Postmodernist fiction: Theological language and moral vision in Borges, Nabokov, and Pynchon

Contributing to the field of twentieth-century American fiction, this dissertation includes three chapters of practical criticism, one each on Borges, Nabokov, and Pynchon. These essays are enveloped by an introductory and final chapter which are more theoretical and historical in nature. Because I have chosen to focus on three of the authors most often numbered among postmodernist writers, the first chapter situates my readings of their work in the context of the current discourse on postmodernism. The thesis uniting these readings challenges the critical literature which characterizes postmodernist fiction as a radicalization of the modernist sense of fragmentation and a rejection of the modernist appeal to tradition. This view, informed by the reception of Derrida's philosophical critique of the metaphysics of presence, neglects another essential aspect of postmodernist works, namely their pluralistic appeals to various possibilities for order, hope, and the restoration of meaningful communication. These possibilities constitute a writer's moral vision, and my method for their discovery involves the examination of the theological language which happens to abound in the fiction which I am considering. Borges' stories are replete with such language, including references to the myth of the eternal return, cabalism, and heresy. Nabokov's use of the theological concepts of beauty, paradise, and sin--like Pynchon's themes of history, eschatology, and revelation--are not peripheral, but central to their texts' structure and meaning. In describing the moral vision of a postmodernist writer, albeit a very private, unsystematic and often self-doubting vision, I intend to counter the deconstructive strain of current theories of postmodernism without failing to incorporate its genuine insights. Playfully and paradoxically, postmodernist fiction not only questions every proposed answer, but also reopens questions which have, for lack of answers, been ridiculed or ignored in "serious" discourse. My dissertation ends with a speculation about postmodernism's place in a future history of ideas.