and defamiliarization, is already multiply incarnated in Lolita.
At a paratexual level, Nabokov himself is that displaced voice, which speaks about
foreign culture in foreign language but which at the same time appropriates this
culture and this language, and in that way speaks from one internal position, since
there is no separate external perspective with which he could identify. 26 Acuteness of
his insights is enabled just by that indeterminacy of his belongingness, an apatride
otherness, which in literature flourished not so long ago with Kafkas Judaism, or
25
We consider Lolita a prototype despite it being published almost 19 years after Absalom, because we believe that
in it converge most important tendencies of all five novels: it is a reference point that, in certain way, condenses
their narrative strategies, and therefore from it (from its different elements) one can proceed to every one of them in
particular. In that and only that sense we allow ourselves to call it prototype.
26
On Nabokovs ambivalent cultural-linguistic position see: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, How Nabokov Rewrote America,
in: The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (2005).
Hemingways corrida27 and Humbert Humbert takes over this Ahasverian feature of
his author, and replicates it in all fields indiscriminately: as wandering expatriate,
conservative European in liberal America, and as idiosyncratic stylist,
hypersensitive eccentric, and sexual pervert. Otherness in all these meanings:
cultural, social, psychological and pathological or, more in line with Hutcheons
terminology, the set of all these differences will determine focal positions of our
novels too.
But first we need to clarify one apparent contradiction: our simultaneous
insistence on everydayness and mediocrity of our characters, and putting emphasis on
their marginality and ex-centricity: i.e. their differentness. Fortunately, we are by
now sufficiently permeated by Marxism, psychoanalysis and anthropology and their
various offshoots to know that normality is just a normative concept, being in the
rank of ideological constructions, and that it implies deviations from the norm as an
inevitable and anticipated part of its structure, in order for it to successfully perform
its social functions. Alienation is modus vivendi of an ordinary man in the capitalist
society, given the capitals expropriation of the means of production and its
establishment of highly exploitative relations of production which led to the
estrangement of worker from himself, from his work and from other workers too: not
to mention antagonistic relationship toward capitalist class it naturally fostered (we
can only assume what would be Marks revised critique of relations of production in
the post-industrial capitalism of our time). On the other hand, Freud, already by his
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901), revealed the vastnesses of abnormality, lurking under the thin layer of
consciousness, and by his theories of the unconscious, drives, complexes, sexual
development, censorship, repression etc. profoundly changed our understanding not
just of mental illnesses, but of mental health as well (showing us how fragile
boundaries between these two are, and how replete with neurotic mechanisms
which are just too intensified, weakened or mixed-up common mechanisms of the
psyche our ordinary life is). Anthropologists, more precisely ethnologists, such as
Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres (to whose works anarcho-primitivists mostly
refer), as well as Richard Lee, James Scott, and Claude Levi-Strauss before them,
showed us how what is considered normal in Eurocentric societies is culturally and

27
Continuing a long tradition of wandering poets: from antiquity, middle age and renaissance to modern nation-
states; from customary, social and economic to ideological and political reasons, traveling, migrations and exiles,
forced or voluntary, seems to be, since always, inextricably linked with writing literature (though in our days at least
between wars less then centuries ago). It is a phenomenon that requires extensive cultural, historical, sociological,
philological, and possibly ethnological study.
economically conditioned, and how it differs from its analogue in primitive, non-
Eurocentric societies based on different structural relationships. The more radical
poststructuralist thinkers go even further; to quote some lines from Deleuzes and
Guattaris Anti-Oedipus:
The points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that
converge on the desiring-machines; then the subjectproduced as a residuum
alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine-
passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another.
This subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the
periphery, with no fixed identity, forever de-centered, defined by the states through
which it passes. (which explains the emergence of original subjectivity as well as
its pre-determined ex-centricity.)
There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that
coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or
with what the preconscious investments "ought to be." That is why, when subjects,
individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interestswhen they rally
to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead
them to combatit is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been
fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being
subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the
infrastructure Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of
the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby to show
how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression
whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social
sphere. All this happens, not in ideology, but well beneath it. (which explains how
desire is invested in social field, and how subjects can be simultaneously
anarchic and law-abiding, revolutionary and conservative.)
If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how
small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that
desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine
capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what
some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence and no
society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation,
servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.
If a society is identical with its structures an amusing hypothesis then
yes, desire threatens its very being. It is therefore of vital importance for a society to
repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that
repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired. It is quite
troublesome to have to say such rudimentary things: desire does not threaten a society
because it is a desire to sleep with the mother, but because it is revolutionary. And
that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that
sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of
wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be
stocked within an established order. (which, being of special importance for us,
explains the reason why society must tame the desire i.e. establish the whole
mechanics of normality.) And finally:
The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or
may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded
as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture
the two categories have become confused From the alienated starting point of our
pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not 'true' sanity. Their madness
is not 'true' madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction
wreaked on them by us and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet
'true' madness any more than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter
in 'patients' is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural
healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails, in
one way or another, the dissolution of the normal ego. (Here Deleuze and Guattari
actually quote Ronald Laings The Politics of Experience. We think no additional
remarks are required except to point out that the concept of normality by itself
comprises the concept of sanity.)
Sloterdijk, for his part, presents us with a quite worrisome picture of modern
normality, which carries the stamp of perpetual status quo of highly developed
cynicism:
Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the
upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because
advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner as a mass phenomenon.
Rather, the cities themselves have become diffuse clumps whose power to create
generally accepted public characters has been lost. The pressure toward
individualization has lessened in the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern
cynics are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as a tangibly
developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their individual sting and refrain from the
risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose
themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the
clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the
domain for cynical deviation. Modern cynics are integrated, asocial characters who,
on the score of subliminal illusionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not
see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be
privately justified. Instinctively, they no longer understand their way of existing as
something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective,
realistically attuned way of seeing things. It is the universally widespread way in
which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers. There even
seems to be something healthy in this attitude, which, after all, the will to self-
preservation generally supports. It is the stance of people who realize that the times of
naivet are gone.
Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline
melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can
remain more or less able to work The key social positions have long since
become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an
undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they
certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic apparatus has
become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about
their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the
short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are
speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. Others
would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus, the new, integrated cynicism even has the
understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices. Behind
the capable, collaborative, hard facade, it covers up a mass of offensive unhappiness
and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence,"
of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are
directed.
We are attentive enough to recognize that what Sloterdijk speaks about is a
global state of affairs: the gloomy diffuse cynicism which in praxis occupies the
place of the average (or, more precisely, relates to the majority of todays
intelligentsia).
But there is no reason to complicate this any further: simply put, normality
encompasses all ex-centric and marginal, because they are average states (and
positions) of average human beings. Normality should be thought of as just one more
Derridean de-centered structure, having no real center, except the series of (its)
substitutions but relying, in turn, on system of differences, rendering its
(unreachable) totality. What is important for us is that, in our context, it means it
practically excludes, unless as a parody, only ideality, metaphysical concepts, and
mystical implications of inflated romantic ingeniousness (which is not equivalent to
the exclusion of all worldly exaltations, ecstasies, elevations and the like). So, there is
no real contradiction between marginality and normality: the latter presupposes the
former as not so unusual modus of human condition and one of its numerous possible
manifestations. Of course, what becomes of the characters placed at a marginal, ex-
centric position, what experiences and events they might be forced or encouraged to
pass through in their development, may and usually does surpass even the most
distant points still belonging to the sphere of normality. This is certainly the case
with our heroes too; although they are average, as well as ex-centric, they are to
find themselves in the limit situations and are bound to cross that limit in order to
completely step out of the vagueness of the normal. Only then they can obtain a full
revelation, that is, a full scope of dialectics between in and out. From that
moment on, one can no more speak of normality, however fuzzy its structure may be;
but the way in which they have to reconcile glories and horrors of truly abnormal
with leftover banalities of everyday life will constitute their understanding of their
and others humanity: and, above all, it will chart the path by which text could lead us
toward its precious core: the unpresentable.
Perverted sexuality, primarily in incestuous key (while in Lolita it will concern
a simulated incest), is one of the main flywheels of Faulkners Absalom which
additionally ramifies itself if reader also remembers Quentin from The Sound and the
Fury and has a notion to what extent incestuous matrix shapes his narrative
perspective (as well as moral-symbolic milieu of Faulkners world);28 while Beloved,
for its part, is full of images of sexual alienation, presented sometimes in extremely
brutal and visceral way: starting from the stolen milk, prostituting with the
engraver and chokecherry tree on Sethes back, through various instances of oral,
gustative and tactile objectification, to the scenes of savage raping, torturing and
sexual exploitation, whose victims are both women and men. 29 Morrison also puts in
the spotlight racial discrimination, position of oppressed and disempowered other,
who is deprived not just of free will, but also of his own culture, and in certain sense
28
On role and significance of incest in Faulkner see: Karl F. Zender, Faulkner and the Politics of Incest (1998), pp. 739-
765.
29
On various forms of libidinal objectification, torture and deprivation, as well as on significance of intersubjective
relationships and resocialization, see: Barbara Schapiro, The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self inToni
Morrison's Beloved (1991), pp. 194-210; and: Kristin Boudreau, Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison's
Beloved (1995), pp. 447-465.
condemned to always be intruder in a foreign world. His situation is thus inverse of
that of Nabokov: he is not in indefinite borderline area, space between outside and
inside, because he tries to appropriate foreign culture and assimilate with foreign
society but because that culture and that society are simultaneously being imposed
on and denied to him: almost as two opposed forces of the same action. On the one
hand, he is irrevocably uprooted from his homeland and cut off from his origins, in
order to be forced to accept order and customs of his masters, which, by nature of
things, must become his own; while, on the other, he is being prohibited from any
opportunity to recognize himself as a member of that new community, because he is
denied not just of right to its heritage and culture, but also of his very humanity i.e.
of right to any culture. The perspective that opens up from this slave margin and
knowledge that thanks to it becomes available must concern that elementary and
primal sphere, where human gets in touch with the bestial: and Beloved reveals
exactly that (literally) sub-cultural world of passions and urges, wherein specters
have flesh too, and its civilizational supports, which enclose and sustain it like a
reservation. Situation is similar in Faulkner, who puts equally strong emphasis on
junction of historical, mythical, pathological and racial but his narrators give the
impression of outsiders also because of something that is more characteristic of
highly intellectual air of romanticism and modernism: namely, because of their
specific mixture of personal extravagance and ideological anachronism. Conspicuous
rhetoric and pathetics, as well as extreme impassionateness in solving moral and
political problems which all can be traced back to Sturm und Drang and Schiller
are just a shell behind which hides profound emotional and social maladjustment, as
of bitter and capricious spinster Rosa Coldfield, so of nostalgic and sensitive
Quentine and his father. All three of them, in a way, live in the wrong time and
experience themselves as the captives of the past: of one nobler and stronger age,
when giants walked the earth, and people were masters of their own destiny
however tragic it was (nostalgic emotions stirred up by an inherent Tragizitt of the
history are Faulkners pronounced Nietzschean trait); this fascination with the past,
the undead, unmourned for and unreconciled with, which comes back to obsess or
haunt them, is in fact what makes them capable to step out of everydayness of its
routines complicit with the meaning of its empty center and reach that no mans
land, world neither-here-nor-there, wherefrom they can look back at ordinary life.30
The matter is somewhat different with Pynchon, Barth and DeLillo, in whom history

30
On various roles of history and past in Faulkner see: Carl Rollyson, Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner
(2007).
does not appear anymore as a burdensome and unignorable origin, personal, racial
and national past, but as a paranoid construction, mythological pattern, textual (i.e.
commercial) convention, or a sign that conceals its own absence (the Baudrillardian
condition which it fulfills, in less obvious way, in all other novels too). In vacuum
created by withdrawal of history which is just a reverse side of being overloaded
with other, alternative and fragmented histories31 their heroes-narrators are left on
their own; that is why their otherness as well always develops out of specific
heightened self-consciousness, as a final stage of introspection, which becomes auto-
destruction an awareness of artificiality of both self and the world (followed by
dissolving of their boundaries and by diffuse, osmotic passing of one into the other;
Oedipas husband is one of the more straightforward examples much more of his
name, and nothing of his nightmares become equalized, thanks to Dr Hilarius LSD
pills: he begins to dismantle and arrange the world, moving time-lines, reconstructing
wholes out of fragments, finding out resonances and repetitions, becoming everyone
and no one, going at the same time into extreme differentiation and extreme sameness
his consciousness is no longer separated from the world)32. DeLillos Gladney will
become prey of this centrifugal force, which throws him off the deadening track of
the routine, when he gets to grips with the empty center, i.e. when he becomes
aware of his own death. Mistrust of reality, which until then was already indicated by
his cultural analysis, by this shift becomes a burning issue: and his intellectual
distance, thanks to which he could develop critical attitude towards the real at all,
grows into existential crisis proper. Pynchon's Oedipa passes through similar ordeals,
pushing herself into the world of eccentrics and rejects, of waste that gravitates
around mysterious Trystero, and facing the alternative: solipsism or pan-determinism,
madness or conspiracy; and her 'mediocrity' will be irrevocably shaken when
testimonies of unreliability of the real begin to pile up so much that at one moment
she even (sort of) attempts suicide or deludes herself that she is pregnant.
The same goes for Barth too, in whom that process is already in its Beckettian
stage: his characters do no longer even belong to any reality, which they could
afterward call into question, because reality is beforehand exposed as a fiction. The
world is clearly falling apart before the eyes of the reader, and all that remains is
multitude of reverberations identity compromised by precursors, and realism

31
On various philosophical approaches to history see: Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (1972)
(especially Introduction), and: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1 (1984).
32
It is speculated that Pynchon had some personal experience with psychodelic drugs. In any case, his description of
the effects of LSD is in accordance with some observations from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (although in
this book Huxley writes about his experiment with mescaline, not LSD).
compromised by convention, a funhouse whose dozed off operator just underlines
artificial character of entire construction. In other words, in all three authors, margin
on which their heroes posit themselves is in effect product of their critical
consciousness: brought to the point of suspecting reality of the world around them
and authenticity of their own self, they pass beyond the menagerie of the average
and enter into vicious and enchanted circle of philosophy. Is the fake reality
projection of the real subject, or the real subject product of the fake reality? Is the
world just a hallucination, or consciousness just another emanation of the world?
Obsessed by these questions, they displace themselves to the position of one meta-
consciousness, whose role is to deconstruct each certainty, all that should be implied
in itself and they insofar cease to be a part of habitual course of events, because
precisely their newborn fundamental skepticism separates them from its lures. That,
however, does not mean that Barths, Pynchons and DeLillos heroes are not
displaced in other ways too as too introspective, cumbersome and aloof,
unaffirmed, dissatisfied nor that marginality in general in them (and especially in
Pynchon) is not thematized, but indicates that this philosophical distance regarding
them three plays the same role as racial otherness in Morrison, or historical
anachronism in Faulkner. Gladneys are surely remarkable for many reasons (and
DeLillos extraordinary skill is in being able to present them as the most unusual
exactly where they appear as the most common), for Ambrose it could be said that he
is obviously maladjusted, Oedipa is hasty and unstable, which we do not conclude
just from her aborted sessions with her psychiatrist After all, it was Nietzsche
who has already brought to light the relationship between philosophical and artistic
deviations and other sorts of abnormalities, and Mann described it beautifully in
Faustus, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, so it should not surprise us that
different eccentricities mutually intertwine and support each other with our pre-
philosophical heroes too. But, it must be repeated again, these deviations and
abnormalities, at the same time, do not make them abnormal in the literal sense of
the word (if any literal sense could be ascribed to it below certain unstable limit);
we already pointed out that the ambivalent and unfixable nature of normality cannot
be ignored or regulated by a simple decree alienation, brutality and traumatization
inscribed within the scope of its concept, are its inherent aberrations and counter-
intuitive parts of its structure: much like the nature is inseparable part of the culture
(Deleuze and Guattari would add: et vice versa) and the unconscious (however
repressed, and along with that repression) is inextricable part of society.
 There is, however, one significant distinction in relation to former literary
heroes we ought to pay attention to when we discuss mentioned intellectual, i.e.
critical margin and its properties in XX century novels. In the next chapter we will
give a full account of this indicative (though secondary) distinguishing feature of
(post)modern questioning of existence, consciousness and reality linked to the
historical evolution, change of perspectives and transformation of the various
backgrounds.

6. Search and revelation, solitary heroes

If we return to comparison to Nabokov, we will soon realize that problematics

of unreliable reality was already developed in Lolita in order to reach its full
expansion in Pale Fire as well as that a lot of meta-fictional traps and ontological
indeterminacies, which are to be specific of both Barth and Pynchon, were already
staged here. Some of the means whereby Nabokov achieves that effect of
derealization are also literary allusions, parodies and pastiches, which Barth and
Pynchon employ in abundance too (as well as Faulkner; while DeLillo parodies
rather sitcoms, disaster stories and pop culture) while Humberts paranoia, which
for its part mystifies and over-codes plot of the novel, will find its place both in
Oedipas pursuit of Trystero, and in Gladneys uncovering of Babettes infidelity and
machinations over dylar (being also reflected in Rosas sections about Sutpen, or in
perplexities over spectral nature of Beloved). Dominant plot, however, one that we
find both in Lolita and other five novels, is the plot of search and revelation which
will be in the closest relationship with presenting of the unpresentable. In this respect,
literature did not advance much further from Aristotle, who, in his famous Poetics,
saw anagnorisis, in the sense of a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing
either friendship or hatred in those who are destined for good or bad fortune, 33 as a
constitutive (although not necessary) part of the tragedy (i.e. of its mythos): and it is
today equally hard to imagine that some (decent) story might do completely without
it. His understanding of anagnorisis as discovery of ones own or others identity or
true nature also, in the widest sense, touches the vital point of modern novels: which
only means that some regularities and interests have not changed in the last two
thousand years. But, the whole search for the unknown, as well as the meaning of the
crucial revelations, went through considerable transformations since Aristotles time;

33
Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a. Both original text in Greek and English translation can be found in: The Poetics of Aristotle,
translated by S. H. Butcher (1895).
former solid cosmological, ethical and political setup became problematic and
susceptible to the most daring relativizations while out of inviolable root
personality, which had lost its transcendent unity, remained just a battlefield of
impersonal forces (urges, instincts, desires).34 Hence the concepts of fate and fortune,
chance and necessity, opinion and truth, so essential to Greek thought, had to change
their role too: recognition could no longer be taken as a confirmation of the higher
order, disclosure of unexpected (but legitimate) rule, or reconciliation with irrefutable
fate, because predetermined social laws, to which the individual had to adapt, ceased
to be universally valid; just as the (guiltless) guilt of that individual, which used to
determine his place in the story, became too complex and conditional to relate only to
the clash of general and individual, i.e. of person and the norm (or of two equally
justified and exclusive spiritual claims, etc.). In other words, collision of
irreconcilable orders which is just another name for Lyotards differend such as
we find in Antigone or Oresteia lost the opportunity to be subsumed under some
higher narrative: either that of tragic emancipation through suffering, or that of
elevation of spirit through contradictions; and by that fact alone, nature of what has
been revealed, and what remains in the gap between these incompatible language
games, had to be drastically changed as well. The question posed is, therefore: for
what new revelations the heroes of (post)modern novels search?
Another similarity between our novels and Aristotle or, rather, Greek tragedy
on the whole which, as their already mentioned parallels with Cervantes,
Shakespeare and Stern, makes them closer to the Dionysian stage (meaning Greek
theater, not Dionysian mind-state) than to their more immediate XIX century
precursors, is the relationship between the characters and their social environment (on
every level on which these relationships can be established). At first poets recounted
any legend that came in their way. Now, the best tragedies are founded on the story
of a few houses on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager,
Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible,
says Aristotle; and continues, a page later: When the tragic incident occurs between
those who are near or dear to one another if, for example, a brother kills, or intends
to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, a son his mother, or any other
deed of the kind is done these are the situations to be looked for by the poet.
Putting aside the reasons and value judgments that led Aristotle to these conclusions,

34
Which could be traced from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis to structuralism and poststructuralism:
although the problem of personal unity (unity of personality) has been posed already by empiricism and rationalism,
and was a heritage of medieval theology (i.e. of medieval and antique philosophy).
and focusing on social connections, inevitably and desirably present among tragic
personas linked by family/hereditary or friendly/rival ties, and political, religious or
military relationships as well as on the role of tragic chorus either as an
unclassified vox populi, or representative of the folk wisdom, customary ethics,
common sense (sophrosyne, eudaimonia), political convictions (and prejudices),
religious beliefs35 etc. it is easy to notice essentially sociable, gregarious nature of
antique heroes, even (and especially) in their most existentially challenging moments:
both physical (life or death situations) and psychological ones (resolving the most
important questions in the play). Certainly, this is not just the matter of dramatic
conventions since, as far as we know, the tragedy itself first appeared in Greece.
Whole dramatic genre, along with its form, conventions, style and other mimetic
and structural parts, was more likely derived from specific social and cultural
climate, still undeveloped bourgeois privacy, less enclosed family units and
considerable prevalence of various types of public life (discussions on agora,
intellectual debates, court trials with up to several thousand jurors, overall interest
and engagement in politics) than solely from literary tradition and authorial
invention. In a word, tragedy was, at least considering its way of presenting social
intercourses, most probably modeled on the real life and its institutions, in
conjunction with influences of religious and mystical doctrines (Orphic mysticism,
Eleusinian Mysteries) and epic tradition (Homeric and post-Homeric poetry), which
provided it with its subjects, plots, ethical and metaphysical bases. What is of interest
to us, at the moment, is that here we already find all types of social connections and
interactions: starting from nuclear families, more or less distant relatives, various
horizontal (collegial, peer, friend) groups, hierarchical structures, separated instances
of prestige, authority or power, closed and open communities, mutually antagonistic
parties, and so on, all the way to society as a whole (ignoring, for our purposes
irrelevant, opposition between human and divine orders, groups and scopes of their
activities and interventions which generally reflect in each other).

35
We will not going into more philosophical or historical-philological explanations of Greek chorus: as Kants
aesthetically autonomous (independent of action) means of symbolizing higher, moral truth, raising tragedy above the
particular (concerns and conflicts) into the higher realm of the ideal; as Schlegels ideal spectator, the objective
affective prism through which the audience was trained to train its vision; as Nietzsches Dionysian barrier of nature
before Apollonian scene of culture, evolved from the ecstatic satyrs of original dithyrambic chorus, and carrying the
Dionysian wisdom of dissolution into primordial being; as Hegels passive, yet judgmental mediator (medium
moderator) of the moral collectivity of the Greek culture; as Lacans emotional means of tragedy, i.e. its healthy
order providing emotional commentary for spectators and exemplifying the function of the pleasure principle; and
so on. Its cultic (or, to resort to one inappropriate, but tempting analogy, liturgical) origin and religious function, which
we believe are indisputable, do not concern us except insofar as they additionally testify of the gregarious nature of
the Greek tragic personas. That is way we will not significantly deviate from the most simplistic, role-oriented view of
the chorus we put forward above.
 The reason we mention all this is because in these first masterpieces of world
literature we can already recognize equal lack of contemplative sensitive loners, as
in our XX century (post)modern novels. Causes for this are, no doubt, very different
but the fact remains that all lifes, intellectual and existential crises in our novels
unfold in collective settings, and are never left up to the characters alone to cope with
them in some privileged, private space of their undisturbed, introspective minds. In
Greece still nonexistent privacy of the civil society reached its axiological peak in
romanticism with cosmic dilemmas being raised and resolved in pure subjective
terms continuing its development and fabrication of delicate, isolated, self-
unsustainable creatures, utterly confused and lost to the world up to the present days:
but without ever again being able to convince us of that amount of self-empowering
delusions (we speak, of course, of literature; advertizing, pop-culture and mass-media
have gone even further in that direction, but with different kinds of models and
ideologies in mind, and different means of their promotion). Wordswordian lonely
strolls, filled with memories and enjoying in nature, while simultaneously absorbing
its intimations of some mystical meaning and almost sensed immortality,
although quite possible to be experienced and to engage our feelings and imagination,
are no longer credible (as poetic fiction), as they were a 100 years ago; neither are
Novalis longed-for dissipation and continuation of life in a dream-like, ethereal state
(What about Rilke then?, somebody would ask; in Rilke, subjectivity does not
present itself as objectivity we are aware of the limits, despite his suggestive
language and enchanting visions). Even Baudelaires transgressions are not so
fascinating anymore: and his spleen can hardly match our own today; while early
Byrons megalomania and self-aggrandizement, as well as Schillers exaggerations
and ethical idealism leave us with strange feeling of immaturity and self-deception
And let us be clear these are the examples that earn our sympathies: we can
empathize with their psychological and existential issues (not to mention beauty of
the poems themselves); but the lower realms of culture have not even that excuse to
fall back on. Adorno protested long ago against falsity of bourgeois private sphere
and its new marvelous freedoms: What freedom remains is superficial, part of the
cherished private life, and lacks substance as far as peoples ability to determine their
own lives is concerned. In reality they are only given free rein in limited activities
because they could not stand it otherwise, and all such license is subject to
cancellation. Thus gregariousness of our novels is in a way a necessary result not of
rehabilitation of ill-conceived urban (or colonial) communities, but of unbearable
need to escape from so perfidiously corrupted and abused privacy.
 Heroes at the critical margin, grappling with the derealized reality and
depersonalized consciousness, do not engage in this venture alone. Freaks like
Nefastis or Driblette, caricatures of mad scientist and delirious creator, immersed
in their own, egocentric madness and isolated in the middle of the crowd, are just
parodic inversions of the real seekers of the truth, as they are parodies of their own
scientific and artistic vocations; in DeLillo that role belongs to Mr. Gray, i.e. Willie
Mink, drug-researching charlatan, for whom difference between world and words
ceased to exist; in Nabokov partly to Gaston Godin, but mostly to uncle Gustave, i.e.
Clare Quilty, and all his heteronyms, haunting Humbert and his nymphet all the way
from Enchanted Hunters to Elphinstone hospital another parodic licentious
genius, surrounded by useless fans and lowlifes, serving just to reflect the most
depraved aspects of the real seeker, Humbert. Regarding the true heroes, as we
already know, all characters placed on philosophical margin deviate from
normality, but they never cut themselves off from it completely, ending up in some
absolute abnormality and losing any touch with the real; they take up the
perspectives of otherness and question the nature of reality, but only insofar as they
are capable of maintaining their view from both inside and outside the limits of the
normal: and one of the consequences of this requirement is that they cannot be left
completely on their own they need to associate themselves with other people, social
groups and communities (which might show crucial for their return from the brinks of
total derealization) be they mainstream, subversive or marginalized. Oedipa has
no problem in making friends and acquaintances of most various types and age
groups, with peculiar quirks and interests or (seemingly) monotonous habits, she is
somewhat promiscuous but clings to her dysfunctional marriage, and maintains
(although reluctantly) contact with her shady psychiatrist in any case, she can
hardly be classified as introvert, despite her philosophical musings and occasional
mystical moments. Gladney is a family man, with wife and six children (Babette
will cheat on him later, but their communication is from the start quite open and
healthy), employed as the professor of Hitler Study at the College, entering into
discussions with his colleagues and buying groceries at the supermarket; he is well-
known and accepted in his community, and his crisis is, apart from his jealousy and
failed revenge, initiated by the most profound existential (but not socially tabooed)
issue: fear (and meaning) of death. Humbert is, despite his perversion, able to be
charming, sociable, and considerate; he makes friends, performs his fatherly duties,
functions in the society and leaves the impression of intelligent and well-adjusted
man while his relationship with Dolores in many ways outgrows the original,
purely sexual attraction. Sethes and Quentins familial and other social ties
(especially with Paul D. and Shreve), as well as their belonging to certain groups and
communities are conspicuous enough in Morrison, black community will have
decisive role in ultimate exorcism of Beloved, while history and tradition of
Southern community had no lesser impact on narration and meaning of Faulkners
story in the whole and even in Barths surfictional novel, family, marriage, love and
other inter-subjective relations permeate most of its narrative and other fragmentary
forms. In a word, there are no more solitary heroes, and, although alienation and
difference are still parts of the equation, being at the margin does not
automatically imply exclusion from the society; on the contrary, it leads to (or is
based on) an intricate web of relationships with various individuals, groups,
collectives and communities whether the quest of our heroes concerns questioning
of reality, or some other search they are determined to undertake.

7. Paradox of desire and unreliability of reality

In Nabokov, trajectory in which Humberts investigations move on follows at

least two separate but intertwined tracks: and on each of them he runs up against
insurmountable obstacle, which reveals his aporetic position. The first one concerns
paradox of desire, whose gratification inevitably entails upcoming destruction of its
object (at least in the oral-sadistic key, which fits perfectly into eroticism of Lolita).
Lust that drives Humbert into shared exile, and into later chase after Lolita, will not
get him what he is searching for complete and mutual consummation but only
certainty about Lolitas evasion, corruption, and ultimate degradation: first with
Quilty, and then, in other (purely economic) way, at Schillers. Even the retribution
he carries out, as some kind of instrument of fate, is extremely controversial and
farcical, since he bears equal, if not greater blame for Lolitas downfall, and since
Quilty is in fact just his own caricature. After all, Humberts pedophile fixation is,
from the very beginning, paradoxical and, in a bizarre way, utopian: ideality of his
island of nymphets is disparate with the reality of their age, his pathological need to
control with his craving for true love, and lyrical wavering and pangs of conscience
with wantonness of sexual exploitation; all that, as a rule, burdens some passionate
relationship is here intensified to the limit, in this impossible arrangement, where the
roles of tutor and lover constantly undermine each other, and which is condemned to
brevity, due to specific nature of Humberts proclivities (which, as he found out
himself, do not tolerate compromise). The second track concerns, however, that
more obvious detective work on discovering and unmasking Lolitas kidnapper
but is in fact a part of wider constellation of signals and clues, whereby in Nabokov
the smallest details get activated. For, as Humbert advances in unraveling the set of
circumstances responsible for his debacle, signs begin more and more explicitly to
indicate twofold constructedness of events: that which slowly reveals itself to
Humbert himself, and that which maybe will be revealed to the reader (and which
Humbert is not aware of).36 In this way, increasingly more striking fictional structure
of Humberts story threatens to call into question credibility of story of Humbert too:
and aporia in which we get caught is undecidability between constructive or real
character of the whole inner world of the novel (and, by analogy, of world in
general). That already mentioned unreliability of reality postmodernism will exploit
abundantly it will be its generic discovery, unpresentability ex ante facto 37 but
the previous differend will be equally significant too: as incompatibility of irrational
and rational, unconscious and conscious, performative and indicative. Let us notice,
in addition, that field where all these opposites permeate each other and thereby spark
in a short circuit, is without a doubt field of ideology, which simulates their
reconciliation; that is why it is not strange to regard Faulkner and Morrison, whose
novels are the most inwrought with the ideological (political, racial, cultural), in spite
of their stylistic differences, as still more closer in problematics to Nabokov than
Pynchon, Barth and DeLillo; and with them it is also easier to recognize both those
impassable paths whereby in Lolita one searches for revelation.38
But before we proceed with parallel and comparative interpretations of
Faulkner and Nabokov, we should draw attention to one more conclusion our
previous assertions already allow us to make. Lolita, as Humberts wishful projection
and sexually overcharged image of Dolores regardless of her very real moral
abandonment, physical curiosity, histrionics and still childish fascination with
forbidden fruits is from the beginning embedded into the chain of false and
imaginary representations, stretching from Humberts early childhood to his

36
This double coding is a subject of many works on Lolita; here we will point out just three: Ellen Pifer, Finding the
'Real' Key to Lolita: A Modest Proposal (2007); George Ferger, Who's Who in the Sublimelight: 'Suave John Ray' and
Lolita's 'Secret Points' (2004); and: Bruce Stone, Editorial In(ter)ference: Errata and Aporia in Lolita (2010).
37
And this unreliability will reveal itself through both what McHale calls epistemological and what he calls ontological
dominant; thus, although McHale places Lolita in Nabokov's modernist phase, indications that issues of ontological
ambiguities are in it already raised are numerous and hard to ignore. On that see: Suzanne Fraysse, Worlds Under
Erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism (1995).
38
Just one aside remark: reader should never forget the amount of irony that penetrates all, scandalous and non-
scandalous Nabokov's pages; moralizing approach is quite dysfunctional, faced with this kind of literature, where
everything tends to be parody of itself, and of many more sources in addition. That is also why one should be careful
with psychological interpretations along with moral judgments and with favoring plot, as plain chain of events, at
the expense of all other literary properties.
frustrated maturity, and ending in an all-encompassing fairytale picture, providing
rationalization to his perversion in the form of a twisted neverland fantasy. The
dominant feature of every link of this idyllic and corrupted imagery, of every
Humberts aborted experience that led to Lolita, is their fake, made-up, simulated and
ultimately irreferential character: their assumed referent is always displaced, fictional
or denied (which will prove to be the case with Lolita too forcing Humbert to
recognize and embrace the true Dolores, at the same time at which he will have to
accept her irretrievable loss). Annabel Lee episode set the pattern for all that
followed; its incomplete sexual act is being staged in the spirit of concealment,
childs play (hide and seek) and frustration; both protagonists having no clue what
to do and how to gratify their desire, except to repeat their half-successful attempts
probably comprised of what they thought they should do and what they heard people
are doing when they are in love. The first scene is being colored by grotesque,
inappropriate and degrading interference of two cheering bearded bathers, and the
second by intrusion of a prowling cat, Annabels mother and limping Dr Cooper
although, temporally, first scene (their last chance) comes after the second (their
first tryst); and after repeated failure of that repeated repetition, the whole love
affair ends basically twice: first with a spatial displacement (Annabels departure)
and then with an absolute displacement (her death of typhus). But doublings and
repetitions do not end here: much older Humbert, supposed writer of Lolita, finds
additional preceding model in Poes famous poem, from which he borrows the
name of his first heroine her only name, since he never reveals how the girl was
really called, not even giving her some fake name, for the reason of discretion (for
Annabel is too overt literary allusion to serve as a proper substitute: as opposed to
Dolores/Lolita pair, where we are fully aware of falsity of both names, reasons for
this falsity thanks to the Foreword of John Ray Jr. and different roles and
connotations of both pseudonyms): as if Humbert wanted for identity of Lolitas
precursor not to be just hidden and protected, but seen only in relation to the, in
fact highly inappropriate and travestied, background (pre-text) of Poes Annabel Lee.
And what is more this preceding model branches out again in two
complementary directions, pointing to both biographical and fictional sources. First,
much more comprehensive and complete resemblance we could found in Poes own
life: more precisely in his marriage with his 13-year-old cousin (Virginia Clemm),
who died in her twenties (about a decade later than Lolita), and his subsequent death
two years afterwards (heart disease being listed as one of likely causes). But
Nabokov gives us just a (delayed) wink in this direction, choosing rather to draw our
attention to purely fictional account of envious angels, children lovers and
sepulcher by the sea, from Poes romantically idealized poem on the theme of
dead beloved: which, admittedly, also has some similarities with Humberts
youthful infatuation and its aftermath although in much more elevated and stylized
register, with all farcical and banal elements (self-consciously and auto-ironically)
transformed. What is most important here, however, is Humberts decision to use this
literary, fictional progenitor as a prototype of his Hotel Mirana adventure which is
already, as far as he is concerned, just a retrospective sublimation (in relation to his
own experience, as well as in relation to Poes), without any discernible real-life
referent and making of that deferred, empty beginning a first link in the chain of
similarly structured events of his life. Another, shorter false beginning appears a
couple pages later, when Humbert describes himself (in the third person) as being
perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. Evoking
the legend of Adams first wife, usually identified as the incarnation of lust, Queen
of demons etc. from pseudepigraphic Alphabet of Ben Sira and Lexicon
Talmudicum points towards the same mechanism of postponed genesis and
retroactive referent, i.e. signifier additionally supplied with its signified (since there
is no mention of Lilith as Adams first wife, either in Christian or in Jewish tradition,
before Alphabet, dating between 8th and 10th century CE, and Buxtorfs Lexicon from
17th century CE). And Humberts further experiences perfectly comply with this self-
signifying, irreferential construction which we cannot fail to recognize as the
Baudrillardian simulacrum: nymphet at the window, who turned out to be a man, the
Parisian prostitute with a nymphic echo, growing almost overnight into the
matter-of-fact young whore, nightmarish encounter in asthmatic womans domicile,
with a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen,
Humberts first marriage with Valeria (prompted by her imitation of a little girl), and
her transformation in a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically
brainless baba they all represent what they are not and what in fact they never
were (Dolores is no exception). This endless repetition of false first assumption and
never-ending chase after the uncatchable are best explained by Humberts own
depiction of his precious ideal the island of nymphets. The paradoxical and
unsustainable nature of this time-space reversal was already pointed out; and together
with its fairytale imagery bewitched travelers, enchanted island, vast, misty
sea, and, of course, demoniac nature of the nymphets (i.e. some girls between
the age of 9 and 14) it is indeed the root simulacrum, quasi-philosophical,
Platonic-like allegory, which governs Humberts sexual lust rationally, as Annabel
Lee episode gives it empirical foundation and excuse. There is no need at this time
to deal with very serious questions of sexual and mental maturity of girls within the
Humberts preferred age span nor to refute the list of his historical predecessors,
which he presents in his defense, by simply highlighting their different socio-cultural
customs and circumstances; his understanding of female prepubescent sexuality is
obviously misled, idealized and fictionalized, to say in the least and his historical
examples are not relevant in changed, modern conditions of XX century. There is no
real referent of his fantasy, no matter how many historical cases he can evoke. To say
it in a more licensed Kantian manner: the island of nymphs is Humberts a priori
simulacrum; Annabel Lee his a posteriori.
In connection with the simulacra of desire there are many more instances,
obeying the same rules, in Nabokovs novel; interested reader could easily find them
on his own, so we do not see the point in expanding our list of examples beyond this
initial series. The mechanism itself is quite clear; but perhaps the most important
conclusion we can draw from all these doublings, repetitions, false beginnings and
fictional backgrounds i.e. displaced referents and deferred signifieds (to use both
Baudrillardian and Derridean terminology) is that desire, true desire and there is
no more importunate desire than some perverse and obsessive fixation is somehow
destined (or condemned) to re-invent and re-define itself by the means of simulacra.
And that is not because the desire itself is abnormal (at the moment we must put
moral issues aside), irrational or confused it knows precisely what it wants and
is capable of any misdeed, rationalization and deception to get what it wants but
because desire, by its nature, has no beginning. In fact, the only way to supply it with
some credible beginning which our way of thinking demands of us emphatically
is to provide it with a simulacrum (that initial simulacrum from which will develop
all subsequent distortions, displacements and misconceptions). We will return to this
conclusion; for now, it is enough to indicate its similarities with Freuds theory of
libido (considering Nabokovs derisive and mocking attitude towards psychoanalysis)
and with Deleuzes and Guattaris theory of desire.
But perhaps the most important conclusion we can draw
Already spotted bewitched travelers enchanted hunters Vivian Darkbloom
Vladimir Nabokov
Why Sutpen wants to make a dynasty?
I potera, Kvilti i znakovi takodje simulakrumi repeating the simulation

8. Lolita and Absalom: desire and reality

 Thus, for example, in Faulkner we find almost identical problematics, as well
as identical obsessiveness of the main character. Racial and class prejudices, as
irrational and therefore indestructible foundation, play the same part in the design of
Thomas Sutpen, as sexual preferences for Humbert (who even dreams of conceiving
the whole dynasty of Lolitas) while the scene at planters mansion, which Sutpen
attends in childhood, assumes equal significance to him as Annabel Lee in Lolita.
Both obsessions develop in formative years (without going into psychological
implausibility of Humberts self-analysis: it is rather overt and ironic rationalization,
for Nabokovs part), when navet of heroes allows them to leave such indelible
stamp on their psyche; both heroes are enslaved to their passions, which makes them
blind to others feelings; and, which is most important, for both of them, the very
fulfillment of their tyrannical desire in itself also entails its frustration. The reason of
their projects failure, however, cannot be attributed to fate Aubrey McFate
frequently panders to Humberts machinations, just as it sometimes seems that
Sutpen is being favored by incredible luck; instead of hybris, their plans are thwarted
by the past which returns to claim its debts: either in the person of Quilty, about
whose former acquaintance with Lolita Humbert finds out too late, or in the person of
Charles Bon, whose relationship with his own half-sister Sutpen fails to prevent,
avoiding to acknowledge him for his son. But, in both cases, psychological and social
conditionality of desire that governs their actions is conspicuous, as is its inner
contradiction that, independently of outer circumstances, indicates its absurd
outcome. If Sutpen had been able to renounce his beliefs, his tragedy could have been
avoided, and the goal to which he strived because of those beliefs would maybe have
been attainable to him same as Lolita would have been attainable to Humbert if he
had been able to renounce his passion, which led him to her in the first place. With
both, it seems like the goal and the means for its fulfillment by nature exclude each
other; Humberts lust makes him too demanding and calculated to be able to keep the
object of that lust apart from forcing him to play two different parts that annul each
other just as exclusive commitment to founding a dynasty and securing its material
well-being makes Sutpen cruel enough to set one son against another, and thus to
become the culprit of its downfall. It is characteristic also that both have earlier,
unsuccessful attempts behind them Humbert to achieve relationship with a girl-
child in Europe, Sutpen to found a family in Tahiti and that both are trying again,
after their best opportunities for success went down the drain Humbert with Rita,
Sutpen with Rosa and Milly. Compulsivity of their character and Sisyphean
discipline with which they devote themselves to their mania point out to desire as a
center around which gravitate all other plots: its paradox is that unpresentable which
is searched for in Absalom and Lolita.
But, that is not the only unpresentable there. Already mentioned unreliability of
reality, which is a destination-Calvary of the second layer of the Passion of
Humbert, in Absalom does not perhaps appear with all ontological and metafictional
implications that Nabokov will develop from Lolita to Pale Fire, and which will
become trademark of postmodernism, but it certainly comes out with powerful
epistemological charge and indeterminacy, which already threaten to blow up the
limits of modernism. In The Sound and the Fury we were dealing with different
versions of events, recounted by highly specific narrators (Benjy was retarded,
Quentin and Jason obsessed with honor, or profit, and all in their way preoccupied
with Caddy), with extraordinary points of view but, definitive story might be (at
least fragmentary) reconstructed, which is also confirmed by final interfering of
omniscient narrator, and by subsequently added authors appendix (consisting in
much of the history of Compson family lineage).39 In Absalom, things are not so:
apart from us being left to conflicting narrators, with biased or otherwise deformed
points of view, story that reveals itself is also mediated, sometimes through multiple
generations or instances of oral tradition (situation similar to the beginning of The
Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, which Derrida discusses in Of an
Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy)40, not one narrator except Rosa is
really a witness of described events (and even she witnessed them only for a short
period she lived in Sutpens Hundred, while otherwise she spreads others hearsay
in her own interpretation, as Quentins father spreads stories of his own father,
general Compson), and, on top of all that, at the end, in Quentins and Shreves
improvisation, the whole narrative becomes completely hypothetical (with made up
characters, like Bons mothers lawyer, about whose existence there is no any
evidence in the world of the novel).41

9. Absalom: fiction and the past

39
William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contexts Criticism (2003).
40
Jacques Derrida, Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy (1982).
41
This, of course, applies only to the 'central story', which describes rise of Thomas Sutpen and quadrilateral Sutpen-
Judith-Henry-Charles Bon: not to the additional or secondary events, which heroes-narrators could attend as
witnesses (or inform themselves about 'from the first hand').
 Problem that here clearly comes out to light is unpresentability of the past, and
this exactly in terms in which Linda Hutcheon discusses problematics of
historiographic metafiction, as a difference between fact and event;42 something did
happen (event) of that one can (with relative certainty) be sure: but, what is the
meaning of that which did happen (fact)? The whole context, causes, interests and
motives cannot be known to their contemporaries for a plain reason that they are not
omniscient, and that their perspective is both spatially and temporally, as well as
intellectually and hermeneutically therefore, both quantitatively and qualitatively
restricted; while, on the other hand, as one moves away from that eyewitness position,
the dangers of retrospective projection, misrecognition of modern tendencies, over-
interpretation and ideologization, as well as of original fraudulence of impressions,
unreliability of reports and incompleteness of explanations, become more and more
noticeable. To that extent, for every reconstruction of the past, historical distance is at
the same time necessary and detrimental; some comprehensive truth would be
available only to a kind of ideal being, in the rank of Berkeleys God, who would be
aware of all, both external and internal events (even of those without any
witness), as well as of meaning of their correlations, and would be able to connect
them into one coherent whole. For human being, though, reconstruction implies
construction and this not just for the one who unravels history afterward, but also
for the one who are experiencing it immediately and construction fiction (et vice
versa);43 that is what Faulkners Absalom in the most striking way demonstrates to us.
Let us ask ourselves, at last, whose story of Sutpens is more convincing: Rosas,
general Compsons, his son Jasons, or Quentins and Shrives? Fragmentary views,
indications and interpretations, that evoke, complement and undermine each other in
different narratives, and that at the end leave us with undisguised extrapolation and
speculation, with a third-hand story, reveal us nothing except that the right past is
unknowable; if a story about any historical event, of any order of magnitude
(from biography to national history), is possible, it is far from complete and reliable
report and we do not even want to go into what the event by itself implicates, and
how to limit all lateral series that enter in its orbit (i.e. to what extent to expand the
story, for it to have any meaning).

10. Beloved: paradox of desire and indeterminacy of identity

42
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988).
43
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1 (1984); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction (1988).
 Paradox of desire or, let us call it its differend is no less noticeable in
Beloved as well. There we meet with different, but equally possessive love parental
and childrens whose two complementary sides are protection and recognition.
Aporeticity of this relationship was already presented to us in Lolita and Absalom:
however contaminated and farcical Humberts fatherhood may have been, his
attempts to save Lolita from the world (although not from himself too) are real as
real as aversion that he in this way arouses in her, and because of which she leaves
him eventually (indeed, interesting question is what is the real reason of Lolitas
escape: Humberts sexual exploitation, or his fatherly control? And we ask this
knowing how offensive it might sound primarily because we have in mind that
Lolita runs away from Humbert only to embrace even more perverse protector,
Quilty)44; while, in Absalom, Charles attempts to attract Sutpens attention and coax
him to acknowledge him for his son end up only with inevitable catastrophe the
single thing he manages to achieve is to force him to orchestrate his murder: and this
with the help of other son, who also, in order to be (in other way) recognized, must
renounce the family, for whose recognition he is striving the most. In Beloved,
hopelessness of parental love is shown in even more drastic way: in order to protect
her daughter and save her from the schoolteacher and his nephews, Sethe is forced to
destroy her; just as Beloved, in her desire for recognition that would verify her
identity, physically ruins the person whose love she needs. Sethes need to redeem
herself, to explain the unexplainable how murder can be an act of love exposes
her then to even more gruesome aporia, potentiated by supernatural atmosphere of the
novel: her complete devotion to found again Beloved, and their reciprocal physical
decline and exuberance, show only that, in her subsequent giving of what was once
denied, Sethe condemns herself to vanish i.e. exactly to move toward the moment
when that giving will become impossible. Even 'male intervention' of Paul D in that
succubus-family circle will not be able to stop vertiginous rushing into disaster not
until the whole community, in some sort of collective exorcism, casts out the intruder
and breaks the spells (where it is impossible to determine whether this intruder
really is, and to what extent, Sethes deceased daughter, Beloved).45 Isolation, we will
notice, as a neurotic choice par excellence drastic separation of public and private

44
Which is certainly not to suggest that she is not a victim of Humbert's molestation and manipulation; on the
contrary, her behaviour can be interpreted also as developing behavioural resilience in response to experienced
trauma. See: Jacqueline Hamrit, Trauma and Free Will in Lolita (2009), pp. 136-145.
45
Soyam Chaningkhombee, Reconstruction of Black Identity and Community in Toni Morrisons Beloved and The Bluest
Eye.
is what increases inextricable entanglements of desire: as in Lolita, where Humbert
from the beginning tries to put his nymphet under the glass bell, so in Absalom,
where Sutpen openly withdraws from community, and limits all his aspirations to his
family circle and to conception of a future dynasty; while in Beloved that isolation
reaches even more morbid pathological and psychic heights, becoming absolute and
almost hopeless. And, in all three cases, breakthrough of the outside world, if not
abolishes ominous and unrestrainable circling of desire, at least gives it a decisive
thrust, speeding it up to the point of breakdown. Gordian knot is not untied desire
cannot be tamed by mere involvement of reality principle but is cut off by a coup
de grace when artificial paradises of the private give in before onslaughts of the
public.
However, behind impassable and cramped paths of desire hides, in Beloved,
even more fundamental problematics that will determine the fate of those sixty
million (and more) from the epigraph (i.e. dedication) and reach out into the darkest
corners of psychological and political abysses the question of identity. Brought to
the foreground by already mentioned contradictory position of slaves, as people
forcibly integrated into foreign culture, but deprived of any possibility to become its
true members, it is already indicated in Absalom by indeterminable racial and family
status of Charles Bon and his son (which largely resembles Smerdyakovs similar
class and family anonymity): and in Morrison it reaches the most striking expression
in long, in many ways intriguing monologue of Sethe, Denver and mysterious
Beloved. Sethes resurrected daughter is not, of course, the only character whose
self-awareness is warped and endangered physical and mental torture equally
gnaws at both Sethe and Paul D, as Denver is gnawed at by neglect and isolation (and
as, in Faulkner, both Quentin and his father will find themselves torn between ruins
of old traditions and new world order) but, she takes a special place in this charade
of identities: primarily because of intensity of her inner dispersion, and then because
of symbolic charge that Morrison stores into miasma of her chaotic memories.
Fragments that flood her consciousness can in no way be attributed to one single
person: some of them seem like they corroborate the possibility of her being Sethes
real daughter, while others are phantasmagoric and outside any context, or in
ambiguous relation to the events that the real Beloved could not experience (e.g.
sections that, by all odds, evoke maltreatment on the slave ship); and the climax of
derangement is reached when fragmentary, but still somewhat recognizable voices of
Sethe and Denver in 23rd chapter merge with already dispersed voice of Beloved
which leaves the impression of progressive confusion and increasing erosion of all
three identities.46 Pendulum that describes the way in which heroines experience their
self passes in this novel through the whole range from paranoid implosion to
schizophrenic dispersion47 from different forms of persecution, isolation and
enclosure to the breakdown of the limits of personality and its effusion in incalculable
directions and if anything is suggested to us through that array of false salvations
it is that identity cannot be built, or at least regained, without strong social
foundation: without interaction with some kind of group (at least with Paul D, who is
a disturbing factor in entire novel), and its reciprocal support and recognition (i.e.
outside intervention that surpasses personal efforts and power of the individual).
Denver is in the novel the one who has a chance to make the most of that lesson and
get out from the vicious circle; Sethes future is more uncertain, although her final
meeting with Paul D in a way indicates that for her too it is not impossible to become
her best thing, i.e. to construct her own identity without obsessive burdens of the
past, which keep her trapped in a triangle of trauma, guilt and redemption. One
should, however, have in mind that community here plays the role of the healer just
as particular, local group that is able to physically communicate with and in reality
embrace endangered individual: community as abstract, global or backstage entity
can have exactly opposite effects deformation and deconstruction of identity (either
in paranoid, or in schizophrenic key) which will be most thoroughly dealt with by
Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49. But Beloved too already indirectly introduces us to
the dark side of social instinct; if we bypass symbolic reading, and refuse to
recognize just paradigm of female Negro slaves, or slaves in general, in the person of
Beloved (i.e. if we do not accept her only as a symbol who epitomizes the fate of
those sixty million from epigraph which does not mean that text does not allow
such reading), and do not write off in advance surreal sights from her monologue as
scenes from the other side, from some transitional transcendence, Limbo, bardo,
etc. (which text also does not exclude as a possibility especially in the light of
African religious beliefs), but accept them as real, though hallucinatory and illusory
memories, in that monologue we will be able to discern the mechanism of her
obscure socialization. In a word, either Beloved is a runaway captive from Deer
Creek, as Stamp Paid suggests, who really witnessed events on the slave ship,48 or
she is embodiment of the ghost of Sethes daughter, who haunts the house number
46
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Toni Morrison, Beloved: 'It was not a story to pass on', in: A Glance Beyond Doubt:
Narration, Representation, Subjectivity (1996).
47
Polarity paranoia-schizophrenia should be understood in the context of Deleuzes and Guattaris paranoid and
schizophrenic poles, from: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2000).
48
Although transatlantic slave trade was completely banned in 1853, the last recorded slave ship illegally smuggled a
number of Africans into the town of Mobile, Alabama, in 1859: so, she could landed from one of those ships.
124, as Sethe and Denver think, or she is somehow both one and the other because
text fragmentarily corroborates both possibilities, in spite of their mutual exclusion
in all three cases the fact remains that it is precisely her hunger for integration,
simultaneous appropriation and belonging between dead and alive, daughter and
mother, orphan and family, individual and race that creates her schizoid
omnipresence and all-present (hic stans and nunc stans), as a conglomerate of
incompatible identities. Undecidability between natural and supernatural
interpretation is not of essential importance for that conclusion: in the context of
African beliefs, living deads and their communi(cati)on with the relatives are not a
matter of fiction but of religious conviction, so the appearance of ghost in flesh and
blood from that perspective is no contradiction at all but that does not solve the
problem of mixed and fragmented identity. Search for the face, smile and recognition
which runs through the entire Beloveds monologue, and possessiveness of that
longing, in which boundaries between self and the other, between what one is, one
has and to what one belongs, are obviously lost, testify about one more general crisis:
about impossibility for alienated I from the margin to build up his identity through
any universal or ideal identification including identification with the margin itself.
And Beloved is in this respect exemplary: if she is Sethes deceased daughter then
assimilation of entire racial past is a factor of schism in her identity; if, however,
she is a runaway slave from Deer Creek then this factor is her craving for family
shelter; at any rate, search for unique meaning, for centering of decentered
alternatives, leads to dissolution of individuals personality, which ceases to be its
own, and becomes equally no ones and everyones (hence also such symbolic
potential of Beloved). Identity, in the case of racial discrimination and other
marginalizing practices is not opposed just to the universal that colonialism
imposes as its global heritage: it opposes every universalization because every
universalization is the rightful heir of colonialism, whatever it sets as its locus and
destination. Anguishes that Sethe, Denver and Paul D suffer, in their own search for
founding and belonging, are thereby being focused and potentiated in the person of
Beloved, because the irreconcilable opposites they face are in her brought to the
extreme to one, we would say, transcendent plane; but also conversely, dispersion
of Beloveds identity in return dissolves all personalities within her range, all too
willing to get caught in a net of pathological dependence and its inherent self-
destructive individuation.

11. Identity and reality: paranoia and schizophrenia (Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo)
 Unpresentability of identity in Morrison is dramatically emphasized as a result
of centuries-long racial exploitation and degradation; but, already in Nabokov,
characters reflecting in each other (Humbert-Quilty, Annabel-Lolita), system of
doubles, overlaps and substitutions and especially their literary analogies in effect
already problematize identity as (im)possible construction. Pynchon, DeLillo and
Barth will approach this problem from quite different, less moving, but no less
anxious side. While in Faulkner and Morrison we were dealing with ambiguous
exclusion from culture or cultural and racial ostracism, in them the culture itself
becomes a burden, storehouse of repetitive patterns, and torsion required by
adjustment to these patterns: but, since there is no more nature that would precede
that distortion, building up identity is like erecting castles in the air, phantasms
supported by phantasms which is also graphically represented by a symbol of
Moebius strip at the beginning of Barths book: that which is on the side of the
base is already superstructure itself, underside is just an extension of upper side,
which twists around itself in order to serve as its own basis (in Pynchon, similar role
is assigned to weaving the world from the painting of Remedios Varo where
weavers, since they are weaving entire reality, must weave themselves too).
Oscillating between the paranoid and schizophrenic, and its characteristic entropy of
identity, are so conspicuous with these writers that there is almost no need to dwell
on examples (Trystero, dylar, Mucho Maas, Willie Mink, Barths echolalias, etc.):
but it is important to note that, unlike Faulkner and Morrison, with whom repression,
torture, and cultural and axiological deracination were factors of loss of identity, with
them this role is taken over by existential insecurity, breakdown of meta-narratives
and artificiality of reality thus, by already mentioned derealization of reality. In
(post)modern age which exports brutality and discrimination to the dumpsites of the
Third World, or to its own, for that purpose designated enclaves (ghetto, white
trash, various sub-cultural and counter-cultural groups), individuation of the average
man is no longer endangered by what is traumatic and terrifying on the contrary,
they in some circumstances can have even therapeutic effect but by that all too
familiar, which is a factor of stagnation and paralysis: being at the same time also the
illusion of continuous change, and of non-existent meaning that this commotion
ostensibly evokes. Paranoia is one of the ways out that lends meaning to a world
without meaning, and allows recuperation of identity, even at the cost of conflict with
the forces projected into its sinister center; schizophrenia, as rendering senseless so
advanced that it turns into its opposite, into omnipresence of meaning and thereby
into omnipresence of personality too is the other. Boundaries between Ego and the
world, i.e. Ego and the others, in both cases are violated: and we are not so much
interested here in psychological explanation of mechanisms of this violation, as in the
fact that the reality itself, especially from about the mid-twentieth century being
increasingly more mediated, fictional, and simulacratic has become a perfect
ground for manifestation of these mechanisms. In other words, what Freud in his time
recognized as a triumph of reality principle, on account of limitation and deformation
of human drives and pleasure principle,49 has today come to its own inversion: to
releasing the drives (at least in enclosed, but globally recognized reservations
which are still in expansion), on account of limitation and deformation of reality
principle. Here we will stop, because deeper delving into this problematics would
require more serious psycho-social analysis (and resorting to some terms such as
death drive which are still raising controversy even in their own fields); we will
just repeat once more a distinction between Barth, Pynchon and DeLillo that applies
as to unpresentability of reality, so to unpresentability of identity (as obverse and
reverse of the same process): Barth primarily dissolves his characters by pointing
out to their fictional, conventional and imaginary nature; Pynchon by confronting
them with alternative and paradoxical interpretation of the world; DeLillo by having
them taste instability and falseness of reality. All three, thus as we already said
dispatch their heroes into the labyrinths of philosophical aporias, which force them to
get themselves involved in the most fundamental and essentially insolvable questions
about the world and about themselves.

12. Conclusion I: three types of unpresentable; margin as condition of their

knowledge; universality of the tripartite structure of sublime

Thus, finally, we distinguished desire, reality and identity as three modern

unpresentables: they are mutually interconnected in their unreliability and
indeterminacy, and are usually signalized by simultaneous presence of several
irreconcilable orders and interpretations. Prevailing plot, which gravitates around
these unpresentables, is a plot of search and revelation which is just why it is not by
accident that Pynchon, by the name of his heroine, in fact alludes to the Oedipus Rex,
play considered exemplary for its economy of reversals and recognitions (peripeteias
and anagnorises) by no other than the father of both terms, Aristotle; and just because
of irreconcilability of contradictions of these unpresentables, the heroes who dare to
49
E.g. in: Sigmund Freud, Nelagodnost u kulturi, in: Iz kulture i umetnosti (1969).
face them must be of the people from the margin of those who will not conform to
one totalizing explanation, but live out the opposites to the full extent and to their
ultimate limit. We will not claim that this is the only, not even the main thread
binding the five discussed novels, along with Nabokovs Lolita (as their belated
prototype i.e. their strategic epitome and essential intersection): nor that there
are no other unpresentables therein, beside these three we have thus far managed to
discern; but their presence there is indisputable, and the thread they make up,
running through the texts, no doubt exists. Taking this as a fact, now we can allow
ourselves to examine these upresentables more closely, and expound them in their
own terms regarding them as expositions and manifestations of the sublime, in
Lyotards sense, and collating them with other, analogous arrangements of
unpresentables in literature, culture and philosophy, in order to grasp their meaning,
nature and interconnection more fully, and against proper historical background. We
already touched upon some historical developments, but not for the same purpose and
not in the same manner: for now our inquiry will start from certain ordering
principle, warranting appropriate categorization and correlation between all three
modi of unpresentable, and trace the recurrence and transformations of its whole
tripartite arrangement, as of a single, unitary structure. That approach will open up a
somewhat different perspective on meaning and history of Lyotardian sublime
prompting, at the same time, much clearer and more comprehensive understanding of
its requirements, limits and conditionality; and especially of the sense in which we
use this, already altered, Kantian term for our specific purpose.
Being conceivable, but not presentable, in the way Kant and Lyotard postulate
for given natural (Kant) or artistic-literary (Lyotard) phenomenon to be an instance of
sublime, does not relate to any abstraction as a merely intelligible thing, nor does it
imply that any non-presentable may be attributed as unpresentable. If this were the
case, every intangible object could be considered as having this property (of being
unpresentable): every psychological and physiological state, inner experience,
general concept (species, genera), mathematical object or operation, notion of ethics
and aesthetics, etc. In the second chapter we clearly specified what kinds of natural
objects meet the requirements for leaving the impression, i.e. arousing the feeling of
sublime by Kants criteria and why. We may recall that, according to him, only
non artificial objects of great physical magnitude or those exhibiting threatening (but
not immediately affecting) destructive power fulfill the conditions for mathematical
or dynamical sublime; although, in both cases, the true sublimity in fact resides
in our mind, in so far as the sublime objects exhort our imagination to reach its
limits in the presentation of the sensible, until the supersensible faculty of reason
steps forward and transcends these limits by its ideas. Sublime is, thus, in the first
place affair of the (transcendental) subject and of interaction, confrontation and
reconciliation in the form of restoring the order between its faculties. Lyotard
conveys this inner struggle in a looser fashion, extending it exclusively over artistic
and literary fields. Without Kantian restrictions, the focus is now on the sentiments
and the way in which modern or postmodern art resolves incommensurability of
reality to concept, i.e. the conflict between conceiving of reason and presenting
of imagination. There is, still, of course, irresistible aspiration towards the infinite
infinitely great, infinitely powerful but no longer so meticulously defined
object of this aspiration: presenting something, conceiving something. The
attention has shifted toward the very existential conditions that put us on the quest for
the infinite implying much more intentional and self-aware imagination (since it is
not just passive observation of nature that is at the stake anymore, but an active
and efficient artistic creation) and toward the attainable artistic and existential
attitudes concerning the possible outcomes of that quest. And besides all that, artistic
and existential interests have become inextricably intertwined: sentiments that
preside over the two available choices nostalgic and jubilant, modern and
postmodern one do not testify only about authors particular aesthetic preference,
but also refer to a specific general state of minds, a definite, collective world-view
and kind of prevailing, epochal Stimmung. In a word, in this short transition from
Kants to Lyotards sublime, we moved from a universal, transcendental interaction
between two opposed mental faculties to a conditioned, historical and existential
deliberation, whose motives and outcomes are as important as the process of
conceiving the unpresentable itself, and which equally determines this process, as it is
determined by it. So, the nature of our three unpresentables must be examined within
such framework: not as transcendental, but as existential structure; not as cluster of
universal, but of historical properties.
Lyotard paved this way, unintentionally, when he turned to personal feelings,
however widespread they might be, and to the historical bifurcation, based on
different experience of one psychological mechanism subjected to a certain
reduction, but more of phenomenological than of transcendental variety and on
different reaction to that experience again, reduced to its impersonal core, i.e. to the
socio-culturally conditioned group dynamics, but not to the unchanging human
nature; by which he disclosed these mechanism, experience and reaction as precisely
the point of historical divergence and defining moment of following artistic and
existential epochal division. We are well-familiar with this way of thinking and
believe we would not be wrong if we identified it as an offspring of Netzschean-
Foucauldian genealogical analysis: of the method Nietzsche used in his Genealogy of
Morals, and which Foucault tried to explain (and later employ) in his Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History. But, what is left to be cleared up and specified is, as we said
above, the nature and history or, if you prefer, genealogy of that concrete set of
unpresentables we distinguished as defining feature of (post)modern literature (or at
least of that branch of [post]modernity constituted by Nabokovs, Faulkners,
Morrisons, Pynchons, DeLillos and Barths novels we dealt with in this study).
First of all, although our three discovered phenomena might seem random on the first
sight sharing nothing except their retroactive uncertainty, regressive simulacra and
indeterminable beginning it is not the case. They actually assemble and fit into a
tightly linked construction, composed of the most fundamental existential and
psychological functions. This structure simultaneously obeys and replicates several
known patterns of distribution, which essentially follow the same logic. In the rough
sketches, it goes like this: 1) One element represents the first principle of subject,
creative force, which being, as a rule, impersonal, i.e. pre-conscious or
unconscious, expansive, linking and penetrating power is responsible for forming
all kinds of connections: as those between subject and other subjects and objects of
the world, so those within the subject itself (resembling, in many respects,
Schopenhauerian will, or Nietzschean will to power and Dionysian principle); 2) The
other element represents the first principle of object not necessarily the object itself,
but its appearance for the subject; so, it is equally subjective and impersonal power,
unconscious property or possession of the subject, which, being constrictive,
consolidating and reactive, arranges, orders and organizes the world (like again, in
similar, not identical terms Schopeanhauerian representation, or Nietzschean
Apollonian principle); and 3) The third element represents the first principle of
personality, that is the resulting form and content of the subject integrating its inner
and outer connections, its specific development and constitution which separate the
conscious being it became from other subjects and objects of the world, and at the
same time allow it to repeat and assess its own constitution and connections, as well
as to continue to establish and develop them consciously (which we might compare
with the same distancing remark as before with Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean
psychological individuation, or with Nietzshean coupling of Dionysian and
Apollonian)50. Regarding our set of unpresentables, the first element would be, of
50
Despite the fact that, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, repeatedly, characterizes Apollo alone as the god of
course, desire, the second one reality and the third one identity. We deliberately
opted for Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean offshoots of Kantian dualism (empirical
realism transcendental idealism: appearance thing-in-itself) as firsthand
analogies of our principles, because the other line of development, going through
Fichte and Hegel, was precisely the birthplace of that strain of romanticism,
engendering and reinforcing the notions of ingeniousness, introspection and
inspiration, excessive sensibility, omnipotent imagination, idiosyncratic and fatal
(accursed) personality, creative licentiousness, megalomaniac and a(nti)social
affinities, as well as other extremely subjective and egocentric beliefs, which we
associated with topos of romantic hero (and consequently with romantic poet: since
romantic poet is romantic hero). That is not to say that in Schopenhauer, and
especially in Nietzsche, there is no trace (and much more than just a trace) of
romantic sensibility its aristocratism of suffering, elitism of genius, at the same time
artistic asceticism and abandon of bermensch (just remember Zarathustra; icy
mountain tops, where only eagles, sun and giants of mankind can abide), no matter is
it compassion or immorality they preach; and it certainly does not mean that the
whole of romanticism and its long lasting legacy can be reduced just to those
exaggerations ingrained into the image of romantic hero. But, it is also true that it was
they, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who consistently uncovered, no longer so lofty
and sublime, motives behind creation of art, behind its existence and purpose,
mercilessly unmasking and denigrating artists, philosophers and all kinds of
intellectuals in the process and Nietzsche went so far as to call into question even
the most sacred roots of morality, culture and civilization, revealing the irrational
and inhuman urges in the very heart of our most admirable accomplishments: not
even genius, nor other romantic, Enlightenment and humanistic ideals were spared. In
a way, that great cleansing marks the beginning of modernity: suspecting and
exposing the low behind the high; getting done with metaphysics or at least
disclosing the true nature of metaphysical tendency, its origin, purpose and effects;
reconsidering the meaning of both low and high from this new, anti-metaphysical
perspective; and finally putting a considerable effort not to end up in utter nihilism
after breakdown of the most of the centuries-old values but to justify new reasons
and incentives for exaltation; being able to still admire the high despite knowing of

individuation, the divine manifestation of the principii individuationis, etc. The meaning of Apollo is just
individuation as objectifying separation and isolation, which are prerequisite for the formation of an organized dream-
like world of order and proportion, as opposed to Dionysian primordial oneness. At the existential level, a more
profound individuation takes place in the whole course of clash and reconciliation of two Greek aesthetic Gods,
producing true tragic individual, in the same way their coupling ultimately produces the Greek Tragedy.
its low: or to see the low in a way which would not prohibit its appreciation. All
three options were possible: to surrender to nihilism and to renounce all values
whatsoever; to recuperate old values by accepting the low as part of the high; or
to establish new values by discovering the high in what was considered as low.
Nietzsche adopted third option; his vitalism implied elevating life itself to the level of
the highest value of the very criterion by which all other values should and could be
judged. Later developments at least those leading to poststructuralism in philosophy
and postmodernism in literature although not vitalistic in the strict sense of the
term, in many respects followed the same direction; but without Nietzsches feverish
enthusiasm, worship of the brute force, utopian fate in the emergence of bermensch,
and unrestrained glorification of instincts at the expense of the reason (it seems that
his most faithful disciples in literature were DAnnunzio, Wyndham Lewis, Andr
Malraux, D.H. Lawrence, Hesse, to some extent Strindberg, Ibsen, at least in The
Master Builder, Artaud, late Chekhov, Gottfried Benn and much of German
expressionism in general, even Kafka and Rilke and, of course, Thomas Mann:
deeply influenced by Nietzsche, but also fairly critical of his anti-intellectualism).
Anyway, his reversal and revaluation held significant sway over XX century
continental philosophy, which adopted his demystification and methodology, while
getting rid of his excessive fervor, hopes and obsessions. In a word, he was a
transitional figure, as well as the founding father of much that was about to come:
which is why his concepts together with Schopenhauers, with which they are
closely connected might give us perfect insight in some basic features of our
tripartite structure of modern sublime.
For Schopenhauer, being is governed by the unconscious, impersonal principle
of will holding the position of Kantian thing-in-itself in his system. Despite its
being a subjective force or, rather, the force we associate with living beings, as
opposed to physical and mathematical laws, which play its role in classical
mechanistic and (much of the modern) scientific world-view the will acts as the
root of both subjects and objects, following the assumptions of organic paradigm,
particularly developed and prominent in romanticism, and being devoid of any
rationality and intellect. As an attempt to solve the then-most intriguing philosophical
question of relationship between subjects and objects (appearance and Ding-an-sich,
transcendental and empirical) which Kant posed in a new, radically challenging
way, but which was just the latest elaboration of the ancient dichotomy between spirit
and matter, i.e. body and soul (comprising many variations: Descartes res extensa
res cogitans, Lockes sensory impressions association of ideas, etc.) it deviated,
considerably and daringly, from the other solutions, offered by the mainstream
German Idealists, in the theories of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling. For, despite its still
metaphysical characterization as the thing-in-itself which, from our point of view,
was not the most fortunate attribution Schopenhauers will bore the properties of
something much less suitable for ordinary metaphysical understanding and much
more susceptible to later non-metaphysical reinterpretations (resembling, for
example, some metaphorical readings of Heraclitus): which is the issue of the most
fundamental difference between the Berlin academic outsider delving into then
little-known Oriental religious sources and his widely recognized and accomplished
rivals, moving within secure limits of the Western post-Socratic tradition. Namely,
while they strove to explain being and becoming as a progressive objectification of
self-consciousness, passing through different but determined stages, and posited as
the first principles of both subjects and objects some intelligible, spiritual and to-
consciousness-adequate which is to say mental procedures and entities,
Schopenhauer linked his impersonal will, as the first principle of being, with blind,
self-determining, free impulses, lawless, purposeless and unreachable by knowledge,
and defined it as the foundation of our instinctual drives something of which we are
quite differently unaware than of pure ideas, our mental faculties or procedures of
observation (and which has quite different potential and ways of being understood)
as well as of everything we encounter in the world (including the world itself). This
Schopenhauers affiliation of ontological (and epistemological) arche with instinctual
unconscious, while keeping the indistinguishability and inseparability of subject and
object, appearance and perception postulated (partly) by transcendental and (fully)
by objective idealism finally relinquished the primacy of mental substance, i.e. of
its processes, forms, products and contents, announcing their abdication in the name
of the active, unconscious power of the will; power which was regarded, from the
side of the subject, at the same time as the initiator of any practical action implying
that doing, and its practical concerns, are to be seen as more fundamental than pure
observation51 and as the emergence of those low strata of human being,
unpredictable and ungoverned by reason: which brings us back to above discussed
reversal of values and subsequent rehabilitation of the low the things that

51
Which, of course, does not mean that Schopenhauer himself was satisfied with this state of affair. On the contrary,
he advises struggle against this 'tyranny' of will, and cherishing of uninterested contemplation, as the means of
philosophical consolation and salvation. But, on the other hand, we can draw a straight line from this reorientation to
praxis and practical concerns to Heideggerian Care (Cura, i.e. Die Sorge), Wordliness of the World (Die Weltlichkeit
der Welt) and Relevance and Significance (Bewandnis und Bedeutsamkeit), as specific phenomenological exposition
of praxis and practical structuring of the world in contrast to Husserlian logicism and formalism, i.e. to the idealistic
theoretical stance.
Nietzsche, as an unorthodox, but full-fledged heir of Schopenhauer, would take to
their limit.52
The will is an expansive and active principle although it relates, as one and
the same principle, to organic and inorganic nature, and to all possible manifestations
of inner and outer world alike, Schopenhauer explicitly defines it as the will to live
comparing the relationship between will and life to the link between body and its
shadow. But, for our experience of existence to be complete, there must be yet
another principle, which would account for the actual, undeniable state of bellum
omnia contra omnes for ceaseless confrontation and opposition of the particular
instances of that supposed thing-in-itself if we maintain that everything is the
expression of the same, indivisible will. This brings into play the second, restrictive
and arranging principle, which is, in Schopenhauer, divided into two successive
stages: 1) The general one, based on the most fundamental condition of appearance
that of being object for a subject which presents itself as the immediate, most
adequate objectification of the will, in the form of Platonic ideas: eternal, singular,
separated and mutually harmonized; and 2) The individual one, prompted by the fact
that we are not just subjects but individuals as well, which relies on the fourfold
principle of sufficient reason the condition of knowledge appropriate to the
individuals and allows the indirect objectification of the will, subjecting its primary
objects to the laws of causality, i.e. physical necessity (becoming), judging, i.e.
logical necessity (knowing), time and space, i.e. mathematical necessity (being) and
motivation, i.e. moral necessity (willing), which constitute exactly four roots of
mentioned principle: whereby the world of multiplicity of particular things i.e. our
everyday world of representations is produced. Notwithstanding Schopenhauers
division, and quite different character of ideas, independent of the principle of
sufficient reason, and representations, subjected to its laws, we will consider these
objectifications as a single process, belonging to a single principle the one in
52
Although we are in fact still dwelling on the playground of Kantian metaphysics, moving along the tracks of Platonic,
neo-Platonic and Christian idealism, only imbued with Buddhist mysticism as with discordant note, disturbing and
disrupting the whole composition we can already recognize the forthcoming development, and rejection of all
redundant metaphysical residues which was about to take place in the XX century. In Schopenhauer, this
disenchanting process was still not brought to its completion actually, the much of the metaphysical, mystical and
poetic aspirations of those days were just natural reaction against epochal disenchantment that gained the greatest
momentum with Enlightenment emphasis on common sense, reason, discussion and rational argumentation; which
was important prerequisite for a number of idealistic philosophical centaurs, attributing spirit, and other intellectual
powers, with almost mystical meaning, and placing them at the position usually reserved for divinity or bestowing
them with certain ontological properties, more suitable for mythological or religious imagery than for philosophical
categorization. Schopenhauer was no exception to this poetizing, prophetic and metaphorical trend: down-to-earth
and matter-of-fact philosophizing regardless of style (which could be even more poetic and metaphorical), but
without quasi-religious agendas was yet to be fought for in the next century, after positivist pettiness and dryness
were assimilated and transformed by more inventive and profound philosophies.
charge of shaping the appearance of the world and bridging the gap between
knowable objects and incomprehensible principle of the will.
We should notice that this principle is also unconscious and impersonal it
deals with conditions of perceivable world, not with concrete applications of laws
making it perceivable and equally subjective and subjectively objective by
nature, although it already presupposes subject-object distinction. It is clear what role
it has in Schopenhauers ontology and epistemology: he had to make room for Kants
noumenon, as intelligible core of representations, by identifying it with Platonic
ideas, and at the same time to comprise Kants two forms of sensibility and twelve
categories of understanding, as well as the three Kants faculties of cognition
(sensibility, understanding, reason), together with the inner sense, i.e. self-
consciousness, into his fourfold principle establishing the whole mechanism of
transposing the will, as the active, all-encompassing thing-in-itself (responsible for
workings of both pure and practical reason, for knowing as well as acting) into
the world of objective representations; that is, presenting the entire process of the
constitution of the world. He linked the harmonious, archetypal stage of Platonic
paradigms, differentiated but still not individualized, beyond their unique existence,
with incongruous state of constant struggle we perceive at the level of concretized
multiplicity of representations corresponding with equally divided and fragmented
will, turning against itself, i.e. against other parts of itself, objectified in other
representations thanks to the principle of sufficient reason, which functions, in this
respect, as the principle of individuation as well (in philosophical, not psychological
sense meaning in the sense of facilitating further distinctions and specifications, by
which every phenomenon becomes what it is and not something else). In
Schopenhauer, this other side of being is actually even more subjective than the
underlying principle of will the life-affirming Ding-an-sich since this will can
be objectified in various grades (simultaneously, not gradually), starting from the
natural forces, through inorganic and organic nature, to the human beings at its peak:
while the principle of sufficient reason pertains only to humans and, possibly, some
higher animals (although this last attribution is not so persuasively explained). But,
taken as a whole, this perceptible world of representations fulfills every criterion of
being the world as we know it: it possesses the conceptual background connecting its
objects at the paradigmatic level within an ideal inventory of all possible
phenomena and their inherent traits and capacities (Platonic ideas, general condition
for objectivity) together with laws, restrictions and regulations by which it arranges
the real diversity of their actual expressions, structures the resulting multitude of
phenomena, including both subjects and objects, and imposes order among their
vacillating and ambivalent relationships (individual representations, the principle of
sufficient reason). In this way, the will as primum movens and representations as
forma mundi complement each other as active and passive, divergent and
convergent creative powers, comprising both sides of the being, while maintaining
unbreakable subject-object connection, linking life and perception, instincts and
structure: and all that on still pre-conscious or unconscious level.
So, it just leaves us with the moment when the personality, i.e. an individual as
a conscious, decision-making entity, also enters the equation. That part of
philosophical inquiry usually implies some kind of principle or set of procedures,
perspectives and choices responsible for our formation, building or development as
empirical subjects but it can, just as well, be posited at a more fundamental, pre-
conscious but sufficiently individualizing level, provided that our unique, distinctive
ego there can already be discerned. This moment is, as a rule, processual,
transformative and dynamic which is to say unfixable or undetermined albeit it
also being defining and contentual, and in some cases (especially as we approach the
more modern, poststructuralist theories) even dispersed, fragmented, multiple and
self-contradictory: not just because it comprises and relies on the other two
transcendental elements, but with regard to its own inner constitution,
characteristics and properties. In Schopenhauer, it primarily concerns the way of
living, that is of dealing with the two integral sides of being in its existing state of
multiple fragments destined to a perpetual struggle whereby, thanks to the mix of
Buddhist teaching and Kantian aesthetics, it comes close to what is soon to be called
individuation in the psychological sense (most notably by Jung, though with enough
analogue concepts, termed differently, but bearing similar meaning, which were in
use long before him). And when a concrete, individual personality from more or
less generalized perspective is in question, Schopenhauer (like, after all, most of the
thinkers) changes the course of his investigation, going ex cathedra, to prescribe a
recipe for overcoming the wrong dispositions, in terms and context of his own
philosophy, and gives the instructions for leading the good life; that is, he occupies
a sort of utopian horizon, and, from these liberating heights, delivers a philosophical
counterpart of religious homily on morals and redemption. Again, this utopian aspect
is neither unique to nor specific of Schopenhauer alone and it has nothing to do
with the pessimistic thrust of his particular worldview (standing, admittedly, quite
apart from meaningful universes, purposeful histories and generally optimistic
prospects, professed by his idealist contemporaries). One of the reasons we chose him
as the first example on which we would elaborate our tripartite structure, in spite of
his still considerable involvement in metaphysics, is precisely because due to this
pessimistic outlook, or to its theoretical premises he manages to evade both
Lyotards grand narratives of XIX century: as the speculative narrative of
development of the spirit, so the political narrative of emancipation of mankind. He
was, in fact, one of the first great (modern) philosophers who would call into question
the legitimacy and intrinsic value of knowledge both scientific and practical,
formalized and informal in favor of other ways of thinking about the world: which
would, through Nietzsches ruthless dissections, find its way to Lyotard, Foucault,
Derrida and other XX century philosophers (and which, in many respects, brought his
own philosophy closer to the ground by using its incipient nihilism against common
intellectualistic aberrations and totalizing idealizations of the time). But, as far as
utopian horizons are concerned, every philosophy is bound to produce them,
crossing the line between indicative and subjunctive between it is and it
would be in the process, and going, more often than not, even a step further, into
the domain of the imperative i.e. making be! out of it would be. As the top
block of the pyramid, these possibilities, implied by the whole system underneath,
i.e. based on the (assumed) implications of its underlying relations and principles,
form the open space reserved for a philosophical future: predictions and
prophecies, potentials yet to be realized. And if we recall that there is already a vast
province of prescriptive instructions, relying equally on making imperatives out of
subjunctives be they assertoric hypothetical imperatives as in Aristotle, or
assertoric categorical imperatives as in Kant etc.53 which is the realm of ethics, and
which we must take into account if we want to determine and distinguish what is
good, valuable and desirable to begin with, it will not surprise us that the mentioned
pyramidion is inextricably entwined with moral judgments and considerations, like
a kind of general salvation, supported by and molded after the individual ones
(although, in Schopenhauers case, this generality is conceived more in the
Buddhist fashion of slow, temporal accumulation of beings detached from the cycle
of reincarnation, than in accordance with the Revelation to John, with its one that is
two instantaneous mass denouements: first resurrection and judgment day). At
any rate, just as this utopian horizon, as a rule, depends on the ethical theories and
moral stance of the philosopher, so there hardly exists any philosophy without these
prophetic and preaching superstructure: Marxism has its dictatorship of the proletariat

53
We will, at this moment, put aside the difference between logical and linguistic meaning of imperative since the
whole point is precisely in intertwining of these meanings.
and development of capitalism towards its own supersession, Hegel his dialectical
and historical development into the Absolute Spirit, Heidegger his unfolding of Being
and safeguarding the Fourfold and it is, finally, not unusual for their utopian
projects to consist of not just one, singular vision, but to branch out into several
possible scenarios or solutions.
To Schopenhauer, there stood out three major opportunities for individual to
escape the ubiquitous bellum omnia contra omnes and overcome the internal
conflict of fragmented, self-alienated will: the aesthetic, ethical and ascetic. The
normal way of life, in accordance with his scheme of existence, could be nothing
else but incessant struggle imposed upon every conscious being, condemned by the
very means of its cognition: the fourfold principle of sufficient reason, which
objectifies one single, indivisible will into its multiple emanations turning them, at
the same time, one against another, as opposed and irreconcilable subjective-
objective entities. And seen from the viewpoint we are most interested in, this might
be put in a slightly different way, so that we could emphasize the main points more
clearly. In general, for Schopenhauer, the basic, common condition of every
individual existence is its predetermined involvement in an interminable clash
between blind, instinctual forces, fighting one another without any goal, reason or
purpose just because striving or yearning is in their nature, regardless of
objects they strive or yearn for. The latter are (more or less) incidental and
replaceable although they do not seem so nor are perceived as such, at the very
moments of them being craved for (which may be highly compulsive); but they are in
fact interchangeable and ultimately insignificant: for will will always find something
to seek for and no casual success in accomplishing its intentions, by achieving
certain objective, i.e. obtaining a particular object, will ever satisfy its hunger or put
an end to its striving. In other words, it is the fate of every human being to succumb
to the vicious circle of wish-fulfillment which leads nowhere, being only an
instrument of the fundamental deceit: a belief that wishes need and ought to be
fulfilled, and that this fulfillment could bring us anything but perpetual repetitions, let
alone some genuine and abiding happiness. And what is more, why the happiness
itself in almost every sense of the word is supposed to be what an individual
should look for in his life at all? Our perception of the world and of ourselves has
already been corrupted and distorted beyond repair thanks to our modes of
cognition so, how can we expect to even understand what we should do with our
lives, and what we are to pursue in order to improve our existence? How can we
know whether the happiness is our authentic goal, or just a veil concealing much
more important tasks? And, finally, if so, what might be those tasks and what kind
(if any) of happiness can man really hope to attain in this life?
When formulated in this way, the Buddhist foundations of Schopenhauers
philosophy come straight to the surface. But, as in the Buddhism proper, with its
Buddha-Dharma (Buddha's teachings), consisting primarily of Four Noble Truths and
Noble Eightfold Path, designed to instruct the disciples how to attain the four stages
of enlightenment and liberate themselves from the weel of samsara (the wheel of
suffering, i.e. cycle of rebirth), so also in Schopenhauer there are viable alternatives
to obeying the tyranny of the fourfold principle of sufficient reason and putting up
with the ordinary, gloomy prison-world it keeps us in. Moreover, his three mentioned
ways of bypassing or overcoming our everyday experience correspond perfectly, only
in a somewhat reversed order, with the threefold division of the noble eightfold path,
occurring, as its summarized categorization, in the Theravada school of Buddhism
(the only surviving representative of the early Buddhist schools): thus Schopenhauer's
aesthetic contemplation might be compared to samdhi ('meditation', including right
effort, right mindfulness and right concentration), his moral awareness to la ('moral
virtue', including right speech, right action and right livelihood), and his ascetic
consciousness to praj ('insight' or 'wisdom', including right view and right
resolve).54 The logic of all three solutions representing, in truth, specific
existential choices, with gradually increasing degree of self-liberation and
(Buddhistically conceived) enlightenment through self-annihilation is essentially
the same: it retraces the steps of our mental procedures and transcendental
agencies in order to find the points of bifurcations where taking a different path
might have resulted in potentially different projection of the world. And in all three
cases even regarding the moral metanoia, which could be considered, quite
ambiguously, as a positive reversal these paths turn out to be (again, as in
Buddhism) the reductive ones: based not on adding or improving some faculty, but
rather on subtraction and renunciation. The first solution, equally indebted to Kants
third Critique (although in strict contradiction with the first) finds its starting point by
getting back before the emergence of the fourfold principle, to the initial and
universal condition of objectivity that is to being an object for a subject which is
responsible for direct, non-individual objectification of the will into a set of timeless,

54
Many aspects of each subdivision can, of course, be easily associated with every one of Schopenhauer's concepts,
especially given later historical developments and shifting of accents; thus this comparison should not be taken as a
definitive and binding conclusion: it is just a provisonal analogy, having no other role but to point out to further
similarities and connections between Buddhist teaching and Schopenhauer's philosophy (which Theravada school, as
more 'scholastically' and 'theologically' oriented branch of Buddhism, makes particularly visible).
archetypal patterns, or Platonic ideas, taking place before breakup and fragmetation
of the will, caused by subsequent application of the fourfold principle of our
cognition (for, the multiplicity of singular Platonic ideas occurs only because of
objectification of different grades of the will, not because of objectification of its
different, individualized and separated fragments). And despite our own cognition
being precisely what allows us to perceive the world, granting us access to the will,
as Ding-an-sich, through the resulting multitude of conflicting subjects and objects,
for Schopenhauer there is another way of approaching the will, without the
devastating interference of our cognition, and without implicating ourselves in the
conflict it produces. That way is aesthetic contemplation which remains at the stage
of general condition of objectivity, i.e. of subject-object distinction, and does not
proceed toward individual, indirect objectifications of the fourfold principle of
sufficient reason.

Close connection with religious heritage: normal state as wrong state: fallen
state, or unawakened one goes to Hedegger with Das Man and inauthentic as
prerequisite for authentic.
We must distinguish between what is possibilities are
And regarding valuable good desirable
With Ethics Marxism,
Arranging ordering restrictive, limitation, regulation
Forms and categories faculties Noumenon phenomena
Individuation

Stamp.

Hajdegerov tubitak, ko-bitak i bitak-u-svetu. Tri sinteze Delezove

whether we should follow it further, and how far, will depend on more general
conclusions it is to provide us and on possibility or impossibility of applying them
to a wider group of literary works.

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