The Dark Inside the Prologue: Enactive Cognition and Eerie Ontology in Catherynne M. Valente's Radiance

Abstract

Twenty-first-century fiction continues to examine the ontological instabilities of postmodernism. But even as they hold on to the idea of multiple realities, these works also aim to change the tone with which that idea is represented. This article analyzes Catherynne M. Valente's Radiance (2015), a novel which thematizes the unstable ontologies that Brian McHale describes through the metaphor of flickering. By adding embodied and communicative dimensions to the postmodernist imaginary, Valente's novel rethinks what the metaphor of flickering could mean and what effects ontological groundlessness can have on readers. The article connects these literary phenomena to the theories of enactive cognition, and suggests that enactive theory, just like Valente's reinterpretation of postmodern flickering, provides a sense of the world having strange agency as well as lacking proper solidity. Thus contemplating our perception of reality is eerie in the sense proposed by Mark Fisher, a term that provides a new grip on the experience of unstable ontology.