“Trust Me”: Responding to the Threat of Writing in Chorus of Mushrooms

“Trust M e“ : Responding to theThreat of Writing in Chorus ofMushrooms Steve McCullough Dalhousie University E xcluded from Plato ’s republic and from J.L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, fictionality has been seen as a threat for as long as there have been critical debates about literature. Trends in recent philosophy have exacerbated traditional anxieties over the falsehood or sophistry implicit in literary language by suggesting that the contingent word play of art is in fact the general case, and that notions of the neces­ sity and truth of non-literary language are a dubious construction within a general economy of fictionality. No theorist has been more associated with the exploration of these vertiginous notions than Jean-François Lyotard. His report on knowledge in the post-industrial West, The Postmodern Condition, remains a seminal exploration of the plurality and contingency of postmodern thought, characteristics that are conspicuously shared by Hiromi Goto’s novel Chorus of Mushrooms. Goto’s book exemplifies in literary form both the possibilities and the anxieties of a postmodern vision of fiction in which issues of reality and facticity take second place to hermeneutic or experiential truth values. Lyotard’s insistence on paralogy and attending to truth on an individual, local scale finds deft instantiation in Goto’s narrative about narrative, about our vicarious experience of the ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 149-170 St e v e M c C u llo u g h is a PhD student at Dalhousie University. He is writing a dissertation on Canadian women’s Holocaust memoirs and gender and violence in post-structuralist thought. His entries on Anne Michaels and Sarah Kofman recently appeared in Holocaust Literature: an Encyclopaedia of Writers and their Works (Routledge). past, and about translations between languages, between idiolect and sociolect, and between fictional versions of the truth.1 There has been a strongly negative response to postmodernist and deconstructive thought on moral grounds by authors who claim that deny­ ing systematic standards and the hegemony of metanarratives prohibits definition of the good and so leads to nihilism.1 2Postmodernist writing thus figured looms as a threat to history, truth, and reality itself. For Lyotard, however, the seemingly relativist “linguistic turn” of postmodern theory results in a displacement of ethics rather than its ruin. He describes lan­ guage in terms of the phrase: [A] phrase presents what it is about, the case, ta pragmata, which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense, der Sinn; that to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; that “through” which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the addressor. The disposition of a phrase universe consists in the situating of these instances in relation to each other. (Différend §25) Phrases link on to other phrases according to rules provided by language games or discourse genres, but no such genre is ultimately authoritative. Phrases cannot not happen, as even silence is a phrase, but what specific 1 Francesco Loriggio warns against the thoughtless use of Western thinkers to interpret the writing of ethnic minority authors who attempt to confound the categories of Western thought (575-7); Guy Beauregard expresses the relevant concern that importing French poststructuralism to comment on Chorus of Mushrooms is a “risk” (60). The congruence between Goto and Lyotard is not, I believe, a dangerous critical fiction nor an accidental resemblance. Goto's narrative arises in the context of ethnic minority experiences with racist social and linguistic expectations. She thus presents seemingly postmodern textual contingency as derived from experiential grounds that challenge the categorical and linguistic assumptions of the very cognitive structures that Lyotard also cri­ tiques in his philosophy. Lyotard’s work has long been focussed on ethnic others, such as Jews and Algerians, whose exclusion has guaranteed the cohesiveness of Western European ideas and identities (see, for example, his Political Writings or Heidegger and "thejews”). Lyotard offers as a relevant example of the unjust differend the inability of ethnic groups who are citizens of colonial powers to present that very citizenship as a wrong that demands redress (Differend §36). The anxiety of being...

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