"A Novel … invested with a Desperate and Aching Significance": Poetics and Ethics of Fragmentariness in Blue Pastoral by Gilbert Sorrentino

Abstract: The potential of radical narrative discontinuity in parodic Postmodern metafiction urges a rethinking of the value of literary meaningfulness and totality in this vein of experimental literature. The poetics of radical narrative discontinuity in Blue Pastoral (1983), induced by a multi-faceted fragmentariness, is discussed as indicative of Postmodern metafiction's experimental drive and its avant-gardist ethos. The focus will be on the play of narrative fissures, as well as on the technique of verbal montage/collage. The articulation of narrative laterality enhances the parodic perversion of the quest plot, in addition to the traditional forms of the pastoral. The ethical implications of the fragmentary in Blue Pastoral and their rootedness in the narrative's anti-representational quality are examined through readerly interpretation and judgment, with the value of literary meaning re-appraised in terms of surface, and the communicative impetus of the metafictional text articulated in terms of both complicity and a demystifying critical distance.