John Barth (1930)

 

From Hart and Leininger, Oxford Companion to American Literature:

BARTH, John [Simmons] (1930-). Maryland-born novelist, educated at Johns Hopkins, whose fiction set on the Eastern Shore of his native state includes The Floating Opera (1956), the experiences of a man recalled on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, and The End of the Road (1958), another existential and nihilist view of experience set in a travestied conventional love triangle. Although placed in the same setting, his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is more fantastic and funnier in its lusty parody of an 18th-century picaresque tale re-creating the life and times of Ebenezer Cooke. This was followed by  Giles Goat-Boy (1966), another lengthy, complex, and comic novel full of ingenious parody in its satirical allegory of the modern world conceived in terms of a university campus. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) consists of 14 pieces of fiction related in part by their concern with what happens when a writer writes (he makes himself a persona) and a reader reads. Chimera (1972) is also a volume of short fiction, retelling in elaborate style tales of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon dealing with social and psychological problems of modern life, also introducing the author Barth along the way. The last-named work won a National Book Award. Barth returned to the long novel in Letters (1979), an unusual development of epistolary fiction, in which seven more or less parallel narratives are reveales through correspondence written by seven characters from his earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure, the intricate story comprising an inquiry into the patterns into which the characters have been previously set and the degree of freedom they may possess. Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) tells of the adventures and ideas occasioned by a long cruise of a college professor and her husband, an aspiring novelist. The Friday Book (1984) collects essays and other nonfiction. The Tidewater Tales (1987) is a lengthy novel about a novelist who claims he cannot write a projected novel as he and his wife sail full of friction along Chesapeake Bay. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) probes the connection between memory and reality in a postmodern style of narration.


The Sot-Weed Factor, novel by John Barth, published in 1960 and in a revised version in 1966.

In a lusty picaresque tale that satirizes conventional historical fiction, the novel creates a fictive biography of the real Ebenezer Cook, endowing him with a twin sister, Anna. After failing in his studies at Cambridge, though abetted by a tutor, Henry Bullingame, Ebenezer is ordered by his father to manage the family tobacco plantation in Maryland. There he spends most of his time writing poetry and protecting his virginity, both of which are under constant assault. Finally he achieves fame as a writer while simultaneously losing his poetic inspiration and his virginity.



Giles Goat-boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus, novel by John Barth, published in 1966.

In the metaphoric world called the University, control is held by a computer, WESAC, which is able to run itself and to tyrannize people, for it has the ability to subject them to a radiating and disintegrating force, that is, to EAT them, an acronym for its power of "Electroencephalic Amplification and Transaction." WESAC is so out of hand that one of its developers, Max Spielman, believes it can only be controlled through reprogramming by a Grand tutor, a prophet, who will bring a "New Syllabus," that is, a new philosophy. For this role and this purpose he selects George Giles, whom he had raised among goats as a goat, though he was actually a human found as an infant in the tapelift of WESAC. In his undertaking George has to contend with a troublemaker, Maurice Stoker, who alone fully understands the operation of WESAC, and with a minor poet, Harold Bray, who contends that he is a Grand Tutor. George enters the computer to destroy it, and learns to confound WESAC by answering its questions through paradoxes that paralyze the machine. When George emerges, authorities eager to put WESAC back into operation seize him and send him back to the animal site of his boyhood, for he is now the University's scapegoat.



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Later works (Wikipedia: John Barth):

• The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
• Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)
• On with the Story (stories) (1996)
• Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)
• The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
• Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)
• The Development: Nine Stories (2008)
• Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)

Nonfiction

• The Friday Book (1984)
• Further Fridays (1995)
• Final Fridays (2012)

 

Postmodernity in Prose

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

 

from American Literature: A History, by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen

(from "After the war: 1945-80 - Jewish American novelists") (...)


Still, although Malamud's characters are not invariably Jewish, in his presentation of Jewish milieus in The Assistant and in his early stories he is the most Jewish of all Jewish American writers of the fifties and sixties. Here, mainstream America is a vague presence in the background, just like Poland and its inhabitants only feature in the distance in the ghettos and streets of I.B. Singer's stories (Gimpel  the Fool, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961) or novels (The Family Moskat, 1950; The Magician of Lublin, 1960). Far more usual in Jewish American fiction is a continuous interaction with mainstream American culture and an unending negotiation of territorial boundaries. Such interaction even takes place when mainstream America is nowhere in sight, as in the title story of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a wistful story about class differences within Newark's Jewish community, in which the narrator's lover-for-a-summer has had her nose 'fixed'—'I was pretty. Now I'm prettier"–to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. With this collection of stories, Roth (1933-[2018]) found himself at the center of controversy, especially because of the stories 'Defender of the Faith', in which a calculating Jeish soldier tries to exploit the loyalty he expects from a Jewish superior, and 'Eli, the Fanatic', in which suburban, assimilated Jews try to prevent orthodox co-religionists from establishin a yeshiva in their mostly gentile neighborhood. Roth's fiercest critics, supset by what seemed a cynical view of middle-class American Jewry, accused him of self-hatred, even of anti-Semitism. What Roth captures in 'Eli' is the self-censorship and the dissembling that in the 1950s were part and parcel of assimilation and the deep sense of alienation—experienced here by the lawyer hired by his fellow Jews—that such a forced way of living may bring with it. This is in fact one of the overriding themes in Jewish-American writing of the first decades after the war. In order to be accepted by mainstream America, Jewish Americans abandon much of what may characterize them as Jews—sometimes, as in 'Goodbye, Columbus', even the shape of their nose—and move out of typically Jewish neighborhoods. But that estranges them from their background while their new environment never fully accepts them, leading to a sort of alienation that differs from that felt by young mainstream Americans but is felt even more profoundly.

After two rather traditional novels featuring a more mainstream cast and dealing with the familiar themes of relationships and personal problems and ambitions (Letting Go, 1962, and When She Was Good, 1967), Roth returned to more specifically Jewish themes with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a virtuoso rant on a psychiatrist's couch in which the novel's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, exhaustively lists all his frustrations at having been brought up Jewish, and in between details his insatiable lusting after blonde, all-American girls. Lust would from then on return regularly in Roth's novels, as in The Professor of Desire (1977) or the fairly recent Sabbath's Theater (1995), and has contributed disproportionally to his public image, but in those novels, too, Roth is concerned with Jewishness, even if he sees himself first of all as an American writer. In the last four decades, Roth has brilliantly chronicled Jewish life in the Newark of his younger years and has through an alter ego, the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman who features in for instance Zuckerman Bound (1985) and The Counterlife (1987), offered incisive meditations on what it means to be a Jewish American writer. Early in his career Roth worried that 'the actuality is continually outdoing our talents', that the technical skills of American writers were no longer a match for the outrageous images and events that the culture casually produced. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.


(From "The End and Return of History: 1980-2010 - Philip Roth")

Philip Roth has remained extremely prolific also after 1980, even to the point of becoming perhaps the iconic American author of the entire period. To begin with, Roth wrote a third novel in the David Kepesh series with The Dying Animal. Then, he has continued the series of novels featuring Nathan Zuckerman, the first instalment of which, The Ghost Writer, appeared in 1979, and the seventh, presumably also the last given its title of Exit Ghost, in 2007, with as other titles Zukerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman has often been interrpeted as an alter ego for Roth himself, but as of 1990 there also started appearing a new series featuring a protagonist called 'Roth', comprising Deception: A Novel (1990), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004). There is also a free-standing novel, Sabbath's Theatre (1995), and finally a series of short novels, Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). We will here briefly treat three exemplary instances from this overwhelming oeuvre.

American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, starts from the premise of the good life in the country as the culmination of the American Dream and a counterweight to the chaos, oppression and misery of the Old World. This is also what the protagonist of the story, whose life Zuckerman records, seems to have been bound for all his life, until everything fell apart. The novel is set in Newark, and the turning point is the 1960s, when Newark's earlier prosperity has melted away under the onslaught of beginning globalization, the city's older population of first and second generation immigrants, many of them Jewish, like the protagonist, have moved away or been minoritized by the large numbers of African Americans that have moved in. Instead of a harmonious community Newark now is the scene of race riots and labor conflicts. On the level of the U.S. as a whole the havoc wrought in Newark repeats itself in the radical youth and political movements rocking the country. Roth returns a hard verdict on what has gone wrong with America during his own lifetime.

A similar feeling speaks from The Plot Against America, winnner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005. Roth finds his initial inspiration in a plea Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic by airplane in 1927 and a national hero, made in 1941 to prevent the U.S. from entering World War II, for which he blamed the Jews, the British, and President Roosevelt. Lindbergh was in good standing with the Nazi regime and especially with Goering, the commander of the German air force. Roth takes the poetic liberty of situating Lindbergh's speech not in 1941 but in 1940, in the run-up to that year's Presidential elections, and casting Lindbergh as the Republican challenger of Roosevelt. When Lindbergh wins the election, life in the U.S. turns bitter for American Jews, and hence also for little Philip Roth. Things look even more somber when Lindbergh disappears on a solo flight with his famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane and Vice-President Wheeler, an extreme rightwing politician, assumes office. In the end, everything returns to normal, Rososevelt triumphs in a special election, Pearl Harbor signals the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and history resumes its familiar course. The Plot Against America asks some hard questions about the nature of American democracy and American politics more generally. For most commentators it was hardly a coincidence that Roth published a novel focusing on these questions, and with such characters, in the run-up to the 2004 elections, with an incumbent who in the wake of 9/11 had institued an authoritarian regime such as the U.S. had hardly ever seen before, and with a Vice-President of known conservative sympathies.

If American Pastoral and The Plot Against America address wider social and political issues, Everyman sticks to the personal level. In all of Roth's later work the consciousness of approaching death is overwhelmingly present, and particularly so in the foru short novels he published towards the end of his career (Roth in 2013 announced that he thought he had written enough and would write no more). In the futher unspecified 'he' protagonist Roth gives us a reincarnation of the medieval 'everyman' from the eponymous morality play. but whereas the medieval Everyman finds that with death all material worries and constraints dissolve and only spiritual virtues remain, because after death comes resurrection, noting of the sort happens in Roth's version. Everyman as the chronicle of a death announced, a merciless march from the cradle to the grave marked by disease, illness, the relentless deterioration of the body, deaths and funerals. Like the medieval play it holds up the mirror of our own fallibility and ephemerality, but without the consolation of faith.

Prose After Postmodernism (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen's American Literature: A History (Routledge, 2014)

(The American Century: World War I to the Present - The End and Return of History: 1980-2010)

Prose 'after' postmodernism

Few of the 'classical' postmodernists who continued writing into the new millennium succeeded in repeating their earlier successes. This applies particularly to Barth, whose many novels, some of them very voluminous, like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and story collections endelessly keep turning over themes and techniques identical to those of his earlier work. Gaddis did pretty much the same in A Frolic of His Own (1994), a book harping on the difference between what is true justice and what the judicial system makes of it, while in Carpenter's Gothic (1985) he satirized religious fundamentalism and personal greed. The postmodern fame of Stanley Elkin (1930-95) rests mainly on the combination of exuberant language and black humor in The Dick Gibson Show (1971), about a boy who is enthralled to the voices coming out of the radio, and The Franchiser (1976), about a man who builds a fast food chain but finds the meaning of life thorugh the multiple sclerosis he suffers from, and from which Elkin himself also died. In his later work Elkin took a more and more tragic view of things. George Mills (1982) is about a man who feels betrayed by God. In The Magic Kingdom (1985) a man who has lost his son takes a group of terminally ill children on a trip to Disneyland. In The Rabbi of Lud (1987) a New Jersey rabbi struggles with his faith.

With Slow Learner (1984) Pynchon published a collection of his early stories, and he brought new work with Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006). Although both Vineland, set in Northern California in a milieu of over-age hippies, and Mason & Dixon, about the two men, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, that drew the famous line that divided the Northern, non-slave holding parts of the U.S. from the Southern slave-holding parts, and recounted in eighteenth-century English, sported all kinds of peculiarities (zany ditties, fantastic events, a cavalier treatment of history) also typical of Pynchon's earlier fiction, they both received mixed reviews, the later novel faring somewhat better than the earlier. Against the Day, though was an immediate hit with the critics. A massive affair, like V. A Novel and Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day plays intricate games with history, with language, with its characters, and with the reader. A central plotline features the anarchist Webb Traverse in his fight against capitalism, his murder on behalf of the industrialist Scarsdale Vibe, and the desire on the part of his three sons to revenge their father's death. Set around the turn of the twentieth century the novel indulges in all kinds of eccentrics, including a dog that reads Henry James, travel through the center of the earth, and countless subplots, all of it brought in a welter of styles, varying from the language of juvenile adventure to tough guy hard-boiled and everything in between. Like Pynchon's earliest books, Against the Day finally leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but also with the feeling that something important has been touched upon.

The most overtly technically postmodern early work of Don DeLillo (1936-) is Ratner's Star (1974), in which a fourteen-year-old mathematical genius decodes an alien message announcing that the earth is about to enter a zone in which the laws of physics no longer apply, and which at the time was often likened to the work of Pynchon. DeLillo's other early novels focused, often satirically, on American popular culture phenomena such as American football or rock and roll. White Noise (1985) established DeLillo as a major author. The novel features a university professor in 'Hitler Studies' (yet who cannot read German), who gets caught in an environmental disaster, but who also is confronted with his own fears of death. The novel is a satire of university life, but even more so of how important events are hijacked by the media and turned into spectacle for an audience bent on sensation. Undoubtedly it is not a coincidence that the cable network CNN was launched in 1980, and that this was also the period in which French thinkers such as Guy Debord (1931-94) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) were busily discussed in American literary circles for the relathionship they posited between consumer society, the cult of the spectacle, and the simulacrisation or simulation of reality in the media. DeLille continued this line of thought in Libra (1988), with as protagonist the murderer of President Kennedy, Mao II (1991), and especially the massive Underworld (1997). Waste, and the problems it causes  in a consumerist society, are a central topic in this novel, the action of which spans the 1950s to the 1990s, with many interlocking plots, settings ranging from the New York Giants' baseball grounds to an artist's studio, and both fictional and historical characters. The novel's title refers to how waste is buried, to the criminal underworld, to the things hidden in history, and to how all of this refuses to remain buried and leads a life of its own. On appearance Underworld was hailed as a major achievement and as one of the most important works of American fiction of the final quarter of the twentieth century. Since Underworld DeLillo has delivered shorter fictions. In Cosmopolis (2003) he once again addresses issues of mediatisation, the world of advertising, and the fads dominating American life. Falling Man (2007) describes how a man who has been wounded in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack looks for new meaning in life. Unlike other first generation postmodernists DeLillo does not use metafiction to approach the postmodern life-world, but meticulously mirrors the latter's emptiness and artificiality in the smooth, stylized, polished but clichéd dialogue of his protagonists, who seem to be unable to go beyond the surface of things. His latter works, though, clearly also engage more directly with both human and social reality.

As of the 1980s a new generation of writers started putting postmodern techniques to new ends. Kathy Acker (1947-97; née Karen Lehmann) from the mid-1970s to her death in 1997 published a number of texts that combine the experimentalism of Burroughs, Sukenick and Federman with a militant feminism. Paul Auster (1947-) is most classically postmodern in his early The New York Trilogy, consisting of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), and in the late Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), which is not only metafictional but likewise heavily intertextual and self-reflective in that all characters, except for the narrator 'Mr. Blank' issue from earlier novels by Auster. Central to the three novels gathered in The New York Trilogy are questions of language, reality and identity. In City of Glass the protagonist, Quinn, on a whim takes on the role of 'the detective Paul Auster' to investigate a case loosely based on the histories of Caspar Hauser and the wild boy of Aveyron, later meets 'the author Paul Auster', gradually loses all his possessions and his identity, and in the end turns out to have literally dissolved into thin  air, the only evidence of his ever having been anywhere being a little red notebook. In Ghosts  a private detective called 'Blue' is hired by 'White' to observe 'Black'. But Black is a detective too, hired to observe someone. Moreover, it begins to look more and more as if White was actually Black in disguise. The story ends with a violent confrontation between Black and Blue. Blue wins, puts on his hat, and departs, leaving the reader totally confused. Quinn and the red notebook from City of Glass return in The Locked Room, be it that the notebook here belonged to Fanshawe, a writer who has disappeared without a trace and whom Quinn is hired to find, without result. The narrator, a friend of Fanshawe's, then gradually assumes the role and identity of Fanshawe, until it appears that Fanshawe is still alive and the narrator has one last conversation with him, though a locked door. Fanshawe is a character from the eponymous novel by Hawthorne, and this is only one of the many intertextual references to literary canonicals throughout The New York Trilogy. Moreover, a number of episodes in the life of Fanshawe, as we get to hear it, correspond with events in the life of Auster himself. In all, The New York Trilogy is a beguiling play with narrative paradoxes, names and identities, the borderlines between fiction and reality, and the literary canon, raising the familiar postmodern issues of language, identity, power, reality, and the (im)possibility of knowing the latter. 

Auster's many novels following The New York Trilogy all in one way or another pose the same questions as did his first and still most popular work. A number of them feature recurring characters, with Quinn for instance resurfacing in In the Country of Last Things (1987) while the protagonest of that novel, Anna Blume, reappears in Moon Palace (1989). Most of them have most unlikely plots, The Music of Chance (1990) being concerned with the building of an endlessly long and useless wall, and Timbuktu (1999) being narrated by a dog. The majority of Auster's characters suffer from one obsession or another. The protagonist of The Book of Illusions (2002), for instance, is obsessed by a movie actor that disappeared in the 1920s. These, and most other fictions by Auster, such as Leviathan (1992) or Oracle Nights (2004), offer a very grim outlook on life, the exception being Mr. Vertigo (1994), in which a nine-year-old orphan learns how to fly. IN some of his later fictions Auster casts characters that after a serious disease or mishap have to get their life back on the rails and make a new beginning. This is so in Oracle Nights, but also in The Brooklyn Follies (2005). Man in the Dark (2008) sees the U.S. torn apart by a new Civil War, while Invisible (2009), a novel in four parts modeled on the seasons, harps on Auster's usual questions about the reliability of language to capture reality, including memories of the past, and authorship. Sunset Park (2010), finally, seems less convoluted, perhaps less 'postmodern' than his earlier work, and once again reflects on how to make a new start in life.

With Richard Powers (1957-) we turn to a set of authors, sometimes referred to as 'The New American School', who have clearly grown up with postmodernism as a major influence, but who in various ways go beyond it. With Powers, as with David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Mark Z. Danielewski (1966-), Dave Eggers (1970-) and Jonathan Safran Foer (1977-), the postmodern connnection most clearly shows in their fascination with themes of language and identity, and with how they fashion their narratives to reflect them. Powers made his debut with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), which is undeniably postmodern in both technique and themes. We are first given a series of reflections on art, and specifically photography in the modern era, what the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who is quoted by Powers, called 'the era of mechanical reproduction', followed by episodes in the lives of three young men photographed on their way to a dance in August 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, and by how a Boston editor of a computer magazine discovers that one of the young men pictured in the photograph is his grandfater. Finally, however, everything turns out to be a verbal construct raised on a photograph of three unknown young men on a country road. Prisoner's Dilemma (1988) likewise plays with postmodern constructions and masquerades, and alternative realities, giving Walt Disney Japanese ancestors, for instance. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) via its title to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, but also to J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations as played by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, and to the structure of DNA, the discovery or near-discovery of which by the scientist-narrator provides the backbone of the novel. Although undeniably inventive, The Gold Bug Variation risks sacrificing story and character to erudition, and this applies even more to Operation Wandering Soul (1993). In Galatea 2.2 (1995) Powers himself admits that with his two previous books he had reached a dead end. He does so by mouth of 'the author Richard Powers' who, after having written a couple of books (that is to say Prisoner's Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations) during a prolonged stay in The Netherlands, on his return to the U.S. discovers that he has nothing left to say. Like Barth in his 1960s fictions, though Powers in Galatea 2.2 turns this defeat into a triumph by having his author Richard Powers narrate the genesis of his earlier Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. If this still sounds very classically postmodern, with his next novel Powers broke out of this mold. Gain (1998) draws a powerful picture of the rise of corporate America, and of how the individualistic and visionary entrepreneurism of the nineteenth century has developed into the nameless and faceless executive leadership of the late twentieth century. In Plowing the Dark (2000) computer-generated virtual reality in the service of the military is juxtaposed to an American being held hostage by guerrillas in Lebanon, the connecting factor between the two being the threat they both pose to man's mental sanity. The Time of our Singing (2003) addresses problems of racial inequality and discrimination via the marriage and offspring of a German-Jewish immigrnat and an African American woman. In The Echo Maker (2006) Powers raises questions about the about the relationship between reality, memory and identity via a protagonist who, as the result of a car accident, suffers from Capgras syndrome, the unfounded conviction that someone familiar is in fact an impostor. At the same time Powers also addresses issues of nature conservation and land and water use vua a refuge of sandhill cranes in Nebraska, the setting of the novel. In Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) the possible discovery of a genetic source of happiness and its possible or potential commercial misuse provide the central strand. 

In several of his essays, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005) and Both Flesh and Not (2012), David Foster Wallace denounced postmodernism for its ironical anti-humanism and metafictional pirouettes, and for the disrespect it showed its characters. Instead, he argued for '"real", albeit pop-mediated characters'. Especially John Barth seems to have served as Wallace's prime target, as can be seen from the parody of the latter in the story 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way', from the collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989). A look at his own work, though, and particularly at his debut, The Broom of the System (1987), leads us to suspect that with these denunciations of his immediate predecessors Wallace was primarily trying to lay his own literary ghosts. With characters named Rick Vigorous, Candy Mandible, Wang-Dang Lang, a talking parrot called 'Vlad the Impaler', a publishing company that goes by the name 'Frequent and Vigorous' (the director of which cannot live up to that motto in the bed of the novel's protagonist Lenore Beardsman), and the zany plan of the Ohio state authorities to create a 'Great Ohio Desert' to foster recreation, the shadow of Pynchon looms heavily over The Broom of the System. Add to this that the plot concerns a search for truth and identity by Lenore, which also involves a search for her great-grandmother also called Lenore, the latter having been a student of Wittgenstein, and the relationship between languasge and reality that is the holy grail of classical postmodernism reappears again here too.

Wallace's massive (1079 pages) second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), definitively established him as one of the most important voices of his generation. In this novel Wallace, in his own words, tries to describe 'what it's like to live in America around the millennium'. The book is set in a near future in which the U.S., Canada and mexico have united to form the Organization of North American Nations, also known as O.N.A.N., with a clear Biblical reference. The President of O.N.A.N. is a former pop-singer and actor, the larger part of New England and South-Eastern Canada is used as a dump for toxic waste, transported there by rocket, and society has become commercialized to the extent that calendar years no longer go by digits but by sponsor advertisements: 'Year of the Whopper', 'Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad'. There is a gang of French-Canadian terrorists ('Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [sic]) chasing a movie, 'The Entertainment', that is so impossible to tear oneself away from that its spectators die from dehydration, and with which the assassins plan to bring down the hated American society. Infinite Jest also sports 388 endnotes. All of this sounds very Pynchonesque, but other than his postmodernist predecessors, and unlike his own earlier work, Wallace in Infinite Jest focuses on the existential anxieties life in such a disorienting and disoriented society engenders. What matters, Wallace insists, is that notwithstanding all the linguistic frolics and jests his characters are 'real' people, with 'real' problems, even if the environment in which they find themselves is recognizably postmodern. To use postmodern irony in these conditions would be unforgivable and stand in the way of real human communication and compassion. Notwithstanding their often comical use of language and situations, the same move toward what we can broadly call a variation of psychological realism can also be noted in the stories collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004), with the tone of the latter colelction getting grimmer, influenced by the events of 9/11, which are also referred to a few times. 

Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves created a major stir upon publication in 2000. Of all the more recent publications this is probably the most orthodoxly postmodern. The novel's central given is a report of a documentary movie registering how movie producer Navidson and his crew explore the enormous spaces that without warning have attached themselves ot his house and that, like the house itself, can just as unpredictably change shape. The report, written up by a certain Zampanó, after the latters death is found by Johnny Truant, an assistant in a tattoo shop and on the brink of succumbing to his drug addiction. To Zampanó's already copious notes Truant adds his own, which clearly show him to be sliding into paranoia. All of this is edited and edited again by nameless further editors that themselves add the occasional further footnote. Zampanó's notes refer to both existing and non-existing articles and books, to scholarly and pseudo-scholarly discussions, and to pseudo-commentaries by Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen King, and Jacques Derrida. Add o this that the novel's page lay-out mirrors Navidson's moves, thereby forcing the reader to sometimes hold the book upside down or at an anlge, uses different colors, and sports a great number of different fonts, including braille and musical notations, as well as photobraphs, drawings, and poems, and that an exhaustive index concludes it all. House of Leaves is hilariously and irrepresibly inventive in its use of techniques yet at the same time extremely menacing in atmosphere, even to the point of horror. As a result, the reader is constantly torn between a distancing reading of what after all could only be sheer linguistic construction—literally a 'house of leaves', that is to say leaves of a book or pages—and a strong emotional response called forth by the reality of the situations and the characters. It is this tension that finally yields the meaning, and the greatness, of House of Leaves. In his second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), loosely modeled on the genre of the road novel, but also involving a trip through American history, Danielewski tried to outdo the experimentalism even of House of Leaves.

Dave Eggers gained immediate fame with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) a deeply moving and at the same time hilariously funny metafictional recount of the period immediately following the decease of the parents of the protagonist Dave Eggers. When father and mother Eggers die within a month of one another the three older Eggers children, but in the first instance Dave, take upon themselves the care of the much younger Toph. Although based in fact, Eggers' account is thoroughly fictionalized. The book shows many postmodern features, but the pain the Eggers children feel is undeniably real and authentic. Not surprisingly, then, in interviews Eggers has consistently declined to be identified as a postmodernist, a position borne out by his later books, such as You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), in which two friends find out how difficult it is to give away money on reasonable gounds, even in desperately poor places, or What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Dent (2006), the true story of a Sudanese refuge. In A Hologram for the King (2012) Eggers tackles the excesses of globalization and the personal and collective dramas they lead to.

In Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan, a young Jewish American, visits the Ukraine in search of the village where his ancestors emighrated to the U.S. He meets a young Ukrainian, Alex, who, along with his grandfather, the latter's unbelievable dog ('Sammy Davis, Junior, called Junior') and equally incredible car, takes Jonathan to his destination. All this is being recounted by Alex in a hilarious—and occasionally belabored—varian of the English language. Alex also keeps up a running correspondence with Jonathan. The true beginning of the story, thouh, lies in Trachimbrod, the village Jonathan is looking for. It soon transpires that the history of Trachibrod is being reconstructed, or better, construed, by Jonathan , who sends chapters to Alex for the latter's comment. For the longest time the history of Trachimbrod remains as hilarious as Alex's usage of English, but it assumes a grimmer outleook when it becomes clear that Alex's grandfather himself comes from Trachimbrod, that the village has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazis, and that the grandfather in question has played a less than heroic role in this event. Issues of memory, reality, and language, and the thin line between fact and fiction, play a major role in Everything Is Illuminated, and give the novel a postmodern tinge, but the latter, as with Eggers, Danielewski, and the later works of  Powers, is here again gainsid by the authenticity of the tragic events and the reality of the characters. This is less the case in Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), notwithstanding the fact that this novel is rooted in the events of 9/11, one of the first novels to do so. Foer's use of typographical and other tricks recalls Danielewski's House of Leaves, but his protagonist oscar Schell, a nine-year-old who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks, is obviously modeled on Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum (1959) by German writer Günther Grass (1927-[2015]). And a number of characters and episodes further recall earlier instances of inhuman behavior, such as the bombardment of Dresden and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima by the Allies in World War II. With Eating Animals (2009) Foer made a plea against present-day commercial practices around food, such as factory farming and commercial fishing. 

The work of Nicole Krauss (1974-) shares a number of characteristics and topics with that of Foer. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room (2002), although not immediately referring to 9/11 itself, has nevertheless been seen as expressing the mood of desolation and despair caused by those events. A novel about memory, the hopelessness and passing of love, and the loneliness of life, all tied together by a nuclear experiment conducted in the Mojave desert in 1957, Man Walks into a Room is an extended symbolical reflection on good and evil, and on the need for the U.S. to leave the trauma of 9/11 behind while at the same time searching for its causes. Krauss has listed DeLillo as one of her main influences, but the mood of Man Walks into a Room, the apparently aimless conversations, the games with language and memory, the role of coincidence, and how man suffers all this without understanding why and without a hold on her or his own existence, also recall the work of Paul Auster. In fact, the book obliquely refers to Auster when the desert is compared to a 'hunger artist', a thematic constant of much of auster's work, especially in his middle period. The History of Love (2005) is concerned with the Holocaust, features a character from Slonim, in present-day Belarus, from which one of Krauss's Jewish grandparents originated, and its plot at least partially truns upon a manuscript. The Great House (2010), with magical realist traits, again is rooted in Jewish history, and links the lives of characters living as far apart as Chile, the U.S. London and Jerusalem via a desk of many drawers. 

 

 

 

Postmodernity in Prose

 

Hemingway, Ernest Miller

(from The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger)

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST [MILLER] (1899-1961), born in Illinois, while attending school made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in Northern Michigan, which helped condition his later primitivistic attitude. After working as a Kansas City reporter, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in France, then transferred to the Italian infantry until the close of World War I, after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star, and settled in Paris as a member of the expatriate group.

Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, wholse style strongly affected him, he published Three Stories & Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and *In Our Time (U.S. 1925). These early stories already exhibited the attitude of mind and technique for which he later became famous. As the leading spokesman for the "lost generation" he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that, their atrophied nerves not permitting them to attack their betrayers, they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions. The stories are mainly concerned with "tough" people, either intelligent men and women who have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians, and professional athletes, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. Emotion is held at arm's length; only the bare happenings are recorded, and emphasis is obtained by understatement and spare dialogue.

After Hemingway returned to New York and wrote the lesser satirical novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), he carried the style and attitude of his short stories into the novel *The Sun Also Rises (1926), which tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war, who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in *A Farewell to Arms (1929), the poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war. Besides further distinguished collections of short stories, *Men Without Women (1927) and *Winner Take Nothing (1933), he wrote only two lesser books during the next few years, although his work continued to exercise a great influence on the literature of the period. *Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting with digressions on literary matters, show a further cultivation of the primitive and brutal levels, contrasted with the hollow culture that had cheated his generation.

In *To Have and Have Not (1937). Hemingway for the first time showed an interest in a possible solution of social problems though collective action. This attitude continued in newspaper articles from Spain about its civil war, whose espionage was the subject of his realistic play, The Fifth Column, adapted for the stage (1940) by Benjamin Glazer, and printed in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), in which appeared two of his finest stories, *"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and *"The Snows of Kilimanjaro". *For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, on an incident in the Spanish Civil War, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. He edited an anthology, Men at War (1942), but issued no new novel until Across the River and into the Trees (1950), which was considered to show that Hemingway had become bitter and defeatist like his tale's protagonist, and aging colonel. With *The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a parable of man against nature in a poignant novelette, he recaptured his critical acclaim, recognized in a Nobel Prize (1954).

In his last years he published nothing, and he had been seriously ill for some time before his death as a suicide by gunshot. However, several posthumous works followed, most notably *A Moveable Feast (1964), sketches of his life and acquaintances in Paris, 1921-1926, and Islands in the Stream, (1970), a novel in three parts about a painter's unhappy marriage, his affection for his sons, their deaths, his bravery in war, his pleasure in deep-sea fishing, and his loneliness. Another novel, written in the 1940s, edited and published in 1986, The Garden of Eden, begins with the honeymoon of an enticing young couple, David and Catherine Bourne, he a good wirter, she an heiress, who break up over serious sexual differences. Later compilations include The Wild Years (1962), his journalism for the Toronto Star; By-Lines (1967), selected journalism of four decades; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), eight of them previously unpublished; and three collections of verse, the last and most inclusive being 88 Poems (1979). Selected Letters was issued in 1981.



In Our Time, 15 short stories by *Hemingway with vignettes serving as interchapters, published in the U.S. in 1925. In Our Time (Paris, 1924) contains only the vignettes. Most stories treat life in the Middle West, but the interpolated sketches describe war in Europe and bullfights.

"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and others tell of the boyhood experiences of Nick, the author's counterpart, who grew up in the Great Lakes region, learning the bitter as well as the beautiful facts of existence through the work of his father, a physician, and through his association with Indian guides and their families. Such stories as "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," "Out of Season," and "Cross Country Snow" are brief, poignant tales of American expatriates in Europe and their complex loves and friendships. "My Old Man" is the story of a boy's loyalty to his father, an American jockey forced to work in Europe because of unsportsmanlike conduct at home, and of the boy's disillusion following his father's death. The author's enthusiasm for sport and the American wilderness is shown in "Big Two-Hearted River," an account of a trout-fishing expedition.


The Sun Also Rises, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1926. The title is derived from a pessimistic passage in Ecclesiastes, expressing a cynical disillusion in keeping with the postwar attitude. The English title of the work is Fiesta.

Lady Brett Ashley, "as charming when she is drunk as when she is sober," is traveling on the continent, waiting for a divorce in order to marry Michael Campbell. Among her other satellites are Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent; his friend Bill Gorton; Robert Cohn, an American Jewish novelist; and an eccentric Greek count. Cohn is weary of his mistress, Frances Clyne, and falls in love with Brett, although neither she nor his other acquaintances feel any real affection for him. The group leave Paris for an excursion in Spain, where they visit the fiesta at Pamplona. They are enthusiastic fans of the bullfights, finding in the ritualistic spectacle a mysterious beauty of precision. Brett and Jake are in love, but unhappily, because a wartime injury has emasculated him. She falls in love with a young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, with whom she elopes; and Cohn departs, expressing his anger by beating Jake, Michael, and Romero. When Romero wants to marry her, Brett decides to return to Michael, who is one of her own kind. She tells Jake, "We could have had such a damned good time together," and he concludes, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?"




A Farewell to Arms, novel by Hemingway, published in 1929, and dramatized by Laurence Stallings (1930).

Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service during World War I, falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. She returns his feeling, and when Henry, wounded during a bombardment, is sent to a hospital at Milan, Catherine comes to nurse him. They spend a happy summer together while he recuperates, and in the autumn Catherine confesses that she is pregnant, but will not marry him, fearing to be sent back to England. Henry returns to his post, finds his comrade Rinaldi depressed by the monotonous horrors of the war, and shares the suffering during the disastrous retreat from Caporetto. He deserts, learns that Catherine has been transferred to Stresa, and joins her there. Although he is in civilian clothes, he is suspected, and forced to flee with Catherine to Switzerland. They go to Lausanne for the birth of their child, but both mother and baby die, leaving Henry desolate and alone in a strange land.


Men without Women, 14 short stories by *Hemingway, published in 1927.

"The Undefeated" tells of the futile heroism of Manuel Garcia, a Spanish bullfighter just released from a hospital, who stubbornly refuses to retire, secures an ill-paid "nocturnal" engagement, and gives an adequate performance before an appreciative audience, but is seriously injured and returned to the hospital. "The Killers" describes the tense atmosphere in a small-town lunchroom, when two Chicago gangsters enter to await Ole Andreson, whom they have been paid to murder. He fails to arrive, and they finally leave. Nick, the waiter, goes to Andreson's room, and finds the victim aware of his impending doom but paralyzed by fear and unwilling to attempt escape. "Fifty Grand" is the story of a champion prizefighter, Jack Brennan, and his bout with the contender Walcott. The midde-aged champion, worried by his responsibilities, cannot train properly, decides that he is bound to lose, and bets $50,000 on his own defeat. He fights well for several rounds, until brutally fouled by his opponent. Insisting that this was an accident, he continues with difficulty, then suddenly ends the matter by an obvious foul on Walcott. "'It's funny how fast you can think when it means that much money'", he says.


Winner Take Nothing, 14 stoires by *Hemingway, published in 1933.

"The Light of the World," set in a small town in the Middle West, has for its chief character a fat, blonde prostitute, who recalls nostalgically the prizefighter who furnished the one rudimentary romantic episode of her life. *"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" portrays the desolate lives of a writer and a customer of a Spanish café. 

At a sidewalk table of a Spanish café an old, deaf man sits drinking brandy late at night as the two waiters discuss him, the older one with sympathy because he too is lonely, fearful, confident of nothing, and also in need of the security of a clean, well-lighted place.

"The Sea-Change" tells of the tragic separation of a young couple, when the girl drifts into a homosexual relation with another woman. "A Way You'll Never Be" describes the hysterical reaction of a young American officer in the Italian army, when he is relieved from active duty and thus has time to become aware of the significance of the war. "Homage to Switzerland" contains three vignettes of fatuous middle-class American tourists in Europe. "A Natural History of the Dead" is a bitter satire on the results of modern warfare. "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" is concerned with two hospital patients, a Mexican gambler and an author, and the way in which the writer cynically plays upon the phrase "the opium of the people."


Death in the Afternoon, discursive work by *Hemingway, published in 1932. In it he describes the rearing and fighting of bulls in Spain, and depicts the bullfight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy, in which the death of the bull is inevitable but must be achieved by the observance of ritual, which gives the animal a maximum chance to destroy the matador. The discussion includes lengthy digressions, in the form of conversations between the author and an old lady, presenting his philosophy through the discussion of various aspects of life and death.


To Have and Have Not, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1937.

Harry Morgan, a tough "conch," as natives of Key West, Fla., call themselves, has devoted his life to the single-minded effort of keeping himself, his wife, and his children on the upper fringe of the "have-nots." He hires out his powerboat to wealthy men for fishing trips, but, when the Depression destroys this source of income and a rich tourist welshes on payment for lost fishing tackle, he is obliged to turn to illegal activities. He contracts to smuggle Chinese from Cuba into the U.S., but, taking their money, murders their leader and abandons the others. While smuggling illegal liquor, he is captured in a gun battle by federal officers, loses an arm, and has his boat confiscated. In a last desperate attempt to obtain money, he aids in the escape of four bank robbers, although realizing that unless he kills them they will kill him. This he does, but they wound him fatally. Picked up by the Coast Guard and accused of being a member of the gang, he stammers, "'A man . . . ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out . . . One man alone ain't got . . . no chance.' He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it."

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, short story by Ernest *Hemingway, published in Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

An American couple on a safari in Kenya, the Macombers have long given the impression of a glamorous and comparatively happy marriage, although the basis for their union is that "Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him." The marriage comes to a new straining point when in cowardice he runs from a wounded lion that he has shot badly, and she, in disgust, gives herself that night to the professional hunter and guide, the sturdy Englishman Robert Wilson. The next day, in a surge of excitement, Macomber discovers self-confidence and happiness as he shoots three wild buffalo, but Margot is suddenly made insecure as she sees him at last as a man who will dominate their marriage. Forced to go into the hiding place of one of the animals he has only wounded to administer the coup de grâce, Macomber seems about to be gored by the buffalo when from the car Mrs. Macomber shoots at the beast and kills her husband instead, after which Wilson says wryly, "Of course it's an accident. I know that."


The Snows of Kilimanjaro, story by *Hemingway, published in Esquire (Aug. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

Dying with "a great tiredness and anger" of blood poisoning from his gangrenous leg, the novelist Harry lies in camp on his African safari, accopmapnied by his wife and native attendants, waiting for a rescue plane that he knows will arrive too late, and remembers experiences that were to have served as subjects of stories when he knew enough to write them well. But he realizes too that he has destroyed his talent by sloth, by enjoyments such as the marriage with his rich wife could bring, and that he hates himself as he vents his cruelty on her. As he knows he will die that night, he tries to write, but vividly he feels and sees and smells death as he drops off, dreaming that the plane has come and taken him not to a hospital but to the very top of Kilimanjaro, said to be the highest mountain in Africa, where, according to the story's epigraph, close to the summit that is called the House of God "there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

For Whom the Bell Tolls, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1940. The title is derived from a sermon by Donne: "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent . . . And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." 

Robert Jordan, an American, has entered the Loyalist army during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and has been sent to join a guerrilla band in the mountains near Segovia to blow up a strategic bridge at the exact minute that will help a Loyalist advance. During the three days and nights that he spends in the guerrilla's cave, he awaits with a romantic opposition to heroism what he suspects will be his own destruction and that of his companions. He falls in love with Maria, daughter of a Republican mayor, who has seen her parents killed and was herself raped by Falangists. Her close-cropped hair is a symbol of her tortures; Jordan helps her to regain her desire to live. Their passioinate love is abetted by the powerful woman Pilar, who dominates the group by her force of character, gusto, and love of the Republic. Her man Pablo is wily but lacks belief and hence courage. The others include foul-mouthed Agustín; pedantic, dignified Fernando; the gypsy Rafael; and the adoring Andrés. A sense of impending disaster develops, with smolering opposition within the group, a Falangist attack on the guerrilla leader El Sordo on a neighboring hill, acts of cowardice by Pablo, and a mission by Andrés to Loyalist headquarters to carry a note from Jordan saying the advance is likely to fail, with the messenger impeded by the Communists' bureaucracy and suspicion. The generals finally realize they should have cancelled the attack, but it is too late. Leaving the retreat, Jordan successfully blasts the bridge. In the attempt to flee he is wounded, and forces the others to leave hism. He lies on the hillside almost delirious, restraining himself from suicide so that he may shoot the leader of the Fascists, and thinks, "I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. . . ."




The Old Man and the Sea, novelette by *Hemingway, published in 1952.

This parable of man's struggle with the natural world, of his noble courage and endurance, tells of the Cuban fisherman Santiago, who for 84 luckless days has rowed his skiff into the Gulf Stream in quest of marlin. At first accompanied by the boy Manolin, with whom he talked of better days and about the great sport of baseball, he is now alone. Aged and solitary, he goes far out and hooks a great fish that tows his boat all afternoon and night and into the next day as he pits his skill and waning strength against it the way he once did as a wrestler called "El Campeón." As the second night turns to dawn he finally harpoons his catch, lashes it to his small boat, and makes his weary way home. As he sails down to port sharks attack his catch and he fights them as best he can with a knife lashed to the tiller gripped in raw hands. Whan he makes land his marlin is but a skeleton. Proud in defeat, Santiago furls his sail and staggers to his shack to be found by the boy and other fishermen, who marvel at his catch, while the spent man sleeps and dreams of past experience.


A Moveable Feast, memoir by *Hemingway of his life in Paris (1921-26), published in 1964. In brief sketches the work summons up the sense of what Paris meant to him as a writer beginning a career and to other expatriate Americans. It tells how Gertrude Stein came to employ the term "lost generation" and of his friendship and falling out with her, of Pound, Fitzgerald, and other associates.

Une Vie, une œuvre : Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

THE HUMAN STAIN (Film)

The Human Stain. Dir. Robert Benton. Based on the novel by Philip Roth. With Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. 2003.*

         https://youtu.be/frw5UxxtZtQ

          2020

 

Morrison, Toni

 

By Adam Begley.  From the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).

 

MORRISON, Toni (1931-[2019])

 

FICTION: The Bluest Eye (1970), *Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) [Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015)]

NONFICTION: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) 

Sula—I'm talking about the character here, not the novel—would have winced at the sentimental streak running through Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known book. Sula is bad news, a skeptical fatalist, an idle, amoral artist, an accident so sure to happen it doesn't bother waiting. But she's my favorite; and she lights up Morrison's second novel like a torch. She's a good part of the reason why I insist that Sula, the skinny, 174-page novel, is Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved—I'm talking about the novel here, not the character, who's really just a ringer from The Exorcist—is something of an icon, a bit like Morrison herself, the unassailable Nobel laureate, supremely confident in herself as a woman, a black woman, and a black woman writer. Beloved is a "contemporary classic," a big book with a colossal subject: slavery. Who wants to knock it? Not m, because in fact it's beautiful, rich, fierce, harrowing. A damn fine book. But also sentimental. Why should uplift and overripe prose poems clog a novel about a runaway slave willing to slaughter her own children, including her newborn baby, rather than be dragged back to captivity, children in tow?

In Beloved, Morrison strains to remind us of goodness and love, as though she feels she has to counter the world's gross tonnage of evil. So we have a white girl busy saving Sethe's life (Sethe the runaway slave, half-dead, hugely pregnant); the white girl chatters all the while about how "Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling." And we have two of Morrison's specialties, food and sex, served up luscious enough to make us forget all that looming horror. Here, for example, the erotic version of corn-on-the-cob: "How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free . . . [N]o accounting for how that simple joy could shake you."

I can already hear a grad-school clever argument about how Morrison binds food and sex and the monstrosity of slavery in one tangled life-like whole, but that doesn't change a thing. The music swells, Sula winces.

Morrison began with a bone-dry book, The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl raped by her father and driven mad by her yearning for blue eyes, epitome of the white world's ideal of beauty. A sad and bitter story, choked by too many voices, it contains passages as lovely as anything Morrison has written—but it's a minor work in a minor key.

Then comes Sula, the story of two little girls, best friends, who grow up very different in "the Bottom," the black neighbourhood of a small Ohio city. Sula and Nell are bouncing with life, vividly real but also emblematic. Sula becomes the radical individualist, Nell the pillar of the community, steady, maternal, dutiful. Morrison weaves her tale with just three strands, a place and two families, but she seems magnificently omniscient, as though she had access to the pooled insight of every sociologist, every psychologist, every anthropologist; as though she had solved the riddle of what holds society together, what holds the solitary self together—and what blows it all apart. Though packed with comic scenes and and brilliantly inventive, Sula ends on a note of rich, full-throated sadness. There's plenty of laughter in the Bottom, but only visiting white folk manage to "hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under [the] head rags and soft felt hats . . . . [T]he laughter was part of the pain."

Song of Solomon—another marvel, a rambling tale, almost picaresque, freer and more daring than Sula, though less precise, less perfect—follow a callo young man's slow steps to redemption. If Sula is about self and community, Song of Solomon is about self and family. Hints of the fantastic in the first two novels—folklore, and the maybe-magic of myth—blossom here. The ordinary takes wing: Our hero flies.

The weakest of Morrison's novels is Tar Baby, a dubious jumble set in the Caribbean, featuring a white candy magnate, his black servants, their beautiful niece, and an ugly cruelty inflicted years ago. Morrison's first extended excursion into the heads of white folk. Only for the loyal fan.

Beloved wiped the slate clean and beckoned, with the same gesture, the august attentions of the Swedish Academy. After which, of course, a disappointment: Jazz, a curiously dispassionate, plotless love story set in Harlem in the 1920s. A teenage girl, an older man, and his jealous wife generate some bizarre domestic violence. In the background, the threat of race riots.

Another kind of violence powers Paradise: the defensive violence of black people intent on protecting their community. Ruby, Oklahoma, is an all-black settlement founded in 1950, a patriarchy, fortress of rightenousness, a prosperous, peaceable community. Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have shut out the white world. A few miles from Ruby is the Convent, nun-less since 1970, a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, some black, some white. There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. In 1976, the misguided men of Ruby, who think of the Convent as a witches' coven, stage a deadly raid.

The narrative is choppy and needlessly confused, but Morrison's messabge comes through loud and clear. No haven can be heavenly, no home can smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or thrives by triage—some in, some out, some damned, some saved. Morrison is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

As a storyteller Morrison combines a poet's grace, a radical's fervor, and a great preacher's moral majesty. She writes for and about the African-American community ("If I tried to write a universal novel," she once claimed, "it would be water"). And yet she reaches us all.

 

See Also: Nobody who "writes like" Morrison is anywhere as good as she is. If you're after other African-American writers, try James Baldwin or John Edgar Wideman (avoid Alice Walker). If you're after nuanced treatment of racial isues, try Nadine Gordimer. If you just want a novel as good as Sula, try The Great Gatsby or Billy Budd.

 

—Adam Begley

John Barth

 BY PETER KURTH

From The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

 

BARTH, JOHN

1930-

b. Dorchester County, Maryland 

FICTION: The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles, Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (Stories, 1968); *Chimera (1972), LETTERS (1979), Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), On with the Story (stories, 1996)

NONFICTION: The Literature of Exhaustion, and the Literature of Replenishment (1982), The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984), Don't Count on It: A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights (1984), Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (1995)

 

As the doyen of "postmodern" novelists in America, John Barth has typically enjoyed two discrete followings. The first are academics, who have found in Barth's playful, wildly-convoluted fictions a permanent gold mine for analysis and criticism. The second are college students, who identify romantically with Barth's existential heroes and his vision of the world as a random, madcap, menacing place, where nothing is what it seems to be and truth is just a construct, a fiction in itself. There are no answers to anything in the Barthian universe, and no solace beyond stories, legends, and narrative invention.

"Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of all my main characters," Barth has said. "We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equeals life: to cease to narrate . . . is to die." As a writer, barth's model and muse is Scheherazade, of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who spun stories for the sultan every evening to escape execution. Generally, Barth's novels are huge, labyrinthine affairs, shot through with comedy, fantasy, ribaldry, wordplay, allegory, literary allusion, and structural culs-de-sac. Just when you think you've grasped Barth's point, rest assured—you haven't. There is always something else behind the door. Barth undercuts himself at every turn, tells you straight out that he can't be trusted, and begs you only to enjoy the ride—the "funhouse," as he constructs it fresh from book to book. 

Barth grew up in the Tidewater region of Maryland, and most if not all of his novels are set there. He was one of a set of fraternal twins, and became a write in adulthood, he thinks, "in part because I no longer had my twin to be wordless with"—hence his fascination with the mechanics of language. His first three novels, all of them comedies "dealing with the problem of nihilism," were conceived as a piece and written in quick succession. Todd Andrews, the hero of The Floating Opera, recognizes that nothing has meaning and decides to commit suicide, only to realize before the deed is done that his vision of reality is neither more nor less significant than anyone else's, and that suicide is just as meaningless as staying alive. The theme is repeated in The End of the Road, with the exception that the hero's object lesson is far more terrible and utterly closed to humor. And in The Sot-Weed Factor, written in the style of an eighteenth-century hero quest, innocence is lost completely when Ebenezer Cooke, first Poet Laureate of Maryland, is subjected to every indignity the nascent colony and its inhabitants can heap upon him.

Giles, Goat Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, for which Barth wrote the National Book Award in 1973, are all difficult, willfully self-conscious fictions that seek to extend the traditional boundaries of the novel, a goal Barth sets for himself in his famous 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," More recently, Barth has doubled back, spewing out "prefaces," "postscripts," mock treatises, and windy explanations for all his books to date. The unreadable LETTERS finds characters from Barth's earlier novels corresponding with him in the hope of justifying themselves. Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor are all set in boats on Chesapeake Bay, where fables of life, love, death, sex, fiction, meaning, and the lack of it are traded back and forth among characters old and new. The Tidewater Tales is the best in this series, or at least the best contained; readers can be forgiven for tiring of the game by the time they've finished all three. A collection of autobiographical pieces, as illusory and open-ended as any of Barth's fiction, appeared in 1994 as Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, bringing Barth's work full circle and further blurring whatever "truth" the reader can perceive. As always, Barth is obsessed with narration, myths, and the ultimate futility of words. 

For many years, Barth has taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is currently professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars. He remains the academic's dream novelist, his work arbitrarily challenging in structure and form but redeemed by inventiveness, huge erudition, humor, and an unquenchable sense of adventure.

See Also: Barth accepts the postmodernist label while remaining sui generis, linked at least in flights of fancy with Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, and Thomas Pynchon. 

 

 

Watching Nothing: Postmodernity in Prose

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Gray on Nabokov (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray:

(...) 

It is difficult to think of a European émigré writer further from all this than Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). In fact, the verbal shift that seems required, from immigrant to émigré, suggests some of the difference. Nabokov was born into a wealthy, prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia and as a youth traveled extensively. His father, a liberal aristocratic jurist, opposed the tyranny of the czar then that of the bolshevviks. He took his family into exile, then was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a reactionary White Russian who later became a Nazi official. Nabokov lived in Berlin and Paris between the two world wars. There, he produced a critically acclaimed series of poems, short stories, and novels in Russian. Then, in 1940, in flight from various forms of totalitarianism, he emigrated to the United States where he began teaching Russian literature. His frist novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941; it concerns a young Russian in Paris, the narrator, who discovers the true nature of his half-brother, and English novelist, while writing his biography. This was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity. Four years later, Nabokov published his first memoir, Conclusive Evidence, later retitled Speak, Memory and, under this title, revised and expanded in 1966. Four years after that, in turn, came the book that established his fortune, his reputation for some and his notoriety for others, Lolita, published first in France then, after censorship problems were resolved, in the United States in 1958. It tells of the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, for what he terms "nymphets" in general and the 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita in particular, and their wanderings across America. It was Nabokov's first novel set in his new home in the New World; and its success allowed him to devote himself full time to his writing. Three more novels appeared after the first publication of Lolita: among them, Pale Fire (1962), a postmodernist tour de force purporting to be a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by an academic who admits to being the king himself. Along with the two other novels, Pnin (1957) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), there are novellas, short stories, a play, critical studies and commentary, translations of his earlier Russian novels, lectures and correspondence, and a monumental translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964). All of the work reflects, in some way, Nabokov's aesthetic of subjective idealism. All of it plays variations on an observation made by the academic commentator in Pale Fire: "'reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art," that commentator observes, "which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye." 

Which suggests the fundamental difference between Nabokov and even a writer like Singer, let alone Olsen or Ozick. "To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by all of us," Nabokov admits in Strong Opinions (1973), a collection of his answers to questions about himself, art, and public issues. "But that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials." "Average reality," Nabokov insits, "begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture." Any book he makes, any art anyone makes that is worth reading is "a subjective and specific affair," Nabokov suggests. It is the creative act that effectively maintains reality just as—and the analogy is his—electricity binds the earth together. As a writer, a creator, he has "no purpose at all when composing the stuff except to compose it." "I work long, on a body of words," as Nabokov puts it, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure." According to this subjective idealist creed, there can be no totalizaing, totalitarian reading of experience, no monolithic entity entitled "life." There is only the "manifold shimmer" of separate, specific lives, my life, your life, his life, or her life. As Nabokov has it, "life does not exist without a possessive epithet." Nor is there some kind of absolute truth or absolute morality attainable, a master narrative of history or ethics that the artists must discover and disclose. "Reality is an infinite succession of stops, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable," Nabokov argues. "You can never get near enough"; and so "whatever the mind grasps it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinction and relief to the observed organism." There is no place here for naturalism or didacticism. "I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction," Nabokov confesses. "Why do I write books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty." "Lolita has no moral in tow," he adds. "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I bluntly call aesthetic bliss." That bliss is the triumph of art, for Nabokov. Its tragedy is suggested by an anecdote Nabokov tells about the original inspiration for Lolita. Which is a story about an ape, who, after months of coaxing, produced the first ever drawing by an animal. "This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

Lolita is certainly Nabokov's finest book. Before it was published, he wrote of it to Edmund Wilson, "its art is pure and its fun is riotous." The purity of its art has several dimensions. Structurally, Nabokov uses traditional romance patterns only to deconstruct them. Humbert Humbert reveals how he desired Lolita, possessed her, fled with her across America after the death of her mother, Charlotte Haze, lost her to a man named Quilty, then killed her new lover. It is the elemental romance structure used here to startling, inverted effect, with elements of quest, attainment, journey, loss, pursuit, and revenge. The love plot is propelled forward in a straight line, in accordance with whose unrelateing extension Charlotte loves Humbert, who loves Lolita, who loves Quilty, who seems to love no one at all. And, as in the courtly love story, the desire of the narrator becomes a metaphor for other kinds of daring, transgression, and retribution. "Oh, My Lolita, I have only words to play with!" Humbert declares early on in the novel. And that discloses another kind of arfulness. The narrator is telling his story as he awaits trial for murder. A "foreword" by one "John Ray Jr. Ph.D." informs us that Humbert died "in legal captivity" after writing this "Confession of a white Widowed Male" "a few days before his trial was scheduled to start." Humbert is a peculiarly knowing narrator. "I shall not exist if you do not imagine me," he tells the reader. Using a style both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing, eluding his audienc. Undercutting what might seem predictably valid responses, he plays on the whole litary history of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first-person protagonists from Diderot to Dostoyevsky. "I am writing this under observation," Humbert admits. Within the narrative, this is literal, since he is in the psychiatric ward of the prison and his cell has an observation window. But Humbert is additionally, acutely aware of being under our observation as well. That helps make his story slippery, his character protean, and his language radically, magically self-referential. Like all Nabokov's novels, but even more than most, Lolita is a verbal game, a maze—what one character in Pale Fire christens a "lexical playfield."

The lexical playfield belongs, of course, to the author eventually rather than the narrator. It is Nabokov who discovers pleasure and difficulty in the complex web of allusion and verbal play—"the magic of games," as Humbert calls it—that constitutes the text. There is, in any event, a distinct difference between the games of the narrator and those of the author; or "Lolita" the confession and Lolita the novel. It is this. Humbert remains so trapped in his words, the "singposts and tombstones" of his story, that he does not realize he is using Lolita. Nabokov does. A great deal of intercultural fun is derived from the contrast between the "old-world politeness" of Humbert and what he perceives as the intriguing banality of America. This is an international novel, in one of tis dimensions, and it offers a riotously comic contrast between different languages, different voices. The verbal hauteur of Humbert ("You talk like a book, Dad," Lolita tells him) collides, in particular, with the unbuttoned slangy creativity that is a verbal element of the girl he pursues and possesses ("Yesser! The Joe-Rea marital enigma is making yaps flap"). And that collision has the dramatic advantage of allowing Lolita, as she is to herself, to escape through the chinks of the narrative. "Lolita had been safely solipsisized," Humbert claims, after he has used her as an unsuspecting aid to masturbatory fantasy. But he does not really solipsisize her, turn her as he puts it into "my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita," even for the period that he writes or we read the text. Perversely, Nabokov once claimed that "one day a reappraiser will come and and declare that I was a rigid moralist kicking sin . . . and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." That reappraisal is celarly required here, for what we as readers witness is Humbert committing the cardinal sin in the subjective idealistic moral lexicon: he takes another human being as a means rather than an end. In the process, he commits child abuse and statutory rape. But that is subsumed, for Nabokov, under the determining, damning fact that he has acted like a moral totalitarian with Lolita. He has imprisoned her within his own reality, denying her her right to hers—and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious but charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child. Momentarily, Humbert senses this when, in the last chapter of Lolita, he hears from his cell sounds coming from the valley below. "What I heard was the melody of children at play," he confesses; "and then I knew that the poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." The note of longing and loss was one that Nabokov was particularly inclined to sound. He once said that "the type of artist who is always in exile" was one for whom he felt "some affinity," which was perhaps natural for someone who spent nearly all his life as an émigré. What charges it with a tragic pathos here, however, is the pain of knowing, as Humbert does for a brief, enchanted moment, that there is nothing worse than this: to rob someone of their childhood—to steal from them the chance to say, right from the start, this is my reality, my life.

Vladimir Nabokov

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