‘I am Peter Stillman.
That is not my real name’. There has been, in postmodernist
fiction, an obsessive concern with identity, either subjective
or objective. Indeed, it is not only self-identity –
or ‘human’ identity – which has become problematic
but also the ‘real’ itself, the very notion of
a stable reality. The huge number of ‘unnameable’
characters or narrators that are to be found in contemporary
fiction or films betray a serious questioning of identity
in the widest sense of the word. From Clint Eastwood’s
triple performance as the ‘man with no name’ in
Sergio Leone’s Westerns to Fight Club’s schizophrenic
plot, postmodernism has always shown unmistakable signs of
a lost identity.
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The crisis, in my opinion, can be explained in two ways.
The first has to do with a problem ‘inside’ fiction
itself, with questions of textuality. Post-structuralist theories
have brought forward issues of authorship and originality
as well as a key concept in the study of postmodernist fiction:
intertextuality. However, maybe even more relevant to this
essay is McHale’s concept of the ontological dominant
which puts problems of identity and reality at the centre
of an understanding of postmodernist fiction. The other approach
to the question consists in analysing the influence of the
‘outside’, that is, in reflecting on how postmodernist
fiction interacts with and reacts to postmodernity. This,
in a way, means taking the other end of the stick and debating
the influence of postmodernist thinkers on writers.
While the lost identity of narrators can arguably be justified
as a reaction to Barthes’ reduction of the text to ‘a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture’,
this does not satisfyingly explain the authors’ obsession
with names and selfhood. ‘In Project Mayhem, we have
no names’, chant the ‘space monkeys’ in
Fight Club, while in The New York Trilogy, the second story
follows Blue, White, Black and Brown, a bunch of nameless
characters playing unclear roles in a case of pointless spying.
The question of subjectivity, as Hutcheon seems to indicate, can be directly linked to the
wider problem of intertextuality. ‘The postmodern way
of defining the self’, she argues, ‘has much to
do with this mutual influencing of textuality and subjectivity’.
Auster’s novel, one might say, is entirely based on
intertextuality insofar as it is a conscious rewriting of
different narratives mainly drawn from detective fiction.
In this context, ‘naming’ the characters would
be a vain attempt to give identity and individuality to amnesiac
clones. Palahniuk also admitted that Fight Club was entirely
made up of stories he had heard in bars. Once again, the construction
of the narrative around urban myths and other recuperated
texts renders the textual identification impossible, the reality
of the characters disappears as soon as their textuality appears.
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