| This dissertation analyzes the psychological and philosophical dynamic of three postmodern narratives: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Philip Roth's The Counterlife. In the context of the postmodern mistrust of narrative reliability, storytelling has become the dangerous activity of a perennially guilty outsider who has come to expect disapproval, and even hostility, from all quarters. The result is a sadomasochistic confrontation between these postmodern writers and their imagined audiences: the pleasure to be derived from storytelling is linked to the pain inflicted by the authors upon their reader or characters in retaliation for their anticipated disapproval. The structural consequence of this ongoing retaliation is identified here as "serial negation"--the constant agonistic oscillation between text and countertext caused by the authors' determined efforts to sidestep criticism and maintain artistic control.;Chapter 1 defines the countertextual phenomenon in terms of Theodor Adorno's "negative dialectics": to avoid the constant threat of inauthenticity, these writers resort to "non-identity thinking"--the continual negation of the characters and situations they record in their fictional notebooks or manuscripts. My thesis contends that this unremitting destruction of their own best efforts is grounded in a sadomasochistic impulse that Freud relates in The Ego and the Id to the death instinct: when external, hierarchical sources of authority lose their hegemony, the ego is left to defend itself vainly against "the murderous id" on the one hand, and the reproaches of the punishing superego on the other. These novelists sabotage their own texts to thwart the introjected power and authority of the critics whose belittlement they both fear and resent.;Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine each of the three novels in turn, demonstrating that such structural devices as fragmentation, duplication, contradiction, and alternative versions of characters and events all reflect diminished confidence in the ability of storytelling to convey meaning. Authority has shifted perceptibly from writer to reader, and the repercussions are often disturbingly hostile. Beckett, Lessing, and Roth resort to metaphors of violent confrontation to describe the battle for narrative authority. By ceding the narrative overview first to their writer figures, and then, unexpectedly, to their character or reader figures, they allow the writer's primal fear of disapproval to destroy storylines, thereby frustrating the reader's desire for credible characterization, stable narrative structure, and thematic resolution. But Chapter 5 suggests that the negative dialectic impulse of these postmodern storytellers generates a precarious spatial and temporal equilibrium that postpones the disaster of nihilistic non-meaning. |
