ABSTRACT
Modernist art-be it visual or verbal-tends to declare its status as art first, “autonomous from the language that lies buried in representational realism” (Harkness 1982, 9). The updated extreme of this view in literature can be seen in American surfiction, in the “textes” of Tel Quel in France, and in the works of the Gruppo 63 in Italy. These Italian writers share with postmodern artists a certain ideological impulse: the desire to challenge the institutional structures of bourgeois society (usually seen as being
reinforced by realism) by awakening readers to the political implications of accepted literary practices. But the method they chose to bring this about is a (late) modernist one which attempts to separate literary language from reference. For Giorgio Manganelli and others, as Gregory Lucente has argued,
(1986, 318) This kind of separation is precisely what postmodernism, in turn, has challenged by conflating this same kind of metafictive reflexivity with documentary materials. Historiographic metafiction always asserts that its world is both resolutely fictive and yet undeniably historical, and that what both realms share is their constitution in and as discourse (Sparshott 1986, 154-5). Paradoxically this emphasis on what at first may appear to be a kind of discursive narcissism is actually what connects the fictional to the historical in a more material sense. Like Duchamp’s ironic ready mades which foreground the accepted, unexamined nature of the referential function of sign systems, postmodern art forms work to “supplant the legislative force of the referential context by the material assumption of a real context, a reality which it had been the mission of representation to repress” (Bois 1981, 31). Think of Jasper Johns’s parodic flags and targets: do they refer to real flags and targets or to the standard representations of them-or both? When Magritte’s painting of a pipe asserts “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” it points toward what was to become a paradox of linguistic and visual postmodern reference, with both its ontological and its epistemological contradictions.
