In Search of the Unpresentable: ‘Detectives of the Sublime’ in (Post) Modern American Novel

Abstract

This paper deals with analysis of five representative American novels of the XX century – Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Barth’s Lost in The Funhouse, DeLillo’s White Noise, and Morrison’s Beloved – using Nabokov’s Lolita as a reference text and as an intersection of certain narrative strategies which appear in the mentioned novels, too. Through Lyotard’s, Baudrillard’s, Ricoeur’s, Hutcheon’s and partially Derrida’s philosophical postulates, we shall endeavor to demonstrate that a common denominator of these texts is the search for some modern unpresentable, and the role that different forms of marginal perspectives play in this search. We shall also outline some provisional (and certainly incomplete) typology of the unpresentable – the paradox of desire, unreliability of reality, and indeterminacy of identity – and determine several different margins – psychopathological, racio-cultural, historic-anachronistic and introvertedly philosophical – at which, in various combinations, the characters who engage themselves in this search for the unpresentable are placed.