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.

Trickle Down Post Modernism

One confronts the average man's working definition of modern art as being the sort of difficult object, whether visual art or literary text, as being something that's open ended into which the viewer can infer any significance . This works fairly well as a definition in a nut shell, accurate in the intentions of what the host of self-referential aesthetics enable us (or forces us, rather) to do if we the audience are to make the effort to bear witness worth the sustained use of our senses. This wreaks havoc with conservative aesthetes who think art should be a giver of laws instead of platforms from which one constructs their multi-faceted paradigms and (in a phrase) deconstructions. One might sympathize with the law givers for reasons having not a bit to do with maintaining and orderly and chaste life, but with the particular tedium of modernist (nee post modernist) strategies. The self-referencing of the medium, the placing of format as the subject of the work ceases to be an interrogation of played out narrative explanations as to what experience leads to and becomes a cloying club of knowing gestures, a wink, a nod, an elbow in the ribs, the patois of yet another privileged group suffocating in their theoretical enclosures.

A key reason for postmodern writing was because reality itself had gotten too strange, obtuse, inflated with its own self-justification for writers to try and be more fantastic than. Cited before, especially from the writings of Brit critic Tony Tanner in his book City of Words, the only way for literature to thrive and reasonably to a fantastic reality is to attempt and be even more fantastic, to shed itself of the need to be faithful to reality and to become even more aware of how fantastic language and technology have caught up with and surpassed conventional fiction's ability to penetrate it's center.

Did Derrida and Barthes actually "define", or address at all the rather slippery notion of "post modernism"? Seems more appropriate to say that they, in their respective inquiries, high lighted some real conceptual issues in Continental philosophy, and created another layer of jargon that made an industry out of what, in retrospect, seems a small addition to our ways of thinking about writing.

Both were inspirations to a generation of literary critics who wanted some Gallic gravitas in their corner so they may speak philosophically with out actually philosophers--or so they may extend their embedded existentialism with into the world with a bright and shiny new paint job--but my reading of them didn't come across the word "post modern". I may be wrong.

Siding with Jacob for a moment, the act of preferring one writer over another with regard to value , style and impact constitutes a choice, choice being a decision. This personal canon-formation, a nascent writers' set of examples of what writing can be, ought to be, and where writing ought to grow from, is obviously a set of choices, albeit convoluted.

Likewise, I doubt that there's a moment in a writer's activity when they are not aware of the shadow of past genius that is cast over them, the Greats--however defined--that they aim their work away from, toward an originality, and maybe genius,that is their own. The anxiety of influence, courtesy of Harold Bloom, is almost an observable dynamic in sensible study. The scholar, in turn, only uncovers who the influences are in the course of credible research, but does not choose them. The temptation may be great, but the theorist/scholar/critic can speculate only so much in their interpretation of real data.

Writers begin with private views and prejudices about the given world, perceived through their eyes, their sets of experience, but an aim of writing to begin with is too seek consensus: it's the shock of recognition, among other things, that gives the aesthetic satisfaction with a narrative that's rendered well. Private projects don't stay private: they enter into the reading world in an attempt to give us more ideas, fixtures, metaphors to help us think about ourselves . That is all, I think, that literature can ever promise, the work itself. Criticism, like literature proper, is hardly a fixed set of standards, a Biblical claim of absolute, final totality. It's an activity that's adjacent, secondary to, literature, and at best can act as an aid to the reader seeking to underline salient elements that dovetail, enlarge, or illuminate the problematic nature of experience that won't, and cannot, tell you what it means.

The artist DOESN'T choose his influences, rather, he finds himself chosen by them.
Too flat an absolute a statement to be useful here: Bloom's refinement of a dialectical model to describe, in sweeping, how influence forms new writing is spectacular, but he over reaches, and over states his case with an insistence that influences choose the writer rather than the other way around. This is a deconstructive reversal that's cuter than it is precise. It's half the tale. Better to have it half and half: the writer certainly exercises choice so far as who they opt to read through their lifetime, and makes judgments based on their reading as to who matters more than others in the forming of a idiosyncratic aesthetic. The writer, as reader, is not a passive agent here.

A writer "being chosen" by their influences makes more sense, I think, when he place the statement at the moment when the writer is actually writing, when inspiration, imagination, and whatever other resources a writer has at their behest combine, churn, swirl, and combine in ways during the drafting that could result in interesting, original work. Process is a word that's horribly abused and bled of meaning these days, but here it's appropriate. Creative process is a strange ritual unique to each writer, an idiosyncratic set of habits that are the basis of the discipline needed for a writer to actually stay seated long enough to produce and bring the work through all it's stages. It's the mysterious clutch of protocols that unleash the influences into the creative roil , and it's here, during these churning, erupting , fever pitched sessions where a writer looses the ability to control the influences about them, large and small, whether from their personal reading, or from the larger culture: it's here where the writer is literally "chosen" by the influences and styles about them and literally have their style defined and guided. So it seems to me, anyway. For the force of the unconscious in the work, of course: memories emerge, scenarios spontaneously form, and arcs are drafted and written out to link disparate sketches on a narrative spine that rapidly becomes a fleshed-out work.


But the steps to get to the point where writing actually commences, I believe, begins with some conscious choices the writer makes in the world that's given to them: deciding what has value among the given--whatever we mean by that-- constitutes choice. What happens beyond that is what becomes problematic, and subject to niggling disagreement. But conscious human agency is not


The self is earned, not invented, some might say, but I might say that the thing which is earned is now less constructed. Well and good, but someone had to invent the criteria of a "self" that's awarded to someone who's "earned" the appellation. A gift wrapped box of "self" does not pop into being at some ceremony one attends on graduation day. Something that is earned needs to have a definition, however slippery or subjective, and that entails construction, more choices to be made in the inventing of a generalized "self".Anything that can be "earned", abstract or material, first needs to be invented.

Anything that is "constructed" is thereby real, whether abstract or material. A constructed entity is operative and has an effect on one's conduct through a problematic sphere. If a self is "constructed", it has dimensions, it has definable limits, it has conditions that are a premise a personality is initially based and layered upon with experience. If it can do that, it's as real as anything as anything you might throw a tin can at. A thing's existence, then, is understood as the actuality of its essence. Allen Ginsberg, speaking of a conversations he had with his mentor William Carlos Williams, gave a definition of Modernist perception as being that "...the thing itself is it's own adequate symbol..." Further, there is the strong suggestion that there is no God in this scheme, that the "thing" being perceived did not require an ideal type, or any other kind of Ideal superstructure in order to exist, to be. Ginsberg, and later poet/critic Jerome Rothenberg, gave a suggestion that this was Western writing's back-door approach toward more open structures, to decidedly un-systematized philosophies, witnessed in the Beat flirtations with Zen. This brings us knocking at the door of an extended Modernist approach--a style in which avant-garde procedure became an ironic protocol to literary writing--that became, in some critical finessing, post modernism.

How could the beliefs be useful if they weren't true? I could have many false beliefs that are coherent, but of what use would they be? The test of any theory is in how it works, and the gauge for how it works is in whether it's employment is of observable benefit to others, i.e., does it give some one and their community a coherent and workable structure to live life, to promote what would locally be defined as the Greater Good, and likewise provide a means for helping a community absorb change, how however and why ever it happens. The test of whether a theory is useful, if I remember my William James, is whether such a methodology leads one to a truth that's germane in situ. The usefulness of a theory is judged by how it side steps the confounding and conflating "proofs" of what constitutes Truth, with the big "t", and instead enables one to find something that works in mending the immediate situation.

Speaking for myself, Lost in the Funhouse is nicely written gripe in which author John Barth, flowing of pen, voices a buried resentment against his own reading habits, a collection that's kind of dull: he voices the complaint against the dreary optimism of modernism, the same dull complaints, in fact, and yet wishes that had been him, rather than Joyce or Faulkner at the key moments of break-through novel writing: a Bloomian moment with his career, with his writing desperately bloated books, his "literature of exhaustion" to demonstrate how much more radical he would have been had he the power to intervene in recent literary history, and also a classic example of the School of Resentment. Barth, I think, resents his teachers, or at least writes like he does.. His work, though important in the postmodern genre, is among it's dullest. The Floating Opera, though, is a masterpiece: brief, funny, unusual, unselfconscious in it's re-formation of the novel. Many readers would find Infinite Jest too hard to follow because they are reared on typical mainstream fiction that sticks to strict, world -shrinking genres. The Modernists we've mentioned here, if in passing, are Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett, among others. Faulkner was the only one who produced works resembling mainstream entertainments, with As I Lay Dying and Intruder in the Dust, yet even these less consequential efforts in his body of work are daunting for the vaguely referenced "general reader".

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.

The accurate statement about Modernists, in general, is that theirs wasn't a search for the single, unifying meaning, the single, capital "Truth", but rather that human beings have a capacity of breaking old habits and developing new ways of seeing the world outside their skins. There is a notion that that writing, art, architecture, film, et al, can be used in unique ways to bring about new perceptions of the addressed world, new ideas about human experience, rather than finding the one unchanging Truth, the single metaphysical road sign. Modernism operates, in a real and traceable sense, within the the concept of the Pluralistic Universe, addressed by William James.

There is truth out there, goes the assumption, but it's less about an absolute dogma about an underlining definition than it is about how the human personality comes to perceive and form a sense of place and belonging within it. The search for singular Truth was a vain task, noted by Eliot, Pound and others: at it's best expression, Modernism remains an invigorating vehicle , a keen investigative sense. Postmodernism searches for fallacies, so called, but we're stuck with the old binary oppositions that deconstructionists find offensive: we cannot have a definable sense of what is false unless we give ourselves over to an idea of what it opposes, the truth, or truths, plural. By default, postmodernism continues the Modernist project for what is useful in our descriptions. An extension of Modernism, in other words.

Modernism and inconsolable coherence

Isn't "deconstruction" an attempt to apply scientific principles to the analysis of language and what it implies? There is a lot of science - envy among the critics in the arts and humanities, and they've seemed to latched on to the extrapolated language of anthropology and linguistics in order to keep their jobs: there is an effort, in the mission of literature departments, to continue to prove that there is stuff of quantifiable worth to be extracted from the study of novels and poems, and that they in some way adding to body of knowledge.Somewhere, so far as the criticism has gone in the last half of the century, the link was made with other discourses, which made much of literary study something of a gawky laughing stock: not historians, not scientists, not psychologists, not philosophers, the gamiest of theory wonks could prate on and onward on fields not his own, keeping the tenuous connection between their specialty, fictional accounts of experience, and real time bathos and tragedy obscured with an ever deepening reservoir of agonized murk. 

The result, of course, is an abandonment of criticism and theory's original mission to seek clarity, comprehension. Among the critics who are incapable of giving serviceable interpretations of books they reputedly teach, too many have produced a feeling that literary is as unapproachable to the non specialist as would a technical article in a medical journal. The post modern critic, too often, become the things they are nominally opposed to: they become a priesthood, the place where power is located! Whether Ginsberg or Ashbery are post modernists skirts this issue, not uncommon here; it's more fruitful to trace post modern poetry's influences. Ginsberg is a romantic, sure, but he was one in the 20th century, confronted with mass-media, A bombs, televised unpopular wars, the whole 60s shot, and his response to these accelerated times had to push the hackneyed envelope. If he trusted his sensibilities to make sense of the world, apart from the mind of God guiding him ( the central conceit of the Romantic Movement and it's attendant schisms), Ginsberg had to expand his poetic line, blur crucial distinctions about well-rendered introspection, and essentially clear the field for further innovation. 

Ashbery, in turn, developed a secret language, a self-addressing voice that managed not reveal much of the soul of the poet, but did much to reveal the writer's mind engaged with the world, musing in elegiac lines of things, their places in the scheme , their displacements by other things--this is the Supreme Fiction of Wallace Stevens, and it sought to bring harmony to a sphere of unknowable phenomenon. Both Ginsberg and Ashbery, coming from Romanticism and moving straight ahead into the Modernists' obessession with inventing new forms from old to gain new ideas about a world that won't yield itself to the individual mind, quite cannily opened the territory for the poets who would be called post-modern poets, wh0 would be, I think, anyone from Ron Silliman, Rae Armentrout or Bob Perelman of the Language school, to the Nuyorican poets, the slam movement, rap and hip hop, and even the largely odious New Formalist group. 

Post modernism, it appears, comes in as many stripes and hues and apologies as Romanticism, Modernism, or even classicism, and there is no hard rule that states that one cannot be a post modern Romantic. It's a reasonable distinction. Though a writer can bring all their resources to bear when they write, a certified grounding in philosophy isn't required to write fiction and poetry. 

The learning doesn't hurt the work if the writer is possessed of demonstrable inspiration, or genius, if you will, but what is essentially an act of the imagination is not required to furnish it's own critical aparatus in it's length. DeLillo, for example, can parse his own imagery and subject them to a cold analytical eye, and creating a haunting poetry about the signifiers fading resonance in a reality that never stops blinking, but his genius is rare. John Barth is very clever, some times brilliant in his deployment of knowing literary conceits in his work, best, I think, in the The Floating Opera, End of the Road and The Sot Weed Factor, and it can also be said , though, that in spite of the "special learning" to attain the rarified information that was needed to construct these novels, Barth wrote the works to operate as novels, as entertainments, first before all, not as formal arguments against prior literary movements. The process is as instinctual as it is deliberate, I think, as is good criticism, who's task, repeat, is to interpret the books in an activity separate from the novel.

The artist DOESN'T choose his influences, rather, he finds himself chosen by them.

Too flat an absolute a statement to be useful here: Bloom's refinement of a dialectical model to describe, in sweeping, how influence forms new writing is spectacular, but he over reaches, and over states his case with an insistence that influences choose the writer rather than the other way around. This is a deconstructive reversal that's cuter than it is precise. It's half the tale. Better to have it half and half: the writer certainly exercises choice so far as who they opt to read through their lifetime, and makes judgments based on their reading as to who matters more than others in the forming of a idiosyncratic aesthetic. The writer, as reader, is not a passive agent here. A writer "being chosen" by their influences makes more sense, I think, when he place the statement at the moment when the writer is actually writing, when inspiration, imagination, and whatever other resources a writer has at their behest combine, churn, swirl, and combine in ways during the drafting that could result in interesting, original work. 

Process is a word that's horribly abused and bled of meaning these days, but here it's appropriate. Creative process is a strange ritual unique to each writer, an idiosyncratic set of habits that are the basis of the discipline needed for a writer to actually stay seated long enough to produce and bring the work through all it's stages. It's the mysterious clutch of protocols that unleash the influences into the creative roil , and it's here, during these churning, erupting , fever pitched sessions where a writer looses the ability to control the influences about them, large and small, whether from their personal reading, or from the larger culture: it's here where the writer is literally "chosen" by the influences and styles about them and literally have their style defined and guided. So it seems to me, anyway. For the force of the unconscious in the work, of course: memories emerge, scenarios spontaneously form, and arcs are drafted and written out to link disparate sketches on a narrative spine that rapidly becomes a fleshed-out work. Of course. But the steps to get to the point where writing actually commences, I believe, begins with some conscious choices the writer makes in the world that's given to them: deciding what has value among the given--whatever we mean by that-- constitutes choice. What happens beyond that is what becomes problematic, and subject to niggling disagreement. But conscious human agency is not

How could the beliefs be useful if they weren't true? I could have many false beliefs that are coherent, but of what use would they be? The test of any theory is in how it works, and the gauge for how it works is in whether it's employment is of observable benefit to others, i.e., does it give some one and their community a coherent and workable structure to live life, to promote what would locally be defined as the Greater Good, and likewise provide a means for helping a community absorb change, how however and why ever it happens. The test of whether a theory is useful, if I remember my James, is whether such a methodology leads one to a truth that's germane in situ.

The usefulness of a theory is judged by how it side steps the confounding and conflating "proofs" of what constitutes Truth, with the big "t", and instead enables one to find something that works in mending the immediate situation. Speaking for myself, Lost in the Funhouse is nicely written gripe in which Barth, flowing of pen, voices a buried resentment against his own reading habits, a collection that's kind of dull: he voices the complaint against the dreary optimism of modernism, the same dull complaints, in fact, and yet wishes that had been him, rather than Joyce or Faulkner at the key moments of break-through novel writing: a Bloomian moment with his career, with his writing desperately bloated books, his "literature of exhaustion" to demonstrate how much more radical he would have been had he the power to intervene in recent literary history, and also a classic example of the School of Resentment. Barth, I think, resents his teachers, or at least writes like he does.. His work, though important in the postmodern genre, is among it's dullest. The Floating Opera, though, is a masterpiece: brief, funny, unusual, un-selfconscious in it's re-formation of the novel. Allen Ginsberg, speaking of a conversations he had with his mentor William Carlos Williams, gave a definition of Modernist perception as being that "...the thing itself is it's own adequate symbol..." Further, there is the strong suggestion that there is no God in this scheme, that the "thing" being perceived did not require an ideal type, or any other kind of Ideal superstructure in order to exist, to be. Ginsberg, and later poet/critic Jerome Rothenberg, gave a suggestion that this was Western writing's back-door approach toward more open structures, to decidedly unsystematized philosophies, witnessed in the Beat flirtations with Zen. This brings us knocking at the door of an extended Modernist approach--a style in which avant-garde procedure became an ironic protocol to literary writing--that became, in some critical finessing, post modernism.

My slight bit about Derrida is that his central contribution to the analysis of literature was creating a rhetorical means by which a generation of coming literary critics was relieved from having to discuss a book in a way that shows that they've actually read it. I've struggled with Derrida's work for several years, and have absorbed quite a bit of writing by him and about him and his ideas, and evasion of the book, the author's concerns, seems more the game rather than explication. 

Many times when one thinks they've come upon an oasis of actual discussion in this varicose discourse , both Derrida or an apostle one might be reading makes a hard turn, left or right, from whatever metaphorical road or river you might have been traversing; in any event, every side road, alley, tributary and inlet was wandered into and prated about until exhaustion drove the reader from the chair and desk they sat at, not convinced of Derrida's and deconstruction's vague premises, but rather resigned that this was a peculiar literary mafia who had no intention of treating literary work like it had an intrinsic worth. Derrida and his supporters argued otherwise, in their few moments of assertive writing, and maintained that the deconstructive process intends to reveal a multitude of interpretations by demonstrating what contradictory positions compose nominally “authoritative” texts. 

It's a grand project on the face of it, an investigative premise intriguing enough to be worth a try, but the results of twenty plus years of post-structuralist theory applied to an arbitrarily termed "canon" produced not clarity, nor comprehension, but only more confusion. One understands why Harold Bloom, a former proponent of Derrida's method, tired of the nihilistic wallow of post-modernism and turned his attentions again to a more fruitful mission of literary criticism and the attending philosophical/religious digressions, how literature gives a reader and a culture a malleable interior superstructure one filters raw experience with. Derrida's accomplishment , I think, was to take assume an array of philosophical tropes available from credible philosophy survey course , add his own egregious seasoning to the unpalatable stew, and turn what used to the sort of infinite prattle of the cocktail party poser into book contracts, tenured positions, and all the other perks of being a celebrity intellectual. It's significant about Derrida's contribution to literary criticism that his name rarely, if ever, arises when useful quotes about authors and their books are the subject of a conversation. 

This is a twofold irony, the literary critic with nothing useful to say about what they've been reading, and an incredibly bad writer as well. That such an awful scribe makes such a dent in the upper reaches of the culture ought not surprise us, just as the success of Jackie Collins is a twofold irony, the literary critic with nothing useful to say about what they've been reading, and an incredibly bad writer as well. That such an awful scribe makes such a dent in the upper reaches of the culture ought not surprise us, just as the success of Jackie Collins no longer distresses mainstream book reviewers. Often times talent and ability have nothing to do with an author's good fortune.

My principle misgiving with Derrida's ideas was his insistence that one cannot argue a point with certainty; there is a lot more to his arguments, subtle, abstruse, and obscured with every evasive trick of the tongue and pen he could muster, but this cluster of notions is at the heart of his life's work. I'm willing to grant that Derrida's intentions were all for the best--that he would expose how the production of meaning, and with it a hazy notion of "authority" comes from a socially constructed set of binary oppositions which, of course, entrenches in constrained ideas about reality-- but his failure to be clearer with his method and aim, and more useful in how readers and citizens can configure a discourse that might lead to ways of ridding the world of its internalized malfunctions has given us instead a sort of relativistic nihilism that advances the severest reactionary premises with what to do with the planet we live on. Baudrillard, certainly, has take the opening as a chance to advance his set of tightly quipped solipsisms that insist, at the heart of their gnomic devising, that apathy is as effective and meaningful political gesture as any collective might take on. 

Since no definitive or authorial fixed moral argument can be made against racism, genocide, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism , pollution, et al,so the thinking goes, one may as well go about their way in this existence unmindful of what constitutes ethics or responsibility, and fulfill such base desires and impulses that give that transitory definition to one's existence, a fleeting sensation of purpose to be replaced by another fleeting fleet sensation, and so on, until one drops, spent, exhausted, dead. This encourages apathy in the pursuit of truth, I think, and in fact reinforces such paranoid mind sets which need to witlessly demonize whole sections of a society's citizenry as "other" and "evil". Racism and homophobia are allowed to thrive in the absence of the ability to make a principled statement, to have a debate, to reach a consensus about what constitutes an idea of right and wrong no longer distresses mainstream book reviewers. Often time talent and ability have nothing to do with an author's good fortune. My principle misgiving with the ideas was his insistence that one cannot argue a point with certainty; there is a lot more to his arguments, subtle, abstruse, and obscured with every evasive trick of the tongue and pen he could muster, but this cluster of notions is at the heart of his life's work. I'm willing to grant that Derrida's intentions were all for the best--that he would expose how the production of meaning, and with it a hazy notion of "authority" comes from a socially constructed set of binary oppositions which, of course, entrenches in constrained ideas about reality-- but his failure to clearly outline his method and aim, and more useful in how readers and citizens can configure a discourse that might lead to ways of ridding the world of its internalized malfunctions has given us instead a sort of relativistic nihilism that advances the severest reactionary premises with what to do with the planet we live on. 

Baudrillard, certainly, has take the opening as a chance to advance his set of tightly quipped solipsisms that insist, at the heart of their gnomic devising, that apathy is as effective and meaningful political gesture as any collective might take on. Since no definitive or author- fixed moral argument can be made against racism, genocide, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism , pollution, et also the thinking goes, one may as well go about their way in this existence unmindful of what constitutes ethics or responsibility, and fulfill such base desires and impulses that give that transitory definition to one's existence, a fleeting sensation of purpose to be replaced by another fleeting fleet sensation, and so on, until one drops, spent, exhausted, dead. At best, his expression of his ideas was a thick , lush weave of deferring equivocation and generous portions of gravity-defying association that thrilled you with the virtuoso language he could spin to keep on the edge of your expectation, sounding as if he were about to arrive at some set of something useful. One didn’t understand a phrase or a word, but one loved to hear him talk. At worse, he reminds me of Walter Benjamin, unable to shake his jargon lest someone find something in his writing they can interrogate in earnest. What he seemed to be saying, in louder or softer tones, and nearly always with the vaguest paint he could color his notions with, is that the authentic, the natural, the fixed reality we dream of returning to, is gone and never existed and how we conduct ourselves via strategies to oppose oppression and effect changes in our condition are doomed, finally, and illusory, since all is ceaseless duplication and variations of opposing versions of historical finality. It's all for naught, and we might as well do nothing at all , merely consume within the storylines and props given us and allow the puppets with the microphones, tv cameras and the Army and Navy to run their games. Remember, Baudrillard was brilliant at describing things and mounting details of what is contradictory, perverse or demonstrably false; notice, though, that he offered no idea on what anyone could do about the situation. My thoughts are that JB was a nihilist, and that the bald face of post modernism, in its global viralism, is to encourage inaction, apathy. There's much of the round robin in his rap, a circuitry that works any argument against itself. But it reveals a fatuous tendency to not answer a question. Agendas are not Baudrillard's strong suit, and after all the illusions that his evasions are a form of liberation and empowerment for those at the margins--the criminal, the student, gays , lesbians, transgendered, the perennially non white, we finally have a poetics that finds glory in things falling apart while the privileged reap their final profits. Their prescription for the population was what neocons wish for the voters;go back to sleep.

 This encourages apathy in the pursuit of truth, I think, and in fact reinforces such paranoid mind sets which need to witlessly demonize whole sections of a society's citizenry as "other" and "evil". Racism and homophobia are allowed to thrive in the absence of the ability to make a principled statement, to have a debate, to reach a consensus about what constitutes an idea of right and

Slippery Literature

There was one of those rowdy discussions about literature at a corner cafe habitats for under employed bohemians where the topic of fiction took a hard left turn, when an aesthetic difference became warfare, a conflict of moral philosophies. I was defending postmodern novelists like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace for the way they were helping blur and otherwise erode the 

barriers that separated fiction-making and reportage, and a woman who'd been in talk suddenly clenched her fist, gritted her teeth, and gave a stare worth of a mackerel facing you down from a cutting board. To paraphrase crudely, her point was that the antics of postmodern writers gave her a loathing sensation she couldn't stand to have; her world was shaken, disturbed. She said she couldn't have the barriers between reason and emotion so disturbed and suggestively destroyed. She went about her business and left the table, and the cafe. I never saw her again, and side step having conversations about half-grasped literary theories with people I've met only that night. It takes so few assertions to undermine a pleasant evening.The convolution of reason and emotion is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in however severe the psychic toll adds up to. If there is no risk to the reading or a dull edge to the narrative, the story is a waste of time. Literature is provocative in the best situations, where style and innovation match and afford the author a means to dwell over the lives of characters who have ambiguous notions of what path to take; heroic, or self-preserving, brave, or cowardly, virtuous, or slippery in ethical and moral principal. It's a tour of the grey areas of existence. Being neither philosophy nor a 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 a rendering requires.

The attack on modernism's' 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 Jameson on the point that Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project which is, in a cramped nutshell, a set of overlapping trends in cultural thinking and expression that countered the conceit that there is a contiguous and coherent way of interpreting the world. After two world wars , discontinuity was the rule, and the ground was set for constructing new ways of seeing the world, as was the cataclysmic optimism that something final and perfect could be made from the ashes. Postmodernism's particular twist was there was no end to historical development and that history was merely a processing of events through convenient fictions. Beyond that, the style of the literary expression hasn't much altered. The key difference seems to be that brand name have replaced place names.

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.As Barthes noted, 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 innate 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.

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.

I was asked this and then I wrote all this before sunrise

Isn't "deconstruction" an attempt to apply scientific principles to the analysis of language and what it implies? There is a lot of science - envy among the critics in the arts and humanities, and they've seemed to latched on to the extrapolated language of anthropology and linguistics in order to keep their jobs: there is an effort, in the mission of literature departments, to continue to prove that there is stuff of quantifiable worth to be extracted from the study of novels and poems, and that they in some way adding to body of knowledge.

Somewhere, so far as the criticism has gone in the last half of the century, the link was made with other discourses, which made much of literary study something of a gawky laughing stock: not historians, not scientists, not psychologists, not philosophers, the gamiest of theory wonks could prate on and onward on fields not his own, keeping the tenuous connection between their specialty, fictional accounts of experience, and real time bathos and tragedy obscured with an ever deepening reservoir of jargonized murk.

The result, of course, is an abandonment of criticism and theory's original mission to seek clarity, comprehension. Among the critics who are incapable of giving serviceable interpretations of books they reputedly teach, too many have produced a feeling that literary is as unapproachable to the non specialist as would a technical article in a medical journal.

The post modern critic too often becomes the things they are nominally opposed to: they become priesthood, the place where power is located! Whether Ginsberg or Ashbery are post modernists skirts this issue, not uncommon here; it's more fruitful to trace post modern poetry's influences. Ginsberg is a romantic, sure, but he was one in the 20th century, confronted with mass-media, A bombs, televised unpopular wars, the whole 60s shot, and his response to these accelerated times had to push the hackneyed envelope.
If he trusted his sensibilities to make sense of the world, apart from the mind of God guiding him (the central conceit of the Romantic Movement and its attendant schisms), Ginsberg had to expand his poetic line, blur crucial distinctions about well-rendered introspection, and essentially clear the field for further innovation.

Ashbery, in turn, developed a secret language, a self-addressing voice that managed not reveal much of the soul of the poet, but did much to reveal the writer's mind engaged with the world, musing in elegiac lines of things, their places in the scheme, their displacements by other things--this is the Supreme Fiction of Wallace Stevens, and it sought to bring harmony to a sphere of unknowable phenomenon.

Both Ginsberg and Ashbery, coming from Romanticism and moving straight ahead into the Modernists' obsession with inventing new forms from old to gain new ideas about a world that won't yield itself to the individual mind, quite cannily opened the territory for the poets who would be called post-modern poets, wh0 would be, I think, anyone from Ron Silliman, Rae Armentrout or Bob Perelman of the Language school, to the Nuyorican poets, the slam movement, rap and hip hop, and even the largely odious New Formalist group.

Post modernism, it appears, comes in as many stripes and hues and apologies as Romanticism, Modernism, or even classicism, and there is no hard rule that states that one cannot be a post modern Romantic. It's a reasonable distinction.

Though a writer can bring all their resources to bear when they write, a certified grounding in philosophy isn't required to write fiction and poetry.

The learning doesn't hurt the work if the writer is possessed of demonstrable inspiration, or genius, if you will, but what is essentially an act of the imagination is not required to furnish it's own critical apparatus. DeLillo, for example, can parse his own imagery and subject them to a cold analytical eye, and creating a haunting poetry about the signifiers fading resonance in a reality that never stops blinking, but his genius is rare. John Barth is very clever, some times brilliant in his deployment of knowing literary conceits in his work, best, I think, in the Floating Opera, End of the Road and The Sot Weed Factor, and it can also be said, though, that despite the "special learning" to attain the rarified information that was needed to construct these novels, Barth wrote the works to operate as novels, as entertainments, first before all, not as formal arguments against prior literary movements.

The process is as instinctual as it is deliberate, I think, as is good criticism, which has an obligation to interpret the books in an activity separate from the novel. Unbelievable to some lit-critters anxious to narrow the range of subject options , not everything that's written, published and which finds an audience it services for either entertainment or instruction can be discussed with the same parsing frameworks.

The artist DOESN'T choose his influences, rather, he finds himself chosen by them.

Too flat an absolute a statement to be useful here: Bloom's refinement of a dialectical model to describe, in sweeping, how influence forms new writing is spectacular, but he over reaches, and over states his case with an insistence that influences choose the writer rather than the other way around. This is a deconstructive reversal that's cuter than it is precise. It's half the tale.

Better to have it half and half: the writer certainly exercises choice so far as who they opt to read through their lifetime, and makes judgments based on their reading as to who matters more than others in the forming of an idiosyncratic aesthetic. The writer, as reader, is not a passive agent here.

A writer "being chosen" by their influences makes more sense, I think, when he place the statement at the moment when the writer is actually writing, when inspiration, imagination, and whatever other resources a writer has at their behest combine, churn, swirl, and combine in ways during the drafting that could result in interesting, original work.

Process is a word that's horribly abused and bled of meaning these days, but here it's appropriate. Creative process is a strange ritual unique to each writer, an idiosyncratic set of habits that are the basis of the discipline needed for a writer to actually stay seated long enough to produce and bring the work through all stages.

It's the mysterious clutch of protocols that unleash the influences into the creative roil, and it's here, during these churning, erupting, fever pitched sessions where a writer looses the ability to control the influences about them, large and small, whether from their personal reading, or from the larger culture: it's here where the writer is literally "chosen" by the influences and styles about them and literally have their style defined and guided. So it seems to me, anyway. For the force of the unconscious in the work, of course: memories emerge, scenarios spontaneously form, and arcs are drafted and written out to link disparate sketches on a narrative spine that rapidly becomes a fleshed-out work.

Of course.

But to get to the point where writing actually commences, I believe, begins with some conscious choices the writer makes in the world that's given to them: deciding what has value among the given--whatever we mean by that-- constitutes choice. What happens beyond that is what becomes problematic, and subject to niggling disagreement. But conscious human agency is not

How could the beliefs be useful if they weren't true? I could have many false beliefs that are coherent, but of what use would they be?
The test of any theory is in how it works, and the gauge for how it works is in whether it's employment is of observable benefit to others, i.e., does it give some one and their community a coherent and workable structure to live life, to promote what would locally be defined as the Greater Good, and likewise provide a means for helping a community absorb change, how however and why ever it happens. The test of whether a theory is useful, if I remember my James, is whether such a methodology leads one to a truth that's germane in situ.

The usefulness of a theory is judged by how it side steps the confounding and conflating "proofs" of what constitutes Truth, with the big "t", and instead enables one to find something that works in mending the immediate situation.
No one seems to want to deal with Lost in the Funhouse, which, casting an eye over this thread, I find ironic.
Speaking for myself, Lost in the Funhouse is nicely written gripe in which Barth, flowing of pen, voices a buried resentment against his own reading habits, a collection that's kind of dull: he voices the complaint against the dreary optimism of modernism, the same dull complaints, in fact, and yet wishes that had been him, rather than Joyce or Faulkner at the key moments of break-through novel writing: a Bloomian moment with his career, with his writing desperately bloated books, his "literature of exhaustion" to demonstrate how much more radical he would have been had he the power to intervene in recent literary history, and also a classic example of the School of Resentment.

Barth, I think, resents his teachers, or at least writes like he does. His work, though important in the postmodern genre, is among the dullest. Manuals for changing light bulbs could exact more excitement. The Floating Opera, though, is a masterpiece: brief, funny, unusual, unselfconscious in it's re-formation of the novel.






Allen Ginsberg, speaking of a conversation he had with his mentor William Carlos Williams, gave a definition of Modernist perception as being that "...the thing itself is its own adequate symbol..." Further, there is the strong suggestion that there is no God in this scheme, that the "thing" being perceived did not require an ideal type, or any other kind of Ideal superstructure in order to exist, to be. Ginsberg, and later poet/critic Jerome Rothenberg, gave a suggestion that this was Western writing's back-door approach toward more open structures, to decidedly unsystematized philosophies, witnessed in the Beat flirtations with Zen. This brings us knocking at the door of an extended Modernist approach--a style in which avant-garde procedure became an ironic protocol to literary writing--that became, in some critical finessing, post modernism.

THE GROUSE AWAKES AND RECOUNTS A CHAT ABOUT LIT AND STUFF

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 reified and the outright ignored to the forefront of the center, place them at 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 postmodernist 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 Bakhtin) 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. 

I had a professor once point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be .This is 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. " And then the lights went out.

Google your face

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. 

The Story always wins

Showing John Wayne films to Viet Nam GIs in an effort to shore up their patriotic zeal and to remind them what their fight is all about is straight out of Heller, Pynchon, and Baudrillard. Viet Nam will always be a horrible fact of history, but you have to find this instance perversely comic: telling real life soldiers that they have to live up to a living military heritage by illustrating the point with fictional renderings with oversized heroics is the perfect post-modern conundrum. The instruction of history, with names, dates, battles, and analysis of particular conditions, is no longer sufficient to make the past useable in the current moment, so... LET'S SHOW THEM MOVIES!

Did WWII soldiers who saw Ronald Reagan movies think that they were really swell?
The audience the Reagan war movies were intended for, the American population still at home thought they were the living end. There was an accurate assessment that the home front needed reassurances that the unexplainable events in Europe were part of some Great and Good Cause, and that our involvement was part of an effort to save everything that is decent and worthy in human history: what better way to make this argument than in an endless series of film reels, where complex historical forces are reduced to simple-yet-compelling story arcs that outlined current events as a matter of good-guys vs. bad guys? It's not as if this was a wrong thing to do, it's just that the idea of soldiers watching films insisting that the battles they're actually in are worth winning produces a wild sense of disconnection: anyone would imagine that the soldiers were already aware of the worthiness of winning the war: their lives depended on it, period.

I don't think the GI's in either the Pacific or European Theatres had the time, or the desire to watch Hollywood movies that were marked for the domestic market, but it is my guess that had the soldiers the option of watching their idealized counterparts, the reaction would be no less derisive, hooting, sarcastic. The irony of the initial post about the Viet Nam showing of Wayne films was the bone-headed notion that old, dated, and thinly valorized characters, rickety as stage props and plainly intended for an civilian audience that needed convincing that life must go on --that is, capitalism must go on-- during a good and just war might in some insane way spark a blaze of militant patriotism in actual soldiers involved, daily in actual carnage, death, destruction. In either case, real or supposed, the effect is perversely comic, and I can only imagine the laughter is a species of gallows humor: it's evidence of a knowledge that language, or its abstracted uses in narrative mediums, can come close to conveying.

Did Derrida and Barthes actually "define", or address at all the rather slippery notion of "post modernism"? Seems more appropriate to say that they, in their respective inquiries, high lighted some real conceptual issues in Continental philosophy, and created another layer of jargon that made an industry out of what, in retrospect, seems a small addition to our ways of thinking about writing. Both were inspirations to a generation of literary critics who wanted some Gallic gravitas in their corner so they may speak philosophically with out actually philosophers--or so they may extend their embedded existentialism with into the world with a bright and shiny new paint job--but my reading of them didn't come across the word "post modern".

Writing and literature is all veils, I would think: if anyone could get "IT" with a piece of work, we would have to assume the writer, and his audience are satisfied, sated, and are disinclined to hear the story again. But there is always another wrinkle to relate, another nuance to discover, another veil to be taken away.

This echoes Roland Barthes idea of writing being an erotic function, that the end that one gets to at the end of the tale is not the point of the quest, but the quest itself, the unveiling of the language, the constant re-assimilation that names for things are made to under go as the nature of the material world defies literary form; it is the imagination that needs to work within the waking sphere, not the world that needs to fit within it's contours.

We find, with reading, that writers we care about themselves could care less about what kind they are supposed to be, according to literary archivists; thus, they will have stylistics extremes that venture into another camp, away from what common knowledge dictates is their "native" style, manner. Is Gravity's Rainbow any less a work of "Magical Realism" than what we've seen in Garcia Marquez or Borges? Is Nabokov's work Pale Fire less post modern than, say, Mulligan Stew? It becomes the definitively moot point, irresolvable and subjects to an unending detour the circles around the precise meaning of finally inconsequential terms. Imagination is trait that will use anything manner or style that is suitable to a writer's project at hand and it ought not be surprising, or upsetting that many writers, assigned to roles by career-making PhD candidates, simply do what they need to do in order to get the work done.

This gives us fascinating paradoxes: Norman Mailer, by temperament a romantic existentialist who might have been in the late 19th century, is one who took to post-modern strategies to render is work: the range of his assumed styles and experimentation creates specific problems with literary historians who might be eager to be done with his books and his name.

Notes

Rollo May asserts somewhere that pure, sheer, absolute innocence is inviolable, and that until the one that's blessed to be in it's wrap willfully samples knowledge of a grittier world, they will be protected from harm and the ill activities of others. This sounds idealistic, even optimistic to me, and is an aspect of a larger argument -- exactly when did we fall from grace? -- That drips with nostalgia for a more interesting era, before we invented the club and the gun.

The difference between being honest and being naive, maybe. Honesty seems a state of complete awareness about the world, a state where one can peer into the eyes of others and discern real motivations behind the eyes, and in turn trust an instinct that steers them from misadventure and victimization. Honesty is a quality that is earned, a purposeful armor. Being naive, then, would be a choice for being stupid, a refusal to realize materialistic agendas of others who view others not as citizens but as resources to be harvested, stripped, denuded. Is cynicism is but naivety in another guise?

Too encompassing, I think, though it is an easy matter for someone to feign worldliness with sham cynicism: abrupt dismissals of topics with impatience and pat-rants are a handy method of avoiding conversation about things. Call someone naive is a statement about their lack of real-world experience, however it gets defined. It means, though, that some conceptions about the way life works hasn't been tested against actual events and that a learning curve has yet to commence about our subject. The cynic believes the world goes only in one direction, is motivated by the worst instincts, but more times , if we have our archetypes clear, it's a world view that's formed after a run of misfortune. At this point one may call the cynic short sighted, as in not taking other things in consideration, but not naïve. ‘‘Ignorant is a better word, as it becomes a willful act after one has tasted the imprecision of real events. It's a refusal to know more, as opposed to a state of not knowing at all.

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Fiction does not need theory in order to be written. First the fiction is written, the artistic moments, and then theory arises as a consequence of critical reading. Theory is a coherent statement of known and verified material facts, in this case works of fiction, and the formation of theory, if it's to be interesting , comes after the appearance of a the primary source. Postmodern critics and erstwhile deconstructionists seek to have theory on the same level as fiction, literature, but in terms of actual practice, theory is a secondary activity, a delayed reaction to fiction, not a simultaneous occurrence. Changing tastes and fashions have more to do with novels falling off the radar, not an absence of theory. And a philosophy without a theory to begin with is not a philosophy at all, only the same said fashionable chatter. For real philosophies that get dropped into our dirty bin, it's most likely that their systems and suppositions have been supplanted, discredited and sufficiently critiqued into submission, which is just the happenstance of intellectual shelf life.

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All bad writing comes from writers who are writing badly, even normally good writers who've undertaken bad projects. There are many tangible reasons for bad writing, not the least of which is the plain truth that the world is full of bad writers who manage to get their scams published. Poe wanted desperately to be thought of as an intellectual, and tried to limn the metaphysical structure of the cosmos in such horse-shit Meta essays/stories like "Eureka" and “The Philosophy of Furniture". These are turgid meanderings in an involuted prose style that would have been consigned to the dust bin had not Poe more than once hunkered down and committed himself to unblemished storytelling, the work that is the basis of his deserved reputation as an original. I think his reputation would have been made even without his dabbling in theory. He was bad at it.

Individual talent is the issue, not generic determinism. Alan Lightman does quite a good job with his novel The Diagnosis, and the charge of it being "over rated" is a remark worth noting when one has read the book and is ready to give a critique on matters relevant to its execution and substance. Modernism cannot get "less modern", I think, because the modernism seems, in itself, only a tidying up of Romantic impulses before it, as post modernism seems only a refinement, an updating of some essentially modernist tropes and stylistics. Each age takes the conventional set of dreads and sagas and makes their contours conform to the constructed world of the current moment. What counts is the individual talent that becomes the substance worth talking about. Even in a post-modernist arena, subject to slippery laws of equivocation and deferral, the talents that transcend the limits that constrict the names assigned art-making processes and histories are what matter for us.

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David Foster Wallace, a civil and occasionally enthralling wunderkind whose is the leading light in the latest generation of post modernists: certainly, the man can write, though his ability to discern between gleaning the telling detail from a life of observation and mere accumulation weighs his prose into a sagging, soggy bag of entrails, dripping a tasteless juice. Infinite Jest is not the masterpiece his admirers want it to be, but it has moments, pleasures, though it drags around the references as if the author were selling the Britannica door to door. His brief works are much, much better, his best form. Underworld is well worth finishing, Scott, though it does get a little clogged in the middle section --middle - aged spread, I suppose -- but the work does sustain itself in total. There is simply too much brilliant writing in the coming pages to pass up, and one does achieve a sense of the largeness DeLillo imagined with his interlinked stories arranged haphazardly in the second half of the American Century. The bomb, the baseball, the mad artist in the desert painting the old , rusted bombers, the nun scouring for humanity in the South Bronx, the use of the language of professional waste disposal, all become part of a metaphor that makes sense in an associative sense that left me particularly breathless by the last page. I think it's a great post-modern novel, but beyond that, it is a great novel, period. One wishes for the careful trimming and tucking a good editor might have had in making Underworld an even stronger masterpiece, but please, do read ahead.