Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. - book reviews

Style, Summer, 1996 by Philip Heldrich

As moving against the grain nearly always stirs up controversy, Phillip Brian Harper's call for revising conceptions of postmodernism is likewise sure to spark interest and debate. In his first book-length study, Harper takes a look at texts from both the modern and postmodern periods to demonstrate how subjective fragmentation arises more from specific gender, racial, and class differences than from the more widely accepted influences of capitalism and technology. Giving a central place to marginalized literature, Harper's study represents a significant contribution toward developing a fuller understanding of the postmodern condition.

In developing his theory of postmodern decenteredness, Harper begins by positioning himself against the well-known theories of Frederic Jameson, Jurgen Habermas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Key to Harper's argument is the idea that social marginalization creates subjective fragmentation well before it is reflected in the general culture of the postmodern era. To demonstrate his point, he looks specifically at a number of modern and postmodern texts. His initial, though less cogent discussions of Nathanael West, Anais Nin, and Djuna Barnes are followed by stronger and more successful chapters on Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison. Harper then turns his attention to Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon to demonstrate how these authors fall short of establishing distinct causes for the decenteredness of their subjects, in contrast to the specific reasons for subjective fragmentation developed in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Lastly, Harper offers insight as to how experiences of marginalized groups, such as African-Americans, are co-opted by the general culture, which erases the specificity of minority experience.

Surely a highlight of Harper's study is his analysis of Brooks's Maud Martha and "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon." In this analysis, Harper is clearly able to articulate his critical premise by demonstrating how the psychic fragmentation of Brooks's characters results from their socio-political experience as African-Americans. More specifically, in his analysis of Brooks's poem, Harper shows how the two women involved are not bound together by motherhood, as commonly believed, but have dissimilar experiences predicated on racial differences, insofar as the Bronzeville mother's interests are suppressed. Similarly, for Maud Martha, Harper shows how the voices of African-American women are continually stifled by racial and class prejudice. For Maud Martha, psychic fragmentation is a result of a continually suppressed rage that Harper shows to be related to the dominant culture's attempts to assimilate African-Americans into the mainstream as unthreatening consumers.

Harper's work on Ellison's Invisible Man is likewise engaging. Using Jacques Lacan's theory of subject formation, Harper analyzes the Invisible Man's inability to achieve self-definition' without a constituting mirror image from which to form his identity. According to Harper, the Invisible Man comes to recognize that his true identity can only be formed through the constitutive function of Harlem's black community. Interestingly, Harper finds this constitution of self through community analogous to Ellison's description of the "'true jazz moment'" that insists upon a musician's simultaneous assertion and repression of self when functioning as a member of a jazz band (135).

Less notable, though still important to Harper's overall contention, are earlier chapters discussing the works of West, Nin, and Barnes. Harper's discussion of West provides a number of interesting points, but finds trouble developing a coherent connection between suggestions about West's preoccupation with the problem of the signifying qualities of language and the subversiveness of his wayward characters toward the established social order. Although at times issues of marginalization seem forced into the discussion of West's work, as in a digression into his Jewish Lithuanian ancestry, other moments, such as the section on "The System of Movement and Its Discontents" (drawing from Michel Foucault's ideas in Discipline and Punish), offer a penetrating analysis of the regimented bodies in West's novels.

The chapter on Nin's Cities of the Interior and Barnes's Nightwood is also at times uneven, but most notably suggests that both authors present incomplete, fragmented feminine identities which find completion only in relationships with men. According to Harper, both Nin and Barnes fail to realize the power of female homosocial and lesbian relationships. But most importantly, Harper's discussion of Nin and Barnes offers much insight into subjective fragmentation predicated on gender differences.

Harper's analysis of Barthelme, Coover, and Pynchon, because they do not invoke specific cultural conditions, strengthens his claim that subjective decenteredness, as developed in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, has its genesis in the specific cultural, economic, political, social, and even gender relations of marginalized populations. For Barthelme, Harper demonstrates how in the characteristic fictions of Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts general disjunctiveness, malaise, and angst result from no specific social, political, or cultural conditions. Similarly, in Coover's metafiction The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Harper shows how Henry Waugh's decenteredness is not due to any specific condition of class, gender, and race. Likewise, in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the sense of indeterminacy created by the text does not develop out of any particular cultural circumstances. However, unlike Barthelme, Coover, and Pynchon, Kingston exhibits how decenteredness derives from the specific cultural experiences of her Chinese and Chinese-American characters.