hand down historical accounts. For example, imagine a museum or
library in which all the alternative histories and memories of the past
are hidden. Write about the experience of entering and spending time
in this museum.F(R)ICTION AS FANTASY
Making new worlds
Postmodernist novels have often portrayed ‘other worlds’ which do not exist
in reality. These worlds are in a f(r)ictional relationship to our own: they
arise partly out of our criticisms of, and hopes for, the world we live in.
Exercise 4 asks you to create a postmodern fiction which constructs a new
world.
Brian McHale, in his book Postmodernist Fiction, makes a very interest-
ing distinction between modernist and postmodernist writing (1989, p. 9).
He argues that modernist fiction is characterised by an epistemological
dominant (that is, problems of knowing), while postmodernist fiction is
characterised by an ontological dominant (problems of being). Modernist
fictions, then, are characterised by problems of knowing the world. They
raise questions such as:
How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?... What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and
with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one
knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object
of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the
limits of the knowable?
(1989, p. 9)
But postmodernist writing, McHale points out, raise problems such as:
What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted,
and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are
placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?;
What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence
of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured?
(1989, p. 10)Because postmodernist fiction has been so preoccupied with this idea of
what constitutes the world, it has also often constructed new or alternate
worlds. McHale points out that science fiction, like postmodernist fiction, is
governed by the ontological dominant. McHale suggests that science fiction
Postmodern f(r)ictions 147