Harper Frames Questions, Makes Post-Modernism Easy

Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture By Philip Brian Harper Oxford University Press $15.95, 195pp.

The title of Philip Brian Harper's recent book filled me at once with intrigue and suspicion.

Interpretations and definitions of what "postmodern culture" actually is never fail to fascinate. Yet this fascination is always partially spoiled by the fact that success-a definitive 'take' on postmodernity-is a logical impossibility. How, to put it simply, it is possible to reach a final interpretation of a cultural phenomenon which has itself prompted a questioning of the validity of all authorities-which has devalued all final interpretations?

Framing the Margins is a refreshing addition to a potentially frustrating debate in that Harper's analysis prompts more questions than it offers solutions. Writers linked by their identification as "marginal" (of which more will be discussed later) are compared with the canonically "postmodern" novelists Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The result of this comparison is to redefine the origins of the fragmentation of the subject that is generally seen as characteristic of literary postmodernity. The "marginal" writers chosen Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison-present a rather motley collection. When I spoke to Harper, and Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Languages and Afro-American Studies here at Harvard, earlier this week, he explained that the subjects of his analysis had indeed been cosen 'without rhyme or reason." "These authors compelled me ," he enthused. "Intuitively, there must be some reason why."

One night suspect this method of selection would make following the argument of Framing the Margins frustrating of confusing. Far from it .Instead the book becomes compelling because of the obviously personal identification of the critic with his material. The woks discussed are not schematized into a definition of marginally; rather, they represent a sample of the richness of various traditions: "We could conceive of (Anaïs Nin and Djuna Bares) as minor in the sense that they are experimental... but in the case of Ellison, The Invisible Man is standardly seen as a major work in the minor tradition, that it say that its minorities does drive from the social minority of Ellison himself." By tracing evidence of what he terms "psychic fragmentation" through the work of these diverse writers and into the dominant contemporary literary culture, Harper aims to question the very criteria by which they are termed socially or artistically "marginal."

Harper insists that in doing this he is not attempting to discredit current interpretations of postmodernism. "On the one hand, I'm calling into question the concept of fragmentation as somehow singly characteristic of postmodernism, but on the other hand I receive very strongly in that characteristic." In this way, paradoxically to re-assert the centrality of fragmentation in postmodernity."

Inevitably, Harper's calls to re-examine the connection between literary theory and wider issues in contemporary political culture. "I find myself personally moving beyond the literary in so far as it seems to a large degree in the extra-literary realm that our sense of ourselves as individuals and as communities and as nations is forged. The way I'm working lately is to identify various issues and problems that seen to leap out at me from other geners, other media...and then to interogate these through a literary text.."

For Harper, the way the practice of literary criticism relates to contemporary culture takes on a role parallel to that played by the minority writing he discusses in Framing the Margins. Just as the discovery of fragmentation in an early work such as The Invisible Man for a reassessment of what constitutes "postmodernism" in contemporary fiction, so can all literary texts more generally be used to call our wider cultural assumptions into question.

The project sounds extravagant. Yet there are plenty of places in Framing the Margins itself where it is both clarifies and illuminates. In his analysis of Cities of the Interior, for example, he investigates Nin's strategies of describing desire. This investigation leads into a further investigation of the power of the masculine gaze in defining female sexuality both in other media (primarily cinema) and in the contemporary public sphere.

The dynamic established in this way, between questions of literary style and questions relating to the wider political culture, makes Harper's both a brave and a very relevant work. He himself insists that, far from being a futile exercise, postmodern theory still has useful work to do: "Despite what we can discern in a lot of postmodern theory as the assertion of a lack of grounding... it seems to me that we willy-nilly constitute such authorities and authenticities every day-necessary." But although theory can alert us to "the constituted and contingent nature of those touchstones...it is less useful in so far as it neglects to indicate how we might construct touchstones that would work better ad in more socially and politically progressive ways than the ones we have so far." Paradoxically, it is only in the recognition of his limitations that theory ultimately comes into its own as a tool.

Professor Harper is currently working on two projects: a book on varieties of social difference within African-American culture and what he terms "a series of investigations into the cultural significance of privacy." If they continue to push at the boundaries of critical practice as does Framing the Margins, then they should be eagerly anticipated.