WATCHING NOTHING: POSTMODERNITY IN PROSE
When
Wolfe was cataloguing the forms of the contemporary American novel
that, he believed, had failed in the primary duty to the real, he picked
out one group for particular condemnation. They were the
postmodernists: those who, Wolfe scornfully suggested, wrote about "The
Prince of Alienation . . . sailing off to Lonesome Island on his Tarot
boat with his back turned and his Timeless cape on, reeking of camphor
balls." For their part, some of those writers have returned the
compliment. One of them, for example, clearly thinking of figures like
Raymond Carver, has referred to the school of "Post Alcoholic
Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism." The opposition is not universal,
of course, not even inevitable. On the contrary, most contemporary
American novelists exploit the possibilities of both realism and
postmodernism, and others besides, as they attempt to navigate the two
rivers of American history described by Mailer. Nevertheless, the
opposition hs been there at times: between the New Journalists and the
Fabulators, the dirty realists and the fantasists or systems builders.
And it is mapped out clearly in the gap that separates Wolfe, Carver,
and the Capote of In Cold Blood from
the wholehearted postmodernists of contemporary American writing,
notably Thomas Pynchon (19837) and John Barth (1930-). Pynchon is
perhaps the most acclaimed and personally the most elusive of the
postmodernists. Relatively little is known about him, apart from the
fact that he studied at Cornell, for some of the time under Vladimir
Nabokov (who did not remember him). and that he worked for a while for
the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle. He has chosen social
invisibility, the last known photograph of him dating from the 1950s.
Although this is almost certainly motivated by a desire to avoid the
pitfalls of celebrity and the publicity machine, it has given the figure
of Pynchon a certain alluring mystery. It also adds to the mystique his
fiction projects, since that projection is of a world on the edge of
apocalypse, threatened by a vast conspiracy directed by or maybe against
and established power elite. This conspiracy, the intimation is, is
decipherable through a series of arcane sighs. The signs, however,
require interpretation, decoding according to the rules of structural
paranoia. And one of those rules is that structural paranoia is
impossible to distinguish from clinical paranoia. So interpretation may
be a symptom rather than a diagnosis. Pynchon's novels are
extraordinarily intricate webs, self-reflexive halls of mirrors,
precisely because they replicate the world as text—a system of signs
that must but cannot be interpreted. Each of his books creates a lexical
space, a self-referential verbal system, that imitates the
post-humanist space, steadily running down and losing energy, that all
of us now occupy.
Pynchon has been his own fiercest critic. In an introductory essay to his early stories, Slow Learner (1984),
he has said that his fundamental problem when he began writing was an
inclination "to begin with a theme, symbol, or other unifying agent, and
then try to force characters and events to conform to it." His books
are certainly packed with ideas and esoteric references; and, whether
one agrees with this self-criticism or not, it is clear that Pynchon
laid down his intellectual cards early. The title of his first important
short story is "Entropy" (1960). It contains specific references to
Henry Adams; and it follows carefully the Adams formulation, "Chaos was
the law of nature; Order was the dream of man." The use of entropy as a
figure for civilization running down was to become structurally
formative in his later fiction. So was his use of two kinds of
characters, alternative central figures first sketched out here. The
situation in "Entropy" is simply and deliberately schematic. There is a
downstairs and an upstairs apartment. Downstairs, a character called
Meatball Mulligan is holding a lease-breaking party, which moves
gradually toward chaos and consequent torpor. Upstairs, another
character, an intellectual called Callisto, is trying to warm a freezing
bird back to life. In his room he maintains a small hothouse jungle,
referred to as a "Rousseau-like fantasy." "Hermetically sealed, it was a
tiny enclave in the city's chaos," the reader is told, "alien to the
vagaries of the weather, national politics, or any civil disorder." The
room is a fantasy, a dream of order, in which Callisto has "perfected
its ecological balance." But the room leaves him in paralysis, the dream
does not work; the bird dies, and Callisto's girlfriend, realizing that
he is "helpless in the past," smashes the window of their hermetically
sealed retreat, breaking the shell surrounding his fantasy life.
Meatball Mulligan, meanwhile, does what he can to stop his party
"deteriorating into total chaos" by tidying up, calming his guests,
getting things mended.
"Entropy," in this way, mediates between
binary opposites: which are the opposites of modern consciousness and
culture. There is the pragmatist, active to the point of excess, doing
what he can with the particular scene, working inside the chaos to
mitigate it. And there is the theorist, passive to the point of
paralysis, trying to shape and figure the cosmic process, standing
outside as much as he can, constructing patterns for the chaos to
explain it. Meatball is immersed, drowning in the riotous present;
Callisto is imprisoned in the hermetically sealed glasshouse of the
past. The text, which here and later is the dominant presence in
Pynchon's writing, is the interface between these two figures, these two
systems or levels of experience. As such, it sketches out human
alternatives in a multiverse where mind and matter are steadily heading
for extinction. Or, it may be, the alternatives of hyperactivity and
containment, the open and the closed, between which the individual
consciousness constantly vacillates. The two are not, in any event,
mutually exclusive. To an extent, what Pynchon does in his work is to
give a decidedly postmodernist spin to perennial American
preoccupations. In the tradition of the American jeremiad, he presents a
culture, if not bound for heaven, then bent toward hell, its own form
of apocalypse or heat death. And in the grain of American writing
structured around the figures of the wilderness and the clearing, he
develops a sometimes bewildering series of systems, human and nonhuman,
built around the fundamental, formaive principles of spatial openness
and closure, immersion and separation, the flexible and the fixed, the
signified and the signifier—a world that is a totality of things, data,
and a world that is a totality of fact, signs.
In his first novel, V (1963),
Pynchon returned to two formative characters recalling Callisto and
Meatball in the shape of Hubert Stencil and Benny Profane. The book
confirms its author's sense of the modern world as an entropic waste
land, inhabited by men and women dedicated to the annihilation of all
animatedness. It is bounded by dead landscapes, urban, mechanical,
underground. A populous narrative, it is also packed with characters who
are ciphers; seeing others and themselves, not as people, but as
things, objects, they lapse into roles, masquerade, and cliché. Blown
along the mean streets and even meaner sewers of this story, Benny
Profane is a schlemiel, the suffering absurd comedian of Jewish lore. A
faded copy of a picaro, he drifts through life in such enterprises as
hunting alligators underneath New York City; it is there, in fact, in
the darkness and oblivion of the sewers, that he finds his greatest
comfort and peace. Hubert Stencil, on the other hand, searches the world
for V., the mysterious female spy and anarchist who is by turns Venus,
Virgin, and Void and seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Stencil appears
to be on a significant quest. Described as "a century's child" and born
in 1901, he is pursuing the remnants of the Virgin in the world of the
Dynamo. His father, a former British spy, has left behind enigmatic
clues pointing to a vast conspiracy in modern history So, whereas
Profane lives in a world of sightlessness without signs or discernible
patterns, Stencil enters a world of elusive signs and apparent patterns,
all gravitating toward an absent presence, the lady V. his quest is for
a fulcrum identity. In a sense, he is given an outline identity by his
search, since he thinks of himself as "quite purely He who looks for V.
(and whatever impersonations that might involve)." It is also a quest
for the identity of modern times. Using the oblique strategy of "attack
and avoid," Stencil moves through many of the major events of the
twentieth century, seeking to recover the master plot, the meanings of
modern history and this book. The only meaning found, however, is the
erasure of meaning: the emptying of a significant human history and its
sacrifice to mechanism and mass. The purposiveness of Stencil, it turns
out, and the purposelessness of Profane are both forms of "yo-yoing"
movement, often violent oscillation, bereft of all significance except
the elemental one of postponing inanimatedness.
At the heart of V, in
short, is a paradox characteristic of all Pynchon's work. Its enormous
historical bulk and vast social fabric is so constructed that it may be
deconstructed, so complexly created that it may be doubted then
decreated. The deconstruction is there, centrally, in the controlling
sign of V. herself, "a remarkably scattered concept" as we are told. A
human figure, passsing through many stages and identities, she comes
down to Stencil's final dream of her as a plasticated technological
object. A shifting letter attached to a historical process of
progressive deanimation, the human figure is translated into a figure of
speech. The other two compositional principles of the novel, Stencil
and Profane, may apparently be opposed, just as Callisto and Meatball
are, as the creator of patterns and the man of contingency, the
constructive and the deconstructive, he who seeks and he who floats They
are joined, however, not only in a failure of significance but a
failure of identity. Stencil and Profane inhabit a textual world that
simultaneously exhausts and drains meaning: there is a proliferation of
data, in excess of possible systems and in denial of any need, any
compulsion to explain. Not only that, they are created only to be
decreated, just as that textual world is—and in the same terms as that
elusive noncharacter V. herself. Their names are parodies, their words
and gestures gamesome or stereotypical, their physcial bearing a series
of masks. As such, they offer playful variations on a definition of life
supplied during the novel: as "a successive rejection of
personalities." In the simplest sense, Vis
not a book without a subject or a plot. Full of characters (of a sort)
and events, it exploits a number of narrative genres to keep the action
lively and the attention engaged: among them the mystery story, the tale
of the quest, and science fiction. But in another, more elemental
sense, it is. Not only a text about indeterminacy, V is an indeterminate text: its significance, its subject is the lack, the impossibility of one.
Almost
the last reported words of V. are "How pleasant to watch Nothing." In
his subsequent fiction, Pynchon has continued this watching and
searching of the boundlessness of "Nothing" in a variety of fictional
guises. In his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966),
the main character, Oedipa Maas, learns that her onetime lover, Pierce
Inverarity, has made her an executor of his estate. Now he is dead, she
sets out to investigate Inverarity's property: an investigation that
leads to the discovery of what she takes to be a conspiratorial
underground communication system dating back to the sixteenth century.
Following the clues, she finally believes she will solve the enigma
thorugh a mysterious bidder keen to buy Inverarity's stamp collection.
But the novel ends with the enigma unsolved, the plot and its meaning
unresolved, as Oedipa awaits the crying out at the auction of the
relevant lot number 49. The subject, and its significance, still wait to
be located. So do they in Gravity's Rainbow (1973),
Pynchon's third novel. Set in the closing years of World War II, the
story here, a complex web of plots and counterplots, involves a Nazi
Lieutenant Weissman, disguised as a mysterious Captain Blicero, and an
American sleuth, Lieutenant Tyron Slothorp, while V-2 rockets rain down
on London. Weissman, it appears, was once the lover of V.—in this
elaborate intertextual world, Pynchon's texts echo his own as well as
the texts of others. The gravitations of mood are characteristic: from
black humor to lyricism to science fiction to fantasy. So is the feeling
the reader experiences, while reading the book, that he or she is
encountering not so much different levels of meaning or reality, as
different planes in fictive space, with each plane in its shadow box
proving to be a false bottom, in an evidently infinite regression. So,
also, finally is the suspicion of conspiracy: Gravity's Rainbow explores
the possibility that, as one character puts it, "war was never
political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the
people distracted."
In this fictive maze, the V-2 rocket assumes
an elusive significance. It answers "to a number of shapes in the dreams
of those who touch it—in combat, in tunnel, or on paper"; each rocket,
the reader learns, "will know its intended and hunt him . . . shining
and pointed in the sky at his back . . . rushing in, rushing closer."
The intimations of a conspiratorial system, here "dictated . . . by the
needs of technology," is wedded, in a way characteristic of Pynchon, to a
centrally, crucially indeterminate sign. Like V., the V-2 rocket is as
compelling as it is mysterious, as beautiful as it is dangerous,
constantly dissolving into nothingness, deadly. Compared to a rainbow
arched downwards, as if by a force of gravity that is dragging humankind
to its death, the rocket initiates the same need to find meaning as V.
did. Similarly, it offers an excess of meaning, an excess that is an
evacuation. Since Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon has moved forward to the landscape of the 1980s and, through ample reminiscence, the 1960s in Vineland (1990), then back to the early twentieth century in Against the Day (2006) and forward again to the 1960s in his variation on the noir novel, Inherent Vice (2009). In between Vineland and Against the Day, he moved back to the early republic in Mason and Dixon (1997)_
to the days when men like the two famous surveyors mentioned in the
title were trying to establish boundaries in the boundlessness of
America, in order to appropriate it. America is memorably described in
this novel as "a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true".
It is the world, the landscape that inahbits all Pynchon's fiction: the
realm of measurelessness and dream, the indicative and the subjunctive,
the closed and appropriated and the open And it is typical of the
author that he should weave his speculations on legends, the rich
"Rubbish-Tip" of dreams ("Does Britannia when she sleeps, dream? one
character asks, "Is America her dream?"), into a densely populated
social fabric and a meditation on historical decline. The fictive energy
of Pynchon seems inexhaustible, not least because it careers with
tireless energy between contraries. But to an extent, what drives it is
summed up in one simple question one character asks the other in this
novel: "Good Christ, Dixon. What are we about?"
The narrator of John Barth's second novel, The End of the Road (1958), begins the story he is to tell with a sly parody of the opening sentence of Moby-Dick: "In a sense, I am Jake Horner." That
use of language to set up distances is characteristic. The distances
are several: between reader and character (Horner is already asking us
to look at him as only "in a sense" what he names himself), between the
narrator and character (who only "in a sense" form a negotiable,
nameable identity)—above all, between the world inside the text and the
world outside Barth has proved to be his own best critic and commentator
precisely because his is a fiction that continually backs up on itself,
subverting any temptation to link that fiction to reality by commenting
on form. His texts and characters are constatnly commenting on
themselves, or inviting or insisting on such comment. His fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966),
for instance, begins with fictive letters of introduction by several
editors that suggest, among other things, that the author is "unhealthy,
embittered, desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps
alcoholic or insane, if not a suicide." Or then, again, that he is a
mysterious unknown, or even a computer.. Besides creating multiple
dubieties, making the book a series of masks, the letters both liberate
the author from the authority of authorship and advie the reader as to
how to read this fiction. Which is, as fiction: a series of signs that
have no reference to objects outside themselves, and whose value lies in
their intrinsic relationship, the play between them. "This author," one
editor complains, "has maintained that language is the matter of his books"; "he turns his back on what is the case, rejects
the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance;
washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself 'doorman of
the Muses' fancy-house'."
"What is the case"
is a sly allusion to a famous remark made by the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. "The world is all that is the case." The world,
Wittgenstein argues, is the sum of what we take to be true and believe
that others take to be rue. We construct our world from the inside out;
and the crucial weapon in those configurations, those patternings of
things, is the system of language we have at our disposal. We cannot, in
fact, get outside the prisonhouse of our language; all we can do, when
we draw a picture of our world, is draw the bars. Inadvertently, one of
the fictive editors revelas the project that is at the heart of all
Barth's fiction, and all other work that is sometimes called postmodern
and sometimes metafiction. Everything is only "in a sense" this or that
it is named. The self is the sum of its rules, its locutions; the world
is the sum of our constructions of it; any apparent essence, any
"natural" baing or feeling or presence, is really a social construct, a
sign of culture trying to wear the mask of nature (and "nature" is a
cultural convention, too). And the text refers to nothing but itself.
The ultimate postmodern protagonist is perhaps Echo in Lost in the Funhouse (1968),
Barth's first collection of stories, who "becomes no more than her
voice." That, together with the self-referential nature of his language
and the self-reflexive character of his fiction, may make Barth's work
sound abstract to the point of being ossified. It is not, on the whole,
because the voice is vital: his novels and stories are packed with
voices, energetic, comically ebullient, often ironic, as Pynchon's are
with masks and figures. Not only that, in his hands, the prisonhouse of
language does become a funhouse: a place for play and passionate
virtuosity.
As for voices: these range from the tones of the narrator of Barth's first novel, The Floating Opera (1956), recalling his experiences on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, to the multiple voices of his fifth novel, Letters (1979). As its title implies, Letters is
an unusual development of epistolary fiction. In it, seven more or less
parallel narratives are revealed through correspondence written by
seven characters from Barth's earlier fiction, including the author
himself as just another imaginary figure. The intricate story that
emerges is a characteristic inquiry into enclosure and liberation: the
patterns into which all seven characters have previously been set, the
degree of freedom they may possibly discover and possess. Typical of
Barth's voices, that of Jake Horner, in turn, is notable for its
sometimes playful, sometimes angry irony, its humorous elusiveness.
Horner is a man so aware of the plural possibilities of existence, the
"game" involved in living, that he often finds himself incapable of
reacting, acting out a role. He can always find a reason for doing
something, or its complete opposite. And the action of The End of the Road concerns a time when, on the advice of his doctor, he attempts to remedy this by becoming a college teacher, to
"teach
the rules. Teach the truth about grammar," the vocabulary of life. The
novel circles around a disastrous travesty of a love triangle when Jake
becomes briefly involved with the wife of a fellow teacher who does
belive life can be contained within one version of it—who, as Jake
marvels, is "always sure of his ground." Yet that triangular affair, and
its dreadful outcome, is less in the foreground than Jake's sustained
sense of the absence of identity, his or that of others, outside of
roles, or the absence of action or meaning apart from performance.
He—and we the readers—are constantly being reminded that this is a
story, one possible version of the world among an infinite number. What
gives the novel its power is the tricky movements of Jake's voice,
always prone to tell us something and then confide "in other senses, of
course, I don't believe this at all." And what gives it its passion is
the vacillation, the constant movement Jake's awareness of his
predicament instigates, between play and paralysis. The games enforced
in The End of the Road with
their painful consequences, conclude with Jake leaving the college and
taking a taxi cab to the airport. Jake's last word is his ambiguous
instruction to the driver, as he gets into the taxi: "Terminal."
Jake
seems to step out of life and motion as he steps into the cab and out
of the narrative. Life equals language equals story. That is the formula
animating Barth's work. To cease to narrate is to die: a point that
Barth makes more or less explicit in his use of the figure of
Scheherazade in the opening history in his collecction, Chimera (1972).
Scheherazade was, of course, the figure in the Arabian folktale who
stayed alive simply by telling stories. Telling stories, in turn, spins
into fantasy. Barth is fond of creating worlds within worlds, using
parody and pastiche, verbal and generic play to produce multiple layered
simulacra: copies, imitations of something for which the original never
existed. It could and can never exist because there was and is no
reality prior to the imitation, to tales and telling. So, in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960),
Barth takes up the author of the 1708 Maryland poem with the same
title, Ebenezer Cooke, about whom virtually nothing is known. He then
uses Cooke as the hero of a lusty picaresque tale that is a pastiche of
history, conventional historical fiction, autobiography, and much else
besides. The Sot-Weed Factor also
raises the issue of how history aand identity are known, by slyly
eliding them with all kinds of literary "lies" from poetry to tall tales
and braggadocio to mythology. Giles Goat-Boy, after
its initial framing in the debate over authorship, continues theis
subversion through similarly comic devices. The whole modern world is
conceived of as a university campus, controlled by a computer that is
able to run itself and tyrannize people. The book is in part a satirical
allegory of the Cold War, since it is divided into East and West. It is
also a characteristically layered fiction, since it parodies everal
genres (myth, allegory, the quest, and so on) and a variety of texts
(including the Bible, Don Quixote, and Ulysses).
Above all, it translates the earth into an artifice. The world, the
intimation is, is a fable, a structure created by language and, as such,
comparable to the artificial structures created by the author of this
novel (whoever he or it may be) and by all his characters (who practice
their several disciplines, their different roles and subject
vocabularies). Works written since Giles Goat-Boy, such as Letters, Sabbatical: A romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales (1987),The Last Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor (1991), and The Development (2008),
continue Barth's passionate play with various forms, the numerous ways
in which we tell ourselves stories to live them and live in them. For
him, that play is at once imperative and inspiring, a form of necessity
and a liberation, something coextensive with breathing. Some of his
characters sometimes may yearn, as one of them puts it, "to give up
language altogether." But that, as Barth feels and indicates, is to
"relapse into numbness," to "float voiceless in the wash of time like an
amphora in the sea." It may seem attractive occasionally, but to
evacuate voice is to erase identity, place, and prexence. To abandon
language and its difficulties is to surrender to death.
Two
writers who have sketched out very different possibilities for
postmodernism, an, in doing so, created distinctive fictive landscapes,
are Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) and John Hawkes (1925-1998). The
distances between them, despite their common allegiance to work of art
as object, an opaque system of language rather than transparnt account
of the world, are suggested by two remarks. "Fragments are the only
forms I trust," observes the narrator in one of the stories in
Barthleme's second collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968).
"The need is to maintain the truth of the fractured picture." Hawkes
insisted in an early interview. Hawkes is interested in creating
strange, phantasmagoric landscapes, dreamscapes in a way, that evoke,
always in their own terms, what he has called "The enormities of
ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around
us," "our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful
action." Barthelme is just as committed as Hawkes is to the displacement
of the writer from the work. He is also committed to the displacement
of the work from the world, so that the work becomes simply, as
Barthelme puts it, "something that is there, like
a rock or a refrigerator." But, whereas Hawkes's fiction has a quality
of nightmare, entropic stillness, Barthelme's stories and novels are
witty, formally elegant, slyly commenting on themselves as artifacts.
Hawkes began his writing, he said, with "something immediately and
intensely visual—a room, a few figures." Then, eschewing interest in
plot, character, setting, and theme, he aimed for what he called
"totality of vision or structure." Using corresponding events, recurring
images and actions, and a prose style that seems to freeze things in
times and retard readerly attention, he creates landscapes of evil and
decay. As his characters traverse these landscapes almost
somnambulistically, their and our feelings vacillate between fear,
dread, and the bleakly, blackly, humorous. Barthelme, however, begins his writing
in the verbal rather than the visual. "O I wish there were some words
in the world that were not the words I always hear!" complains the title
character in Barthelme's first novel, Snow White (1967).
Barthelme obliges with a verbal collage, full of odd juxtapositions and
unpredictable swerves: a linguistic equivalent of Pop Art, in a way,
which picks up the shards and fragments, the detritus of modern life and
gives them a quality of surprise. "We like books that have a lot of dreck in them," admits the narrator of that same novel. And it is precisely the dreck of contemporary conversation,
from the commonest clichés to intellectual chatter, that is picked up
in his books and turned all to strangeness by omitting or fragmenting
the habitual arrangements and separations by which we seek to retain a
feeling of control over our environment. Waste is turned to magic in his
work, but the sense of magic is also accompanied by unease. Barthelme's
fiction constantly fluctuates between immersion in trash culture and
the impulse to evade, an impulse that finds its emotional issue in irony, disappointment, and a free-floating nostalgia.
Everything doubles back on itself, nothing is not placed in implicit,
ironic question marks in his fiction. Nevertheless, what Barthelme
captures in his work, along with what one of his charcters called "the
ongoing circus of the mind," is the suspicion that, after all, it may
not be that easy to go with the junk flow—or to be what Barthelme has
called himself, "a student of surfaces."
"Do you like the story so far?" asks the narrator of Snow White about
halfway through. He then helpfully provides the reader with an
opportunity to answer "Yes ( ) No ( )." This is followed by a further
fourteen questions for the reader to fill in his or her preferences.
Quite apart from reminding us that this book is, after all, an artifact,
an object, the product of play and planning, the questionnaire offers a
slyly parodic comment on the currently fashionable ideas of the work of
art as open and the reader as co-producer rather than a consumer of the
text. But the last question sounds a slightly melancholic note. "In
your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( )," the
narrator asks. "Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( )." Any world has
its stringencies, its absences, restricting the room for magic and play.
The absence of several shoulders is not the most pressing of these,
perhaps. But how else would Barthelme intimate these limits and lacks
but in a manner that subverts, pokes fun at his own intimation?
Barthelme is resistant to message. One of his stories, "The Balloon" in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, even
toys with the absurdity of meaning. An enormous balloon appears over
the city. People argue over its significance. Some manage to "write
messages on the surface." Mainly what people enjoy, though, is that it
is "not limited and defined." It is delightfully random, amorphous,
floating free above "the grid of precise, rectangular pathways" beneath
it. And "this ability of the balloon to shift its shape, to change," the
reader learns, "was very pleasing, expecially to people whose lives
were rather rigidly patterned." Clearly, the balloon is a paradigm of
the art object, the kind of free-form product, plastic and ephemeral,
that Barthelme is interested in making: resistant to understanding,
interpretation, or reflection. but, in its own odd, jokey way, as it
floats over the citizens, it generates a ruefulness, a wry regret that
carries over into Barthelme's other fictions. "I am in the wrong time,"
Snow White reflects "How does the concept of 'something better' arise?"
the narrator of that same novel asks, "What does it look like, this something better?"
It is remarkable that the sportive fantasy and verbal trickery of
Barthelme are often at their best when he is playing with loss and
longing: "Emily Dickinson, why have you left me and gone?" goes a passage in Snow White, "ah
ah ah ah ah." Readers can certinly walk around a Barthelme verbal
object, seeing in it above all a model of how to free language and
feeling from stale associations. But what they are likely to catch, as
they walk around, is a borderline melancholia. So, when Snow White
writes a poem, the seven men who live with her have no doubt as to its
theme. "The theme is loss, we take it," they ask causticlally. Her reply
is simple: "I have not been able to imagine anything better."
Of John Hawkes's 1961 novel, The Lime Twig, his
fellow novelist Flannery O'Connor has observed that "You suffer it like
a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you
wait to escape from but can't." That is true of all his fiction. His
nominal subjects range far and wide—many of them, he has said, acquired
from the newspapers or from other writers. So, for instance, The Cannibal (1949) explores the horrors of devastation in postwar Germany. The Lime Twig presents the psychopathic effects on a man of life during and after the blitz on London. Travesty (1967)
is the monologue of a Frenchman that serves as a suicide note while he
prepares to kill his daughter, his friend, and himself. Virginia (1982) concerns a girl who has experienced two previous lives in France, both marked by strange sexual experience. Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985) is about a boy confronted with hunting and sexuality during a trip to Alaska. And The Frog (1996)
tells of a boy with a real or imagined frog in its stomach. What
characterizes all thise and his other novels, however, is the vision of a
dreamscape fractured by an appalling yet almost ritualized violence.
Hawkes has said that he wanted, from the first, to create "a totally new
and necessary fictional landscape." "My writing depends on absolute
detachment," he has explained, "and the unfamiliar or invented landscape
helps me to achieve and maintain that detachment . . . I want to try to
create a world, not represent one." What he is after is
objectification, not representation. As Hawkes puts it, his aim is "to
objectify" the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of
the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world, so as to
achieve "a formalizing of our deepest urgencies". His characters come
and go across his frozen landscapes as if caught in a strange sort of
repetition compulsion. They are not so much imitations of life as
figures from an exhibition, waxwork curios from some subliminal house of
horror. And the violence they inevitable encounter is as vivid and
distant as violence seen through soundproof glass. in The Cannibal the
primary act of violent negation is signaled by the controlling metaphor
of the book, which also gives it its title. Although the main setting
is Germany after the war, it reaches back to 1914 and forward to a
future repetition of Nazi control, which will return the entire nation
to an insane asylum. The dominant presence, and narrator, is Zizendorf,
the leader of the Nazis. Set in contrast to him is a young girl,
Selvaggia, who stands at a window, in innocent, impotent terror,
watching the evil that men do. By the end, she is "wild-eyed from
watching the night and the birth of the Nation." Zizendorf orders her to
draw the blinds and sleep. The last sentence of the book gives us her
response: "She did as she was told." The return to an evidently endless
sleep, a nightmare of violent repression, seems inevitable, since there
is no intimation in this or any other book by Hawkes, that things can
change or get better. Just as character and setting appear paralyzed, so
events are peculiarly without progression. Hawkes so rearranges the
fractured elements in his fictive picture that the temporal dimension
drains away into a spatial patterning of detail. And he so contrives his
prose into complex sequences of baroque fragments that the reader too
is held back, left in suspense. We are doomed to watch the world Hawkes
creates just as Selvaggia does, with helpless, horrified wonder. Or, to
return to that remark of O'Connor, we have to suffer it, like a dream.
Two
other writers associated with postmodernism, Thomas Berger (1924-) and
John Gardner (1933-1982), could hardly be more different from Barthelme
and Hawkes, or from one another. Which goes to show, perhaps, that
postmodernism is almost as capacious a term as realist. A prolific
writer, Berger has produced a series of comic novels about his
non-Jewish schlemiel hero Carlo Reinhart (Crazy in Berlin (1958), Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), Reinhart's Women (1981)). He has written parodies of the detective novel (Who is Teddy Villanova? (1977) and Arthurian romance (Arthur Rex (1978)), replayed Oresteia (Ossie's Story (1990)) and Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crews (1994)) for modern times, and engaged in satirical fables about, for instance, a man with the power to become invisible (Being Invisible (1987)
or a man so discontented about his relationship with real women that he
builds an ideal woman secretly at the animatronics firm where he works (Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004)). Unquestionably his best novel, however, is Little Big Man (1964).
The narrator of this novel, Jack Crabb, the Little Big Man, is by his
own account 111 years old. He claims to be the sole survivor of Custer's
last stand, knocked out Wyatt Earp, and to have been in a shootout with
"Wild Bill" Hickock. Drawing on the traditions of frontier humor and
the tall tale, Berger endows Crabb with a voice that is vernacular and
vital, and a view of life that is shifty, amoral, and unillusioned.
"Most of all troubles comes from having standards," he declares. So, he
careers between roles and between cultures with "a brainy opportunism"
as it is called by the prissy amateur historian, Ralph Fielding Snell,
who frames the novel with a foreword and epilogue. Snell admits doubt as
to whether Crabb is "the most neglected hero in the history of this
country or a liar of insane proportions." From one point of view,
however, that hardly matters. Either way, Snell and Berger intimate,
Crabb is heroic: providing, either by deed or word, "an image of human
vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned
coincidence." Set in a classic American past though it is, Little Big Man (and, for that matter, The Return of Little Big Man (1999)
is about the typical protean man of postmodern science fiction for whom
there are no settled certainties, no sure codes, and roles are picked
up or discarded like a set of clothes. There are no absolutes, no
essences; that classic past and its myths are themselves demystified,
mocked, and parodied. The only constant here is the constant
self-fashioning: a self-exploratory, in flux, that casually acts or
voices itself into being—that makes itself as it goes along.
As the title of one of his critical works, On Moral Fiction (1978),
suggests, Gardner was nominally far from such moral relativism. "Art
leads, it doesn't follow," he said in an interview in 1977. "Art does
not imitate life, art makes people do things," he added, "if we
celebrate bad values in our arts, we're going to have a bad society; if
we celebrate values which make you healthier, which make life better,
we're going to have a better world." Consistent with this, he produced
in his 1976 novel, October Light, two
interwoven stories concerned with the nihilism and alienation of
contemporary life. One circles around popular culture: television, with
its "endless simpering advertising" and "its monstrously obscene games
of greed." The other focuses on high culture: the literature of
absurdism and entropy with its assumption that "life . . . was a boring
novel." What the protagonist in both stories has to learn is a deeply
traditional lesson: the difference between false art and real life. He
has to return from the false worlds of mass cvulture and amoral
literature to the true world of relationship; and, finally, he does.
Gardner's finest novel, Grendel (1971),
however, does not entirely conform to his own expressed views about
art. The book tells the story of the old English epic poem "Beowulf"
from the point of view of the monster. Gardner himself was a medievalist
scholar; and here he plays with medieval notions of psychology and
numerological symbolism as he sets the materialism, nihilis, and sheer
brutishness of Grendel against heroic Christianity. What emerges from
this extraordinary tales is the revelation that Grendel is indispensable
to the civilizing forces of science and the arts. He is the brute
existence on which humans depend for their definition of themselves.
"You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to
poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are," a
sympathetic dragon tells Grendel. "You are mankind,
or man's condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the
mountain." A source of power for humanity, apparently, Grendel is also
the source of power for the book. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he
may lose but the author seems to be secretly on his side. Edgy,
unnatural, unreliable, Grendel is a typically postmodern narrator.
Constantly dramatizing or changing himself, his strong, seductive voice
leaves the reader without sure ground. "I cry, and hug myself, and
laugh," he declares, "letting out salt tears, he he! till I fall down
and gasping and sobbing. (It's mostly fake.)." Gardner may have been
suspicious of postmodernism and keen to give his work a moral dimension.
Ironically, his finest character and narrator is irredeemably,
necessarily amoral. And his best work is his best precisely because it
has a postmodern edge.
The range of possibilities charted by
writers as otherwise different as Gardner and Berger, Hawkes and
Barthelme suggests that postmodernism is probably best seen, not as a
unified movement, but as a cluster, a constellation of motives, a
generic field. it is a field that is itself marked by skepticism about
specific generic types; in its disposition to parody, ironic inversion,
and metafictional insistence on its own modes of significance—and, in
particular, language—it is the absolute reverse of the stable. The one
constant in postmodernism, that is constant only in its inconstancey,
was handily summarized by Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004) in The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969).
There, he insisted that "the contemporary" lived in "the world of
post-realism" and had "to start from scratch." "Reality doesn't exist,"
Sukenick argued. "God was the omnipresent author, but he died: now no
one knows the plot." So, living in an age of epistemological
redefinition, an urgently felt need to redraw the mental maps of the
world, postmodernist writers thrive on the imperative of being abetrant,
arbitrary—above all, different. And the loose, baggy monster of
postmodernism can include such diverse radical experimentalists, aside
from writers already entioned and Sukenick himself (Up (1968), 98.6 (1975), Blown Away (1986)) as Nicholson Baker (1940-) (The Mezzanine (1988), Vox (1992) The Everlasting Story of Wory (1998)), William H. Gass (1924-) (Omensetter's Luck (1966)), Steve Katz (1935-) The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (1968), Moving Parts (1977), Clarence Major (1936-) (All-Night Visions (1969), No (1973)), Stephen Schneck (1944-1996) (The Nightclerk (1965)), Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006) (Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things(1971), Flawless Play Restored (1975), Aberration of Starlight (1980)), and Rudolph Worlitzer (1938-) (Nog (1969)). For that matter, it can incorporate Joseph McElroy (1930), whose Lookout Cartridge (1974) conveys a sense of formal systems functioning in a void and one of whose novels, Plus (1977), is about a mind suspended in space. And Robert Coover, who in his finest novel, The Public Burning (1977),
transfers actual events, including the Eisenhower years and the
execution of the Rosenbergs for spying, to the figurative realm. The
execution of the Rosenbergs is turned into a public burning in Times
Square, New York. Times Square itself is presented not just as a public
meeting place but a source of a history, since it is here that the
records of the New York Times are
created. Coover goes on to analyze how historical record is made, in a
bold imaginative gesture which shows that fiction does not only aid fact
in the rehearsal of the past; it can, and does, draw it into subjective
reality. In doing so, he offers what is in effect a postmodernist
meditation on history, and on the urgencies, the origins of story.
Two
other writers often associated with postmodernism, Russell Banks (1940)
and David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), have taken very different paths.
Banks's output is unusually varied. His first novel, Family Life (1975)
is a fragmented narrative set in an imaginary kingdom. With its
rejection of traditional forms of characterization and its foregrounding
of artifice, it bears many of the hallmarks of postmodernism. So do his
second and fourth novels, Hamilton Starks (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983). With The Book of Jamaica (1980), however, and, even more, Continental Drift (1985), Banks gravitated toward realism while still using metafictional techniques. Continental Drift, perhaps
his finest novel so far, combines two at first sight unrelated
stories—about a Haitian woman's attempt to escape to America and an
American man's relocation of his family to Florida—to explore class
conflict and transnational migration. The shift toward realism has
become even more marked in Banks's later novels, and so has his
preoccupation with forms of violence ranging from the personal to the
global. Affliction (1989), for instance, is an autobiographically based novel about family abuse; The Sweet Hereafter (1991) offers several perspectives on a fatal school-bus accident; Cloudsplitter (1998) tells the story of the radical abolitionist John Brown from the standpoint of his son; while The Darling (2006)
is an account by an ex-member of a radical activist group, on the run
from the law, of her encounter with a crisis-torn Liberia. What binds
these different fictional experiments together is Banks's oncern with
multiple varieties of abuse. As he has put it, "I see my life as a kind
of obsessive return to the 'wound' of abuse,... going back again and
again ... trying to figure out ... who is to blame and who is to be
forgiven."
By contrast, Wallace only completed two novels during his brief lifetime. His major work, however, Infinite Jest (1996), is over a thousand pages long.
Wallace believed that the mass media exerted a determining, ironic
influence on fiction; and his own work is steeped in irony, a blithe
refusal to be confined to any particular voice or vision. Infinite Jest is
set in a future world in which the United States, Canada, and Mexico
form one unified state, and corporations buy naming rights to each
calendar year. There is a vast range of bizarre characters, and such
plot as the book possesses revolves around a search for the missing
master copy of a film cartridge called "Infinite Jest" and referred to
as "The Entertainment"—a work so entertaining to its viewers that they
become lifeless, losing interest in anything other than the film. But Infinite Jest is
less a novel with a plot than a labyrinth of language, a web of words
that weaves together such diverse topics as substance abuse and recovery
programs, tennis, film theory, child abuse and family relationships,
and the relentless search of the corporate world for new products and
markets. What compounds the intricacy of this web is the radical
discontinuity of idiom. The language careers between the vernacular and
the esoteric; there are wild neologisms, self-generated abbreviations
and acronyms packed into elaborate, multi-clause sentences. There are
nearly a hundred pages of footnotes designed, Wallace explained, to
jumble our perception of reality while persuading us to read on. Infinite Jest the novel is like "Infinite Jest" the film referred to in its pages, a seductive maze capturing the reader within its world of funhouse mirrors.
Like so many major postmodernist work, it resists meaning but, while
doing so, generates strange feelings of loss and longing. Its
characters, and perhaps its readers, are invited to yearn for innocent,
unselfconscious experience while drowning in insignificance, captivated
by artifice.
John Barth once suggested that the way postmodernism
showed its distinctly American face was through its "cheerful
nihilism," its comic and parodic texture. That is, of course, too
sweeping. But across from radical experimentalists like McElroy and
Coover, there are those many postmodern writers who have chosen to
pursue an absurd humor, a dark comedy that deconstructs and demystirfies
all it surveys. Apart from those already mentioned, such writers
include J. P. Donleavy (1926-) (The Ginger Man (1955), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968)) and Terry Southern (1926-2000) (Candy (1958), The Magic Christian (1959), Blue Movie (1970)),
whose predilection for protean, amoral characters has got them into
trouble with the censorship laws. Notably, there is also John Kennedy
Toole (1937-1969) who, in his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980),
mocked everything to do with his region, the South and his hometown of
New Orleans, making his hero, Ignatius Reilly, sound sometimes like a
Southern traditionalist on speed. And there is Stanley Elkin
(1930-1995), a novelist and storyteller who, during the course of a long
career, produced satirical, surreal versions of the success story (A Bad Man(1967), The Franchiser (1976)), a picaresque tale about adventures in the media trade (The Dick Gibson Show (1971)), and comic fantasies about death (The Living End (1979) and reincarnation (George Mills (1982)).
Postmodernism
as black humor or brave fantasy tends to merge here with contemporary
confessional forms of male liberationists like John Irving (1942-) (The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus (1994), Until I Find You (2005)) and female liberationists like Erica Jong (Fear of Flying (1973), Fear of Fifty(1994)) and Lisa Alther (1944-) (Kinflicks (1976), Original Sin (1981)).
At the other edge, postmodernism as radical, metafictional experiment
is more inclined to reveal its international relations. Experiment is,
of course, an American tradition and the subversion of fictional forms
in particular goes back at least as far in American literature as Herman
Melville. But the specific terms in which postmodernists have
interrogated word and thing, language and its connection to reality,
show the impact and sometimes the influence of writers from outside
America. Like other cultural movements, more so than most, postmodernism
is on one level an international phenomenon. And the sense
postmodernist writers have of living after realism is one shard with,
say, European poststructuralist critcis, writers of le nouveau roman like
Michel Butor and Raymond Queneau, and Latin American magic realists.
This international dimension is foregrounded in the work of those
postmodern novelists whose own story is one of crossings between
national boundaries, especially the European and American. The fiction
of Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia, spending long years in Europe
before continuing his exile in America, is a case in point. So are the
narrative experiments of the French-American Raymond Federman
(1928-2009), whose Take It or Leave It (1976)
announces itself as "an exaggerated second hand tale to be read aloud
either standing or sitting," and the books of the Polish-born,
Russian-reared Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) from The Painted Bird (1965), through Being There (1971) and Blind Date (1977), to his last novel, The Hermit of 69th Street (1988).
Another
instance of international origins promoting international connections
is the writing of Walter Abish (1931-). Abish was born in Austria and
reared in China before taking US citizenship. His first novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), invites a comparision with le nouveau roman in
its stern attention to verbal structure. Every word of the first
chapter begins with the letter A, the second with A or B, the third with
A, B, or C, and so on. At Z, the process reverses, the final chapter
beginning every word again with the letter A. Abish's second novel, How German It Is (1984),
suggests other international relations. A postmodern political
thriller, it concerns an American of German parentage who returns to a
German town to investigate his father's wartime death and to answer his
own question as to how German he is. The international influential
presences here are several. They include American writers like Pynchon
and French ones like Butor, who have used popular genres to break and
undercut them. More deeply, persuasively, though, they are other,
European writers such as Italo Calvino and Peter Handke. As in the work
of Calvino and Hande, there is a bleak detachment, a flat materialism
to How German It Is, the
presentation of a world of signs without meanings under which dark
meanings may hide. A writer like Abish, as he explores the crisis
relations between history and form and pursues the task of unlocking
some hidden code that might interpret those relations, shows how
postmodernism—like any other movement in American literature, at some
point—has to be perceived within a frame of reference other than the
American. It has to be, not only because postmodernist writers skip
across national boundaries with such calculated and consummate skill—and
not only because some of them, at least, cannot or will not shake off
their own international origins. It is also and more fundamentally
because—as it has been the peculiar fate of postmodernism to
emphasize—no boundary of any kind is impermeable. No frame of reference,
including the national one, is adequate, absolute, or terminal.
