Verifiable Fictions: Didactic Narrative in the Antirealist American Novel

This study examines the revival of didactic narrative in exemplary antirealist American novels of the last forty years. In chapters on Don DeLillo, William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and Richard Powers, I trace the ways in which these writers deploy antirealist literary practices of ontological destabilization, metafictional digression, and deliberate textual difficulty as ways of revisiting the proposition, rejected by many among their cohort, that fiction may have pedagogical value. These novelists attempt to reconcile their commitment to formal innovation with the belief that fiction offers cognitive gains, beholden though it is to humanistic values of the sort that avant-garde principles ostensibly repudiate. As such, these novelists grapple with an ambivalent conception of the novel as both a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a culturally promiscuous text that samples from--and speaks back to--a range of nonfictional discourses. In reading these works, I consider the epistemological potency of literature within a tradition of antirealist experimentation that has typically disavowed any affiliations with the didactic, and in particular its pejorative connotations with rigid, authoritarian moralizing. Drawing upon Jacques Rancière's model of the ignorant schoolmaster, I argue that these novelists reject the mantle of encyclopedic mastery, deploying instead a "pedagogy of failure" that encourages an autodidactic mode of verification among readers. In exploring scenes of failed instruction, these novels reconfigure postmodern authorship in terms of a reluctant teacher addressing an audience of recalcitrant students. These works thus acclimatize readers to a mode of attention that encourages a continual revision of one's beliefs and attitudes in the wake of failure and misunderstanding. In so doing, these authors attempt--with varying success--to avoid the self-imposed cultural marginalization that comes with adhering to antirealism's more ludic, oppositional strictures.Ph