The politics of pastiche in the postmodern novel

This dissertation seeks to recover the political function of the postmodern novel through the formal effect of pastiche. I read Jameson's foundational account of pastiche through Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic subject to render form legible as political practice. In turning from representation, the postmodern novel draws upon the equivalence of text and subject to make language the proper stage of cultural transformation: "only fiction can invent a people" (Deleuze Cinema 2, 222). The texts I study each transform pastiche into the event, a connection between reader and text where identity and meaning undergo the continual process of creation. The formal aspects of the novel emphasize the vital interpenetration of language and lived experience. In my first chapter, I analyze the way David Markson's Reader's Block opens the practice of form production, not merely beyond the figure of the unique voice of the Great Writer, but beyond writers in general to include the reader. By using pastiche to dismantle the distinction between producers and consumers of culture, this novel opens the power of meaning production to any who chose to practice it. The resistance of Toni Morrison's Paradise to resolve the crisis raised by its narrative is the subject of Chapter Two. I argue that by deconstructing narrative closure, Morrison both dramatizes and refuses to repeat the operation of power in the narratives that construct cultural identity. In my final chapter, I show that the pastiche of genres in E.L. Doctorow's City of God aspires to reproduce the ethical function of sacred text. By holding open and closed storylines in continual tension, it redeems the search for truth. It reintegrates narrative into a life conceived as an ongoing process of interpretation. Pastiche enables the postmodern writer to account for the productive interdependence of language and the real without denying their autonomy.