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The ripped-seam relativism of Post modernism is evident in the work of so-called New Journalists, whose cultural reporting used fictional techniques to tell fact-based stories, writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Peter Matthiessen. The school, if there ever was one, has faded as something one claims as current, but the flashy prose style and application of novel-like strategies remains influential. The method has left a trace that seeps upward through the soil and is absorbed, as an influence, by a generation of journalists nee bloggers, historians and social loud mouths who may well be unaware that loud mouthed application of fictional narrative structure to actual events isn’t something that was always with us.

The New Journalist were  post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. The style defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding.  Some years ago that sounded revolutionary and seemed a lethal theoretical blow to the constructs of the vaguely described ruling class controlling the conversation and the terms.  There are masterpieces in the genre, yes, but a good amount of it reads agitated and shrill, written by writers drunk on adjectives and cheesy effects who tried mightily to goose a number of ordinary stories.

The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being a post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning. The conflation of the irrational of fictional dynamics and the reasonable presentation of vetted facts is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished.  New Journalism seemed, for many, not just history in a hurry but Philosophy on the fly. The attack on modernisms' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had. 

Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before.

In any event, New Journalists never as a group never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded some what, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the limpest of avant gard  gestures, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again. 

Logan Heights

 I think that William Logan is a passable formalist  poet .  That’s all I can say abou the man’s efforts to write memorable verse, as there is  the sort of straining you detect that makes you think of someone conspicuously hurting themselves trying to make the heavy lifting their doing appear effortless. You could say that his poems are as poetic as a hernia, which is fine for those who love hernias and their propensity to make bodies bulge in extrusions of varied grotesquerie  I  give him credit , however, for fashioning as a nicely cutting prose style and a talent for the put down. It doesn'tmatter that you disagree with him, think wrong headed or willfully provocative; like the chronically snarky John Simon or the brilliantly acerbic polemics from the late William F. Buckley, he is fun to read . It’s  not a little like rooting for the villain in a professional wrestling match, or slowing down to gawk at a bad auto accident. Ill will and unkind cuts, real or show biz artifice, are what get and keep our attention. His remarks, though, rather too quickly revert to sarcasm, albeit sarcasm of a elevated sort; you wish he'd deal less with surface attributes of a poem and delve into thinking that is more off the charted course.

His review of the most recent work of British  Poet Laureate  Carol Ann Duffy .

is a prize example of Logan 's  synapses firing in the service of frontal assault. I wouldn't mind normally, since Duffy's work interests me not at all; I'd rather consider draining a cesspool than be obliged to read her treacle. Logan, though, goes on too long and too loudly over the word  "swooned". Sarcasm crowds out a subtler tact, it crowds out real criticism. There’s no doubt that Logan knows why he thinks the word is useless as a matter of practical poetry-making –a man as resourceful with cadence and comment as Logan cannot help  but be plagued with many an interesting idea. A paycheck , though, favors the fastest typist, and so his notions are turned into compact little landmines that go off quick, loud, one after another. All   that boom, pow, and kabam  grates to an extent and you  find yourself taking a deep breath and letting it out loudly , overwhelming the noise of the wisecracks ; you wish he’d taken a deep breath himself and explained his thinking more fully with the rest of the class.

"Swooned" is a perfectly fine word for a poet to make use of; Logan's error in that he implies that the term is hopelessly dated because it is of another era, an example of old fashioned sort of poetry. He'd have been on firmer ground had he argued that it is a word that needs to be in the hands of a poet with an ear for newer and older lexicons. For myself, I'd have no problem using "swooned" regardless of its age because it has a beautiful , melodic, fluid sound, and it's effectiveness needn't be consigned to the post-modern habit of knee jerk modernism to justify its use. Straight forward or ironic, it is a fine word and what matters, really , are the language the poet musters up--is there a sequence of well chosen images and metaphors, agile word choices that service a scenario--and the efficacy of the perceptions and attendant emotional resonances. Regular people in every day speech mix their terms, old, new, obscure, clear as glass, all the time and I don't see why some words are banned merely because they are no longer favored for common use. The point is the sound of the word and the effectiveness of its deployment; talent matters most of all. Carol Ann Duffy isn't that poet , but Logan isn't the man to tell anyone what ought not be done.

No more National Poetry Month

Well, yeah, I'm grumpy some of the time, and I've been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual  dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading or promoting. The reservations come chiefly from the attitude that poetry is something pathetic in itself, with Special Needs, and that there is a collective delusion in the publishing world that poetry can be made more popular by hyping the form with the cliched hokum that sounds culled from New Age screeds. It's a little infuriating to witness an art that you believe, at its best, sparks the unusual idea or the unforeseen connection within a reader be reduced as something that marketers promise to deliver a consumer to an even deeper vat of circumscribed thinking.

I wouldn't say my remarks about National Poetry Month are grumpy, just realistic. On the face of it I welcome a month dedicated to the art , craft and diversity of poets and their work , and even think that the month might well bring new readers to poetry as something they'd read in their leisure time. The problem is that once we give someone or some  thing a special day, week, or month for the nominal purpose of increasing awareness, most of the population bothering to observe what the calendar day commemorates will nod their head, bow their head, read a few poems, maybe buy a single volume that will likely wind up half way finished and atop a coffee table, a page bent down to mark a page,not be picked up again, and then be done with it for the year. It certainly gives major publishers significant favorable publicity so they can present themselves as more than bottom-line obsessed subsidiaries of malignant media corporations: look at what we're doing to support the arts, look at our love of poetry!!

There are poets who benefit, many of them I count my favorites, but the fact that poetry in general has a month dedicated to it's supposed welfare seems more to me that the rest of the literary world considers the form a poor, sickly relative; April as poetry month is the metaphorical gulag, a ghetto, a hospice, that space where this art, which no publisher seems to know how to market so it contributes usefully to their bottom line, is allowed to make it's noise, indulge their rhetoric for a short period in the spot light before being ushered from the stage and back to the margins.

Poets, the work they do, the theories they develop regarding their art has been the most rarefied and most diffuse of the arts as it developed since the encroachment of Modernism over turned the conventional thinking about poetry's form and purpose. It's been to poetry's advantage, I think, that the audience has been small, very small, compared to the other genres that help publishers make their payrolls and their dividends, since the relative obscurity has allowed poets of many different styles and concerns, politics and agendas to advance their art and arguments , both Quietest and Post-Avant Gard, unconcerned with a commercial aspect that wasn't theirs to begin with. National Poetry Month is something like a zoo the city folk may visit on their days off , and the poets are the exotic creatures who will perform their tricks, do their dances, take their bows for the smattering of applause and loose coin that might come their way. Generally speaking, poets and their work would be better off, and saner as well, if the illusion that a dedicated month will increase the readership and increase book sales as well.

It would be better for poets to stop behaving like their in need of rehabilitation and went about their business, doing what we're supposed to do to the best our individual and collective abilities. If the work is good, interesting, of quality on it's own terms, the audience , whatever the size, will come.

_____________________________

Muscle poetry

The poem "Richard Noel" is Harry Thomas' slap at obscurantist modernism in all its forms, resisting the lure of diffuse and the oblique for the clipped, staccato version of Rudyard Kipling, although Kipling himself would have furnished the fife and brass to accentuate and enliven the rattatatat of the military drums. Thomas' poem is a rhythmic straight jacket, the confined emotionalism of someone trying to keep their bleeding heart to a steady, unexcited beat. If only if he'd actually let it all go to provide us with something fiercer, more explosive than this soggy parody of Hemingway's succinct, staccato  effusions about a Personal Code.

To finish the long profile

**his grade depended on,

the afternoon before

**the surgery, alone,

he worked late in the library.

**I saw him typing away.

On my desk were his ten pages

**the first thing the next day.

Over the years I, too,

**have had hard things to face.

But when did I once summon

**such fortitude and grace?

It is admirable, one supposes, that a student gets their homework turned in on time despite an affliction, but this tribute, with its hushed bathos, seems very, very silly indeed. There is something remarkable in the attempt to overstate a point using such a crabbed rhetoric; the clichés and the conventional wisdom toward the sick and the afflicted area boiled , chipped and chiseled to their irreducible essences, leaving only a salty residue of uninteresting thinking. There is ossification here, there is poet tasting, but there is no poetry, such as we understand it. So what does one do to mend this tendency of amateurs to compose and distribute this stanza'd insult to the eyes? Exactly nothing. Nothing can be done to cure the lagging tastes of the naive.

There is that large faction of the otherwise diminutive poetry audience that likes its verse rhyming, rocking in a cadence that suggests a three-legged clogging competition, stanzas that are morally coherent and as comprehensible as a stack of pancakes, and the seldom discussed aspect among the rest of us self-declared elites fighting back gag reflexes is that this more or less a permanent state of affairs in this odd and contentious corner of the literary world. For all the chatter some of us offer up about being ecumenical. inclusive and appreciative of the broadness contemporary contains with regards to style, aesthetics, and the subtly differentiated concerns each of the coexisting schools collectively undertake to have their respective poems achieve their results, many of us choke with contempt and despair over the obvious if unacknowledged truth that doggerel, poesy, poet tasting and all the loutish rest are permanent fixtures in the literary culture that thrives beyond the ramparts.

There are no mass conversions forthcoming when it comes to convincing the rest of the poetry world that they’d be better off reading the stronger stuff. Consumers know what they want to read, and the amateur poet, not beholden to particular school of poetics or allegiances formed while they were a graduate student, will write exactly how they see fit, daring, strange enough, to write poems that make sense.

I don't think there is anything subtle or understated about "Richard Noël”. This set up is basically the plot line of the old ABC-TV disease-themed "Movies of the Week", where the usual tragedy was introduced in the first act, the resolve of the afflicted is tested as he or she struggles to get on with their life is shown in the second, and the third act concludes with the victim teaching a doubting observer a lesson amounting to the life can be lived fully even with a hindering, perhaps fatal ailment. These soapy melodramas were churned out week after week, and what their popularity attests to is that this sort of by-the-numbers approach to conflict and resolution is what the public accepts as the height of dramatic action.

What's off putting to me is the patronizing tone Thomas takes toward his subject --the whole Kipling "Gunga Din" tone of Imperialist paternalism (where there is the narrator's surprise that what he regards as "civilized" virtues emerge from a heathen subject) weighs this down with a sure paving of the narrative line to a limited series of genre constrained conclusions.

It might be interesting for a writer to use this situation as a reason for soul searching and critical self-examination, but that is a tricky balance to achieve, the getting the details of the afflicted's situation right with a delicately deployed tone , and having the narrator's introspection not overwhelm the poem and make the poem a bottomless confession. And what ought to be achieved by the third act, that final part of the dialectic, would need to be an insight, an image, a phrase that is somewhat apart from the previous two elements, something unique and not facile, as Thomas' finishing stanza was in "Richard Noel".

The execution is competent enough, although there isn’t an interesting rhythm anywhere in the poem. It’s hemmed in by its lack of distinction or character. While I don’t the poet’s sincerity, this rhymes of the sing-song variety; each time a line alights upon a previous line’s phonic twin, there’s a perceptible crash, or a thud. It’s not that I’m opposed to rhyme, but it is certain that in these days following the post modernist insurrection a poet who rhymes should be exceptional. Thom Gunn gets the craft write with his verse, bringing in associations that surprise the reader expecting a vague gloss of the subject matter due to the presence of rhyme. His work is wonderfully controlled, musical, artfully constructed without indicating the labor it takes to compose with such a tuned ear:

The Man with Night Sweats

By Thom Gunn

I wake up cold, I who

Prospered through dreams of heat

Wake to their residue,

Sweat and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:

Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored

The body I could trust

Even while I adored

The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in

Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry

The given shield was cracked,

My mind reduced to hurry,

My flesh reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,

But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am

Hugging my body to me

As if to shield it from

The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough

To hold an avalanche off.

There are other poets who write a fine poem in more traditional modes who haven’t sacrificed their wit; one may argue on ideological grounds that the formalism one comes across is a reactionary movement linked in spirit and practice to a more rigid culturally conservative impulse, but for my part I prefer to judge the poet by the work. Eliot, Pound and others where profoundly nasty people who did work that with stood their propensities toward bigotry and general “A”-holism. It’s a simple matter of judging what works in the poem, and what doesn’t.

notes on more dead horses

The generation of  New Journalist  who emerged during the 60s and 70s were indeed post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. Post modernism is defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding.  Now that post modernism is as old hat and near useless as anything other than an historical place holder for a series of shallow ideas, we find that the what was called the pomo gesture in the work of the hungry journalists, that of treating their subjects and their contexts as though they were part of an explicitly literary, i.e., fictional framework, is important chiefly because it availed the writers a means to write a compelling prose. Less important than compelling readers to few the world differently—Ezra Pound’s assignment for all the Modernists—the importance of the books the style produced lies in their adherence to some rather conventional ideas of what constituted a higher quality of writing.

The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize and “make strange” the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning.

I do not have a problem of with the conflation of the emotional with the rational, since that is the point of writing and making an argument in the first place. One may use whatever the current wisdom insists are formal means, or one may engage the current species of avant-garde slash and burn in order to make their case, but the point is coming to an end that somehow makes a point, or has created an enlarged and vivid sense of the studied particulars.

In any event, New Journalists never as a group never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded somewhat, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the post modern gesture, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again. The conflation of reason and reason is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished.

The attack on modernisms' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had.

Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before.

I agree with Fred Jamieson on the point that Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project. Writing is an argument so far that the central impulse to write at all is to make a series of statements about oneself and one's experiences in the world , and reach a satisfying conclusion, some "meaning" at the end of the discourse.  Barthes notes that  the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not an static event, but a fluid movement through time that a writer's perception of changes moment to moment, text to text. The argument is thus not one sided, but multi-vocal, complex, interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves within in the writer and onto their pages, in the extension of characters, plot, instances, local, active bits of imagining where the goal, is finally to attempt to resolve contradiction, arrive at something absolute in a universe that seems to permanently with hold its Absolute Meanings during this lifetime, and to achieve, somehow, some peace, some satisfaction. But no: the argument persists, the imagination soars, the old certainties cannot contain either the unset of new perceptions, nor can sooth a writer's restlessness. In literature, the conflation continues, reason and emotion color each other, the eyes shut, hoping for vision, a clear path, but the writing continues, the sorting through of experience continues, the unease continues, the world changes radically and not at all. That post modernism's over all mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.

Lew Welch said that you don’t write unless you can’t do anything else; writers are powerless to write in ways other than the urge dictates, regardless of what crit

Our punk, our genius

Bob Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop. He was pop by the definitions of pop music holding sway in the mid to late Sixties when the word became associated with experimentation, the avant-guard. "Pop" and "Rock" were interchangeable terms. Peter Townsend was the one who coined the term "power pop", in an interview I read in the old Hit Parader music journal,  and used the phrase to describe the Who. It was a term he used to define the Beach Boys, a band he admired quite a bit Definitions of terms change, of course, and with the re-emergence of conspicuously commercial tunes in a post-punk era came a new pop music that was heavy on irony and purely obsessed with its hook value. 

The Beach Boys were an extension of the harmony prone Four Freshmen, a vocal style overlaid upon a Chuck Berry chord progression with lyrics addressing concerns not of the 40s or 50s, surfing and souped cars. The who borrowed the Beach Boys'  vocalese and used it in conjunction with a musical style premised on power chords and snarling teen hooliganism. Dylan, though, was the one who broke from the pack, taking his inspiration from the nominally "pure"  genres contained in the folk music revival.  The good man, though, had something larger to  do rather than adhere to principles; fame was his goal, and fortune;  he walked backward into genius,  into the backwoods with this nasal, grunting vocals and lyrics that blended  an idealized  proletariat idiom with  great heaping doses of  Verlaine and Eliot: he brought literary Modernism to the jukebox. He also understood the dynamics of being a teen ideal. If he couldn't be sexy/dangerous like  Elvis, he could at least be vague, mysterious, "poetic".

The "dignity" and" integrity" that Dylan refused to be marginalized by--ie, made quaint and neutered as a revolutionary force of any definition--were those notions codified by the lefty Folk Revival he eventually abandoned. Their idea of those qualities had little to do with Polonius's greatest platitude--"...to thine own self-be true..." --and everything to do with conformity to a vaguely held consensus.  I would only insist that the means of Dylan following his muse amounts to deftly selected instances of opportunism. Had Dylan been less inspired in his mashing together of his unlike influences, we likely would have regarded him as a pretentious fool trying to beserk himself into genius. Dylan, though, was a genius, and his careerism is mitigated in the music and lyrics that resulted from it. The work is everything. It took rock and roll by surprise. Someone like Dylan from the Sixties wouldn't be considered pop at all. He had singles that found chart positions, he earned gold albums, he toured internationally, gave interviews and signed autographs. He was a pop star, a pop artist, a contradiction that refused to be marginalized by unprofitable consolations such as dignity or integrity. He was going to be famous and get rich; he was a pop star and a punk. Our punk, our genius.

Garbled

Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature: Why does she ask all the wrong questions? - By William Deresiewicz - Slate Magazine

The central conceit of a much contemporary criticism has been to raise the critic's musings on literature to the same level as the literature these folks intensely scrutinize. This seems a ploy to have literary critics form a new priesthood and authoritative to be sought out no less than the poet, the novelist, the playwright, and philosopher. Marjorie Garber is relatively typical of the academic who feels the need to produce a tract, composed almost entirely of weathered, rusty post-modernist adages, that demands that the reader requires the professional critic to open up the text for them and so facilitate a new rigor in how those so blessed think about the world. "The Use and Abuse of Literature," a manifesto intended to convince the readership she condescends to that their particular takes on books they've read and lived with are woefully incomplete, even shallow. We need to stop asking what things mean and investigate instead how they mean. If you labored for some years with attempts to grasp recent critical trends, you no doubt realize this is something that creates topic drift. Garber gives us permission to not debate ideas put forth through narrative conflict and metaphor and instead insists on turning us into mechanics. It's messy and pointless labor, I think.

Anyone who knows me realizes that  I am not anti-critic--my chief concern is that the profession and the practice resist the codification of closed-system terms that want to seal literature from the rest of the universe the art is assigned to engage and to prevent the interested reader from having a nuanced take on a writer's work that can stand beside the effusions of the doctors of literary chatter.  True enough, the critic ought to guide, poke, prod, and urge a reader to think outside the conventional, freeze-dried frameworks an entertainment media foists upon us; the activity, though, ought to be a temporary thing, as the theoretical reader we're addressing should cease turning critics for clarification and consider them, instead, as a means to heighten their own insight. Critics, ultimately, should be a short-lived thing. Garber writes as if she thinks the assignation should be permanent. This is hubris made worse by her habit of asking continuous strings of rhetorical questions about the whys and wherefores of what creative writers do and then slipping away from her bare assertions as she glides to the next issue. It makes for a splendid bit of dancing had one the elegance of a Nabokov or a James to pronounce their vagueness with the sweetest and most distracting verbal music. Garber plays no music; this book is a consistent paraphrase of old notions presented in a droning monotone.

Even a critic I happen to enjoy, Harold Bloom, wrote a little instruction Manuel called "How to Read and Why," a grandiose albeit slim volume where the good critic plagiarized himself from other of his books about and offered up a little mumbling about reading in a correctly guided manner. Oh well, even intelligent people with insight and several levels of wit and discernment can be subject to brief bits of blow-hards. Though I think that there is a variety of "truth" that literature is best suited to reveal and bring forth for discussion, I am not taken with the idea that fiction, poetry, and plays are intended to disclose facts. I have no objection to the questions Garber wants to ask; the reservations come with Garber's seeming need to rush past those questions and hurry instead to the next set of wonderings. She brings forth a continuous stream of inquiries and then defers, delays, goes diffuse at the edges. This book lacks a genuine discussion of any number of issues, contradictions, and controversies the task criticism contains. She resembles critic Fred Jameson in this respect; there is a concentrated period of throat clearing and harrumphing, followed by what can best be described as a gutless strategy of deferral. It makes you want to re-read Terry Eagleton's books on the critical arts, like "Literary Theory," "Problems of Post-Modernism" or "After Theory." Background, thesis, argument. In general, I am interested in how literature works. Indeed I am obsessed by it, but I am not willing to settle for the Professional Critic to be the priestly arbiter of what needs to be noticed, inspected, discussed; her insistence that the general reader's response is useless without a Critic's watermark is implicit in this cozy apology.

Notes in the night

Richard Rorty, in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" defines an "ironist" as someone who realizes "that anything can be made to look good or bad by being re described" (73). Are postmodern writers this kind of "ironist"? No more, it would seem , than any other writer scribing under the modernist tenet of "making it new", or to another extreme, 'defamiliarizing" (from Bahktin) recognizable settings , characters and schemes in a language that's meant to provoke readers to see their world in new ways. This is a modernist habit that the new, cubist, cut-up, stream-of-conscious takes on the world will sweep away past aesthetic interpretative models and lead one to a the correct formation of the world-- there remains a faith that language and other senses can apprehend and describe a tangible , material world and capture its complex composition, a "metaphysics of presence" that art can unearth.

Irony, in this sense, is usually contained within the story, a result of several kinds of narrative operations coming to a crucial moment of ironic intensity that then drives the story into directions one , with hope, didn't anticipate. Post modern writers start off with the intent of being post modern from the start, and rather than have their inventions gear us for a challenge to see the world in a truer light (contrasted against previous schools of lovely language but false conclusions), the project is to debunk the idea of narrative style all together.

Irony is intended to demonstrate some flaws in character's assumptions about the world, a description of the world that emerges contrarily after we've been introduced to the zeitgeist of the fictionalized terrain. Post modern writers are ironists of a different sort, decidedly more acidic and cynical about whether narrative in any form can hone our instincts.  It's a tenet of Modernism that in order for writing to be truly contemporary, it must achieve a level of difficulty that allegedly force the reader to reassess their take on experience. Impenetrability was encouraged, so far as the Modernist project encouraged any specific tendency among its early practitioners.

"Make it new" was a chief slogan at the height of the Modernist literary movement, courtesy of Karl Shapiro, and the works, assimilated into academic study, don't comprise the sort of literature that makes for lazy readers. Rather, it's techniques set up the ideal reader, say, "reared in the Modernist style", to grasp the manner and aim of a Postmodern writing, which again, I believe, in it's best expression, is an extension of the Modernist agenda, albeit tweaked about the edges with a bankrupt critical apparatus. The theory cannot keep apace with the actual imaginative writing: sorry, but many theorists seem like bright children adept at taking things apart who cannot quite put them back together in anyway that's useful, meaningful.

A book worth reading and re-reading

The fuss over postmodern style has blessedly subsided a while ago, leaving me with the opportunity to clear some novels from my bookshelf that  aged as well as I would have hoped. What had seem novel, bold, smart in the eighties and nineties now seems, well, contrived, faddish and tacky.  DeLillo , Pynchon and others are doing just fine for credibility , of course, and  younger writer's effort,  Chris Bachelder's Bear v Shark:The Novel, scores big with his 2002 debut novel. It was the po-mo laugh fest that the over-praised and under-edited Jonathan Franzen strained. "The Corrections".It answers what every Luddite might have been wondering about the long term effects of television watching on our much assaulted nuclear family.

In the future, the televisions have no off switch, nor do they have remote controls, because technology has gotten to the point that television no longer influences the culture, but IS the culture. Reality and simulation melt together seamlessly, without a trace of resistance from the archetypal family whose path we follow as they prepare themselves for a Las Vegas vacation to witness the much hyped Media Event of Bear v. Shark. Bachelder keeps a straight face through out most of this short but punchy novel, and displays an ear for the way television cant infiltrates our daily speech, and invades our dream life. Scattered through out the book are a heap of fast and savage rips on Mass Mediated news, sports call-in shows, flouncy entertainment under which nothing substantial resides. In this world, experts in the guise of pundits, jocks, philosophers, and academics all feed a an uncountably intrusive technology that renders every distraction and disturbance into an entertainment value, to be used until a new contrived sequence of illusion can be set in place.

Bachelder, demonstrating a brevity and incisive wit that trashes the claims made for the word-gorged "genius" of D.F. Wallace, writes surely, sharply, with his eye never off his target.  Though he does, at times, resort to the sort of post-modernism stylistics and cliches, such as having the author step out from the story to deliver some self-aware discourse on the limits of narrative's capacity to represent the external world fully, completely -- he has a novel or two to go before the lit.critese is pounded out of him -- our author finally reveals a humane side underneath the smart language, and issues forth a funny yet serious warning about our habit of relinquishing our thinking and our capacity to live imaginatively over to the hands of data-drunk programmers.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's novels have been remarkably strong given the length of his career, and the only one I think is subpar is his 9/11 novel; nicely fitted, of course, with some of the author's famed verbal brilliance, but it seemed more per-formative than anything else, with the estranged characters and their respective stages of psychic exile twined in pro forma fashion around that date's catastrophe. The novel seemed to have been written out of sense of obligation, that the author who had made a career out of writing about a world that fits the 9/11 cliche "everything has changed" felt compelled to give his remarks in fictional form. It alone among his books was a labor to read, as it seems to have been a labor to write.

Otherwise, I salute his post-Underworld writings The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, a delicately etched character study and a black comedy respectively who's central characters, a performance artist and a digital guru commodities broker, reach the end of the belief systems that filled in the interior absence of purpose and commitment to the world.In this instance I find much to like about "Point Omega", although I think it helps if you've read several of his books , are aware of his larger themes and appreciate the way he has condensed and concentrated his themes into a hard,splendidly spare narrative line. It is, I think, a continuation of DeLillo's examination of a culture that has had the mystery and mythology stripped from it by the harsher trends in Modernism, replaced with various wrap around belief systems ranging from political ideology, art-for-art's sake, technology and assorted other absolutist-tending habits of mass-think that each attempt to replace what had been the spiritual, the religious, the intuitive.

Our character Elster, here, is a polymath, a genius versed in a seeming unlimited variety of cross-indexed disciplines, someone whom the intelligence and defense apparatus of the State brought on as someone who's musings about their agendas and techniques might somehow give them an advantage over opponents both current and future. Elster,though, is someone who finds his learning, the knowledge and he garnered in an effort to weave his way through an infinitely complex network of warring belief systems, collapsing upon itself. Now he considers the finite essence of all things, stripped of meaning as he has been stripped of his inner life;he watches an endless artful deconstruction of an iconic movie, he prefers the limitless waste of the desert, he desires an existence that can be mute, meaningless, flat and precisely without resonance. I think this is powerful stuff, really, a lyric poem.

When Narratives Shrink

I find myself again leafing through the brown  pages of college texts, most having to do with the string of Gordian knots called Contemporary Literary Criticism, the variety that infiltrated American English Departments in the Sixties and drove out the last vestiges of Romanticism and killed whatever taste their was for New Criticism. These are things I've pondered on the run since getting my degree in 1981, riffing on matters reducible to Lyotard's book The Post Modern Condition.

Do postmodern writers avoid grand narratives? Hardly, as the point of post modern writing was to confront the formerly dominant notion of master narrative and investigate the inconsistencies in the conceits, and to devise alternative ways of telling big stories and conveying big ideas. The doings of Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth seem not to want to destroy the grand narratives as such, but instead to re-tool it, re-build, tweak and switch-and-swap styles, one for the other, in the practice of pastiche and parody, in order to extend the potential of fiction with interesting accounts of either Historical processes, or the banality of daily life. The points posted about Pynchon being particularly strong with knowledge of history are well taken, since his fictional project is to imagine and elaborate on the gaps and alienated niches left out of an allegedly all- encompassing narrative sweep, the events and personalities otherwise that reside at the margins of, the periphery of the storyline. A task of postmodern fiction, among other ploys, is to bring the trivialized and the ignored to the center of the action, and weave them into the structure as elements no less essential to what ever conclusion a novelist might come to than are the efforts of Presidents, Kings, or Philosophers directing hypothetical History to some final, defining resolution.

The narrative is not made less grand, but bigger, denser, more intriguing to suss out. It's not that either Pynchon or DeLillo had set out to debunk the notion of that fiction can give a reliable accounting of history or the resonance of real-life; it would seem that both remembered that what they want to do is write fiction, after all, and that neither they, nor their fellows, are required to produce work that attempts verisimilitude. Grand narratives aren't shunned by post modern writers, but are played with, expanded, adapted to new shapes and intentions; this demonstrates resilience, not exhaustion, and the undertaking is more interesting for the fiction-writing post modernist. I am of a mind that philosophers of post modernism have different sympathies than postmodern novelists. It's not as though all postmodern writers are set on debunking or re-tooling grand narratives. Quite the opposite. Other writers, arguably post-modern, settle on smaller realities, dioramas of kind, worlds self-contained within their own subset: Burroughs, Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Kathy Acker, Ron Sukineck, among others of more recent vintage do their work at the borders, creating a vivid narrative sense with their particular experiments that mirrors, I think, a tradition of short stories and novellas, life in obscured corners brought to light. Skewed, though, skewed and wacky, a post modernist signature.

Why then would you think of Pynchon at all as a PM while Steinbeck is considered the quintessential Modern? There seems to be no difference. Pynchon would be postmodern because there is a knowingness about his virtuoso use of myth: besides the fact that he mixes his cultural dictions, high to low and middle brow in the center, he's aware of the ultimate transparency of myth as being just another good yarn one may play with however one decides. Steinbeck, in his faith in the final truth of narrative function, sees myth as containing symbolic Truth about human nature that resists critique. Pynchon’s' use is playfully skeptical, though Steinbeck’s' best work is no less compelling for his use of archetypes.

Richard Rorty, in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" defines an "ironist" as someone who realizes "that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed" Are postmodern writers this kind of "ironist"? No more, it would seem, than any other writer scribing under the modernist tenet of "making it new", or to another extreme, 'defamiliarizing" (from Bahktin) recognizable settings, characters and schemes in a language that's meant to provoke readers to see their world in new ways. This is a modernist habit that the new, cubist, cut-up, stream-of-conscious takes on the world will sweep away past aesthetic interpretative models and lead one to a the correct formation of the world-- there remains a faith that language and other senses can apprehend and describe a tangible, material world and capture its complex composition, a "metaphysics of presence" that art can unearth. Irony, in this sense, is usually contained within the story, a result of several kinds of narrative operations coming to a crucial moment of ironic intensity that then drives the story into directions one , with hope, didn't anticipate.

Post modern writers start off with the intent of being post modern from the start, and rather than have their inventions gear us for a challenge to see the world in a truer light (contrasted against previous schools of lovely language but false conclusions), the project is to debunk the idea of narrative style all together. Irony is intended to demonstrate some flaws in character's assumptions about the world, a description of the world that emerges contrarily after we've been introduced to the zeitgeist of the fictionalized terrain. Post modern writers are ironists of a different sort, decidedly more acidic and cynical about whether narrative in any form can hone our instincts. A professor I saw in a lecture point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be .This Marcel Duchamp’s' idea, a classic dada gesture he offered with his ready-mades, such as urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedestals. The point, though, was that the object became an aesthetic object, denatured, in a manner of speaking, from its natural context and forced, suddenly, to be discussed in its very "thingness". The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default.Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold , shape and hone materials and forms into an a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any definable function, is suddenly given a use that is sufficiently economic, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. Duchamp, and other Dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the privileged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending.

Big Idea, or a bunch of small ones hidden in the details?

Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform. Steinbeck had the spirit of reformer as well and sought to give an unsentimental account of the working poor in this country; but sentimental he remained, a quality that mired much of his other work besides Grapes of Wrath.

His drive to give the truth in story form needed to be fueled by tangible emotion, and so his tales take on familiar rise-and-fall themes we find in conventional tragedy.Thomas Pynchon is perhaps the novelist version of Chaos Theory, which is to say that all is not chaos at all but rather that the relationships between all narrative angles, as in the relationships between all biological systems, are far more intricate and intertwined than a conventional accounting would have us know. Pynchon steps back several yards from his subject and masters the rhetoric of any style he fancies to pay attention too, and is able to grasp the eternal absurdities of plot lines are made to perform. His aim, I guess, is to the notion of Grand Narrative is actually too modest a term; the tale that's told has multitudeVery post-modern, I'd say, but it's disturbing to think that men and women who are nominally good writers can fill up pages and bandwidth with a tweaked yammering that exists only to avoid the ideas they begin with in the subject line. This is very much like Samuel Beckett's novels, Malloy, Malone, The Lost Ones, More Pricks than Kicks, and here we have the link with the Late Modernism that had the creator (author) and subject (novel) rising , in their unperishable need to produce, from the noisy clash and clutter of an aesthetic philosophy that demanded new ways of putting the world together, of making the world non-liner and multi-valent, sufficiently prepared to be remade with technology and criteria. The point for many is that bleeding-edge writing has been around long enough -- since after WWll, I believe-- for a useful literary criteria to arise around it. The re-making and the re-re-making of those values are generally extensions, elaborations or, more radically, severe disagreements with standards that formed around a work while in nascent form. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement, among scads of others in history, had it's propagandists in it's early time, critics whose views remain bed rock, the base from which reformations are made.

Conflating the punchlines

New Journalism was a style of cultural journalism that favored using fictional techniques to tell fact-based stories, with writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Peter Matthisen each becoming the omniscient narrator observing, cataloguing and characterizing each telling detail of the events under review. The approach faded as something one claims as current, but the flashy prose style and application of novel-like strategies remains influential. The method has left a trace that seeps upward through the soil and is absorbed, as an influence, by a generation of journalists nee bloggers, historians and social loud mouths who may well be unaware that loud mouthed application of fictional narrative structure to actual events isn’t something that was always with us.

The New Journalist were post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. The style defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding. Some years ago that sounded revolutionary and seemed a lethal theoretical blow to the constructs of the vaguely described ruling class controlling the conversation and the terms. There are masterpieces in the genre, yes, but a good amount of it reads agitated and shrill, written by writers drunk on adjectives and cheesy effects who tried mightily to goose a number of ordinary stories.

The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being a post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning. The conflation of the irrational of fictional dynamics and the reasonable presentation of vetted facts is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished. New Journalism seemed, for many, not just history in a hurry but Philosophy on the fly.

The attack on modernism's' assumption that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had. Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before.

New Journalists never never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded some what, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the post modern gesture, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again.

Writing in the captain's tower

If Pound's poems work for reasons other than how he wanted them work, fine, that can be explicated interestingly enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case, based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic (though failed poet).

Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues: The Sacred Wood and some of his other critical assessments have merit as purely critical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. The problem with his criticism was that it was less a system of thought than it was a nice articulation of resentments or one liners that weren't further developed. Eliot, the Royalist, the Anglo-Catholic, the anti-modern Modernist, thought himself too busy to explain himself, and reveals the conservative impatience for inclusiveness; things simply have gotten worse in our culture once alien hordes began infiltrating our borders. It seemed to him so obvious a matter of cause and effect that the relative succinctness of his views, articulated in aesthetics, needn't dwell on what everyone already knows. The criticism would be the equivalent of how he described "The Waste Land", a species of rhythmic grumbling.

It's less about what one can call his "despair" than what his operating premise has in common with the post modern aesthetic: Eliot, the Modernist poet extraordinaire, perceives the world the universe has having any sort of definable center, any unifying moral force formally knowable by faith and good works. There is despair in the works, behind the lines--one responds to them emotionally and intellectually--and the power behind the images, the shimmering surfaces the diminished, de-concretized narrator feels estranged from, comes from a felt presence, a real personality. Eliot , though, turns the despair into a series of ideas, and makes the poetry an argument with the presence day.

There is pervasive sense of everything being utterly strange in the streets, bridges over rivers, strangeness at the beach, and we, it sounds, a heightened sense of voices, media, bombs, headlines competing for the attention of some one who realizes that they're no longer a citizen in a culture where connection to a core set of meanings, codes and authority offers them a security, but are instead consumers, buyers, economic in a corrupt system that only exploits and denudes nature, culture, god.

Eliot conveys the sense of disconnection brilliantly, a modernist by his association with the period, though at heart he was very much a Christian romantic seeking to find again some of the Scripture surety to ease his passage through the world of man and his material things. There has always been this yearning for a redemption of purpose in the vaporous sphere, and much of his work, especially in criticism, argued that the metaphysical aspect could be re-established, recreated, re-imagined (the operative word) through the discipline of artistic craft. Modernists, ultimately, shared many of the same views of postmodernism with regards of the world being an clashing, noisy mess of competing, unlinked signifiers, but post modernism has given up the fight of trying to place meaning in the world, and also the idea that the world can be changed for the better. Modernists , as I take them in their shared practice and aesthetic proclamations, are all romantics, though their the angle and color of their stripes may vary. Romanticism, in fact, is an early kind of modernism: the short of it is that there is a final faith in the individual to deign the design of the world, and in turn change its shape by use of his imagination .

Eliot's poems, as well, stand up well enough with out his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might other wise resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to their respective purposes. Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his verse, like he were trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories contained: The Cantos sound desperate in his desire to be a genius.

Theorized into Submission

We might as well say it, none of the “ism” terms stay in one ideological location—even with a prevailing idea that concepts and their definitions are fixed, there is incredible fluidity in how notions go off the reservation, so to speak “Modernism” proper has it's left and right wings, whether Bauhaus or Albert Speer, and it is important to note that a host of Modernist poetry’s early geniuses, Ezra Pound and Eliot in particular, were notably conservative and pugnaciously anti-Semitic. Part of bringing a revolutionizing the way we saw the world (with it in mind to change the world) meant, in the long wrong, in ridding the planet of particular ethnic groups who only diluted the clarity and brought falseness to the world. As the term "postmodernism" is used, in most instances, as a term meant to describe the clusters of habits that characterize a current age against previous ones, it only makes perverted sense that the polarities intuitively use the same devices to achieve fear-driven agendas, rhetorical tweaking assumed. If I had to clue some one in as to what deconstruction is, I would step back from my usual shuffle about it being a type of extreme investigative process into the reliability of text to contain anything of the phenomenal world, and would instead point to the series of state and federal cases involving election results.

The debacle in the Gore v Bush concern was a genuine Post Modern Moment; Republicans had to temporarily forgo an Absolutist agenda and assume the rhetoric of legalesed deconstruction to confuse, blur and disgorge their oppositions' Grundissian rants. Matters that once seemed clear and fixed in their symbolic authority to a truth we all yield to suddenly seem less firm, in fact wobbly simply because one man wouldn't yield the game. The right isn't afraid to name, nor to advance their cause. There is a living embodiment of political will behind their description the current situation, and it would be Post Modern Tragedy that we've theorized ourselves into submission.

The American Left certainly wasn't afraid of offending political sensibilities while there was a Viet Nam war through which the ultimately unprovable historical determinism could be obscured by a conflict whose obscenity over rode local matters. But with the end of the war, the left here about receded to theory, unwilling, I think , to realize something fundamentally decent about Americans and their sense of fairness to the right cause, and it seemed to matter little to the intellectual elite to deal with practical matters of policy , county, state and federal.

The left, in general, became generalized in theory and law, and reduced everything to an eviscerated discourse of euphemistic speech that was not allowed to defile a sense of neutrality: things ceased to have names, only vague descriptions , and in this atmosphere any talk about identifying problems about what sickens the Nation became impossible . Rather than action to change social relations, real practice, a fight for change was reduced to a ideologically perplexed course in etiquette, the practice of which made humans confront each other in ways that were nervous, nervous, ultimately insane.

Gramsci wound up in prison, but he didn't write manuals for non-offensive language in the work place: he never lost his belief that theory needed to stop somewhere, that abstruse descriptions had to halt at the right juncture and some remedy, based on sane analysis, had to be effected. One's knowledge of what produces alienation and states where exploitation is possible needed to be matched with solutions."Guts" comes to mind, courage, old fashioned and romantic virtues , but still ways to talk about the world, the city where we might live, and within in, a way to imagine and realize the ways to make it maybe make it more workable than it was then when we entered into it, knowing only hunger and the feeling of cold earth. The exact problem with postmodern theory, the intellectual and not the aesthetic texts, is that it's turned into a self-conscious wallow (often disguised under the rubric of being "self-reflective") that brandishes the idea that an awareness of it's own social construction somehow advances bold, better human freedom. As Derrida was obsessed with the undecidablity of texts to crystallize phenomenon external to it’s own system-making tendency, Baudrillard in turn concerned himself with providing a sociology of how our terms of self-empowerment are , in fact, the chains that keep us at our stations, the ugly bottom half of post modernist comes a bit clearer: it’s useless, surrender to the inevitable, every good we might ever had has been tried and failed terribly. Post modernist intent can be a resource hogging neocons best friend, as it offers an enlightened version of apathy. What it does is make the nominal partisans of just causes weak and immobile, ready to have their own conventional wisdom used against them, as they were during The Miami Chad Trials, by a foe that's true to its own cause enough to use any weapon it can lay its hands on in order to make the world theirs and sterile under one Totalizing God, who, I suspect, isn't likely to have much truck with language theory.

notes on postmodernism and Fiction

Post modern fiction at best is by writers who have a faith beyond their own understanding that the novel will work to their creative convictions--DeLillo, Gaddis, Pynchon, Erikson, Vollmann, Didion and many, many others who've tweaked and commented upon the form their using in the execution of their work, have books that are red hot because they work as novels, first and foremost. The experiments end up in areas that are outside the middle class expectations of its audiences, the prose demonstrates a mastery of language that creates room for human response even as the writer--dead or alive--tries to imagine it's inability to step outside itself, out of it's prison house.

The term is central to many liberal arts and humanities programs, but its propagation results in bad criticism, the sort of pseudo-science that makes equivocation seem respectable. As theory, post modern thought is unsatisfying because it finally reveals cowardice in trying to uncover meaning in experience, or to try to enter into a debate what it is that makes the human experience worth thinking about.

It is this absenteeism on the political front that has enabled the Right to gain a high road in the area of values: our Republican opposition insist on talking about how we ought to live, while the Left, such as it is in the University departments, snort and insist that it's a more subtle, pervasive, insidious set of conditions that effect that The World. The Big Picture , Lyotard's "grand narrative", has a virtue as argument only if it has imagination to burn its concerns into the consciousness of the Culture it’s trying to enlighten. The blindered relativism and rudderless , entropy-grasping adherents of post-modern theory are producing an unreadable nonsense that no one who's worried about their schools, or their sewer systems , can respond to.

But post modernism, as style expressed in books, films, and theatre, will have a lasting mark on the landscape. If nothing else, the novels of Don DeLillo and Pynchon will stand for decades to come--their greatness is Faulknerian, Proustian-- as masterpieces of their time, as will others, no doubt. The judgment of History will separate out who will ultimately be with us, in some form, at the end of this century. Fred Jamieson has maintained that pomo is actually an extension of modernism's style: Eliot's style and concern with how cadences go together are hardly less radical than what the Beats, or the Language Poets have devised under their separate extreme energies, and Gertrude Stein, the mistress of Modernism if their was one, wrote in ways that are post-modern by the current lexicon.

But it has less to do with precursors foreshadowing a creative habit that would become coherent much later in the century: rather, it has more to do with a kind of continuity that postmodernists are loathe to admit, that the efforts of recent and younger artists are extensions of ideas that have found full expression in an earlier, perhaps more exiting time.

Much of post moderns' flashiest writers seem as they are trying to berserk themselves into genius: Harold Bloom is on point with his idea of the anxiety of influence.

Much of the sex and sizzle of recent work seems willfully, unnaturally expanded and encyclopedic: there's a worrisome dread under DF Wallace's work that refuses to stop trying top it's last page, an awareness that every sentence he writes is in competition with the history of Literature, in total. This insistence on being brilliance makes the work impossible to relish, savor. It bores with its marching bands and fireworks.

In his book City of Words, the late critic Tony Tanner maintained that reality in the 20th century had simply become too fantastic for fiction to simply be a slightly "exaggerated" replication of it: that realist project was indeed used up. Rather, the current novelist should cease trying to render a facsimile of actual experience, coded, as such, with a convenient moral and metaphysical argument behind it, and simply become more fantastic, fabulist, genre-leaping.

It was his notion that the novel, to really be anything at all, need to become 'word' structures, the titled city of words, and re introduce some things such as wonder and paradox, simply fantastic things, and to skillfully play with the archive of literary conventions to infuse their fantastic tales with a verve that he saw as lacking in the then current state of the novel. An interesting, ground breaking book on the rise of what's become known as the post-modern novel, and a succinct argument for the need.


One of the long standing praises sung in behalf of The Modern Age was the speed with which the affairs of the world were suddenly conducted, with the advent of air travel, the telegraph, radio, and eventually television. It was believed, as McLuhan did in his Musings in Understanding Media and, inevitably, The Medium is the Message, that this acceleration of real time and the shrinking of the world would produced comprehension and clarity of a reality that formerly with held it's secrets.

That is finally a large hope for what's considered to be one of Modernism's great aims--to produce art, literature, and technologies that transforms the way the world is experienced. Your experience with this obscure composer fulfils that promise, somewhat: you, and the thousands you speak of, shared the experience, did their research with the technology at their disposal, and finally wrote about it in the same few hours. A little more of the world's culture was known and shared at the same time, little different than the first live television broadcast , coast to coast, where thousands of Americans viewed the same scene at the same time. An quintessentially modern event.

The criticism that pushes forth post-modernism as a movement distinct from modernism certainly isn't lacking in moral force. It is the claim of the academic left that writes these tracts that the skeptical rigor they're applying to literature will aid, somehow, in the liberation of oppressed cultures, over turn falsifying ideologies, make absent cruel and crushing economic systems that extort, exfoliate, and waste, and enable us to experience a freedom that our current , binarily limited conceptions prevent us from achieving. There is certain righteousness to this cloudy, fence-sitting prose that reminds one of old catechisms. Scary.

For the force of post-modern writers, I'd say it's not the job of the writer to offer moral instruction to a reader, but rather to deal with the subject of being human in whatever contexts and conflicts that offers a narrative worth following. If morality is the author's intent, I say fine--Saul Bellow still brings me the uniform joy of writing superbly with his smug , Harold Bloomian classicism--but randomness, playfulness, and even amorality are welcome. What matters is whether the writer assumes his tasks with an idea of what he wants his art to accomplish at the end of it, of what sort of tone they want to leave resonating with the reader. De Lillo does this. So does Pynchon.

Don't Be Cruel: Say No to National Poetry Month

Well, yeah, I'm grumpy some of the time, and I've been accused of being a curmudgeon in regards to National Poetry Month, the annual dedication to an elusive art with a small audience that itself is divided among several hundred-seeming schools of thought as to what is genuinely worth reading or promoting. The reservations come chiefly from the attitude that poetry is something pathetic in itself, with Special Needs, and that there is a collective delusion in the publishing world that poetry can be made more popular by hyping the form with the cliched hokum that sounds culled from New Age screeds. It's a little infuriating to witness an art that you believe, at it's best, sparks the unusual idea or the unforeseen connection within a reader be reduced as something that marketers promise to deliver a consumer to an even deeper vat of circumscribed thinking.

I wouldn't say my remarks about National Poetry Month are grumpy, just realistic. On the face of it I welcome a month dedicated to the art , craft and diversity of poets and their work , and even think that the month might well bring new readers to poetry as something they'd read in their leisure time. The problem is that once we give someone or some thing a special day, week, or month for the nominal purpose of increasing awareness, most of the population bothering to observe what the calendar day commemorates will nod their head, bow their head, read a few poems, maybe buy a single volume that will likely wind up half way finished and atop a coffee table, a page bent down to mark a page,not be picked up again, and then be done with it for the year. It certainly gives major publishers significant favorable publicity so they can present themselves as more than bottom-line obsessed subsidiaries of malignant media corporations: look at what we're doing to support the arts, look at our love of poetry!!

There are poets who benefit, many of them I count my favorites, but the fact that poetry in general has a month dedicated to it's supposed welfare seems more to me that the rest of the literary world considers the form a poor, sickly relative; April as poetry month is the metaphorical gulag, a ghetto, a hospice, that space where this art, which no publisher seems to know how to market so it contributes usefully to their bottom line, is allowed to make it's noise, indulge their rhetoric for a short period in the spot light before being ushered from the stage and back to the margins.

Poets, the work they do, the theories they develop regarding their art has been the most rarefied and most diffuse of the arts as it developed since the encroachment of Modernism over turned the conventional thinking about poetry's form and purpose. It's been to poetry's advantage, I think, that the audience has been small, very small, compared to the other genres that help publishers make their payrolls and their dividends, since the relative obscurity has allowed poets of many different styles and concerns, politics and agendas to advance their art and arguments , both Quietist and Post-Avant Gard, unconcerned with a commercial aspect that wasn't theirs to begin with. National Poetry Month is something like a zoo the city folk may visit on their days off , and the poets are the exotic creatures who will perform their tricks, do their dances, take their bows for the smattering of applause and loose coin that might come their way. Generally speaking, poets and their work would be better off, and saner as well, if the illusion that a dedicated month will increase the readership and increase book sales as well.

It would be better for poets to stop behaving like their in need of rehabilitation and went about their business, doing what we're supposed to do to the best our individual and collective abilities. If the work is good, interesting, of quality on it's own terms, the audience , whatever the size, will come.

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(A related piece from two years ago, with a link to a useful Charles Bernstein essay.-tb)


We are here in April again, and those of us concerned a little about poetry as art need again accommodate the ludicrous thing called National Poetry Month. The hope is to get folks to change their reading habits to include poetry volumes along with their steady diets of mysteries, romances, celebrity cookbooks and memoirs written by people who will soon to be exposed as liars and cheats. Is there hope for the General Audience? The divisions in the Poetry War are drawn, both sides will wage battle for the soul of the book buyer , but the pathetic truth is that vast promotion and arguments as to the worth of verse are to no avail. Literally, no one is buying it. Or buying too little of it for the fuss and bother of having a month out of the year dedicated to poets and their obscurities.
The General Audience I speak of is vague, purposefully so, as it speaks to anyone who has an amorphous notion of how to generalize about poetry readers share in common. The war between various schools, groups and the like strikes me as more bickering between the professionals, poets, critics and academics (some of whom happen to practice all three occupations) who have status and power on the line as they advance their agenda and create an enemy camp in the interests of bolstering whatever claims can be made for a particular group's alleged superior aesthetics. Some of this ongoing disagreement is fascinating and useful, since the distinctions as they’re clarified can be informative and the criticisms each has of the other’s perceived shortcomings can potentially yield insight on issues a writer might be otherwise be too close to.

I have my preferences, sure, and I subscribe to a particular set of principles, but these rules of poetry are worn like a loose suit, not a straight jacket. Most readers who a general interests in poetry , contemporary and older, will like or dislike a variety of different approaches to verse for an equally varied set of reasons, most of which, if asked, our hypothetical General Reader would be able to explain if asked. The basic question of a poem, whether written for the lyric voice, the vernacular rant, or the experimental rigorist, is whether it works or not, both on its own terms and in terms of whether it gives pleasure or joy. Someone might suggest that teachers could increase the audience for poems if they taught the material better, but this is a strawman.We can't lay this at the teacher's feet because it's my firm conviction that most poetry, ambitious or otherwise, isn't going be the thing the large majority of their students will take after in adulthood, regardless of how good or bad a job the instructor might be. We're talking about adult readers here, those who have reading habits formed and in place for a lifetime; some are more curious about more ambitious forms, most who read poetry prefer the greatest hits of Whitman, Plath or Dickens, if they read poetry at all, and the General Audience, as we've been calling them, has not interest in poetry what so ever, except when they need a quote for a funeral or a wedding.

In other words, people who might buy a book of poems do so for reasons that are the same as they always have been, word of mouth, display, book review, and so on. Things like National Poetry Month do so very little to increase the fraction of the book buying public to have even a casual appreciation of poetry; they simply don't care for those things that are not measurable by generic conventions. Charles Bernstein wrote a cogent, if slightly smug essay in 1999 called "Against National
Poetry Month As Such" in which he derides the notion that publishers and a clatch of state and federal arts czars can increase interest in and sales of poetry collections by reducing to the level of the contrived New Age/faux mediation group think that would have us read the literature with the hope that stress and pain will go away.(I am thinking myself of Roger Housden's odious collection "Ten Poems To Change Your Life",which abuses the work of good poets by presenting them as accessories one buys on impulse at the cash register).Bernstein's main point is well taken with me, that poetry is being sold as something it isn't, like the volumes poets publish are good for you in the way that pop psych and New Age literature claim to be. What is being sold are the specious promises of poetry, not the poetry itself which, of all the literary arts, should stand alone , unencumbered by political or therapeutic contrivance. National Poetry Month is a hypocritical waste of time, I think, a commercial venture born of the kind of cynicism that enables corporations to manipulate buyers into purchasing things they haven't an honest need for.