Nihilism and organicism: An ontology of postmodern American fiction

This study advances a distinct form of ontological literary criticism and demonstrates its application to postmodernist fictions. The approach embarks from Ricoeur's conception of literary texts as possible worlds in which readers may orient their horizons of understanding. The implication in Ricoeur is that fictionalizing is grounded in the capacity of ontological projection, the transcendence of ontological thrownness, which permits the creation of imaginary horizons of Being and alternative modes of Being-in-a-world. Ontological projection, in this light, becomes the defining element of fiction. Since, following Heidegger, worldhood is an a priori structure of Dasein's Being, fictional Daseins can be projected only as they inhabit a world, but the kind of world projected also contours the Being of fictional Daseins. Through a method similar to the hermeneutic phenomenology of Being and Time, the dissertation analyzes nihilistic and organic structures in text-worlds as they constitute the ground of possibility and examines Dasein as it is influenced by and oriented toward the Being of text-world entities.;Both nihilism and organicism are perspectives bringing together a variety of ideas in metaphysics, politics, ethics, and psychology, related ultimately to an ontological stance. Whereas nihilism denies truth or meaning in a condition of alienation between Dasein and world, organicism conceives of a world as a living unity, incorporating Dasein into processes of growth and creative advance. Their dialectic in postmodern fiction takes forms ranging from pure opposition to complete synthesis. In the novels of Mailer, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, the major authors examined in the study, synthesis is most often partial, involving an integration of elements from both ontologies. Mailer projects nihilistic forces as residents in the flesh of organisms, which channel the destructive energies toward increasing vitality. In Vonnegut, the human organism is the source of nihilism, a mental state made possible by the peculiar configuration of the large human brain. Pynchon's early text-worlds display an oppositional structure, while Gravity's Rainbow subsumes both ontologies into a Oneness posited beyond the grasp of the human mind. The synthesis of such ostensively incompatible ontologies is among the most profound and surprising formulations of postmodernist fiction.