Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure That the Genre Exists
By MICHAEL BERUBE
I have a confession to make. For over 10 years now, I've been offering a course called "Postmodernism and American Fiction" as an undergraduate honors seminar and on the graduate level. I usually assign a range of contemporary novelists, from well-known figures like Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Toni Morrison to relatively unsung writers like Richard Grossman (author of The Alphabet Man and The Book of Lazarus) and Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits). I also assign a packet or two of contemporary critical theorists -- the authors of postmodernism's greatest hits (Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard), as well as some of its more trenchant critics (Nancy Fraser, Andreas Huyssen).
In the class, we talk about what it means to be an "antifoundationalist" -- that is, one of those sane, secular people who believe that it's best to operate as if our moral and epistemological principles derive not from divine will or uniform moral law, but from ordinary social practices. My students and I look at Richard Rorty's antifoundationalist philosophy, a pleasant kind of enterprise in which people converse about the good and the true without thinking about whether their claims can be grounded in something that is not merely another claim. We argue about whether antifoundationalism is any different from shallow moral relativism. We linger over postmodernism's critiques of Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative reason, debating whether any critique of reason can be cogent or persuasive unless it, too, implicitly relies on some norms for communication. Then we debate what counts as legitimate debate, and what happens when debaters disagree so fundamentally and violently that they can't even find the words in which to disagree.
For the most part, it's confusing and fun. But that's not what I've come to confess. On the contrary, I'm quite happy that my students, graduates and undergraduates alike, tend to think that my course engages some of the most important intellectual issues of our day. Why, last spring, I even had the great good luck to meet a student who was able to supplement Baudrillard's famously caustic reading of Disneyland ("Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland") with stories of his own employment history at Disney. In fact, the critical-theory part of my class seems to go just fine.
The problem is with the fiction: It just isn't postmodern enough. And that, I've gradually come to realize, is because there really isn't any such thing as postmodern fiction -- at least not in the terms that most literary critics have proposed so far.
My course on "Postmodernism and American Fiction" still makes sense -- but only because of the ambiguity of the conjunction "and." I could just as well call the course "Recent Intellectual Debates in the Humanities, Along With a Bunch of Novels Written Since 1965."
That's not to say that my students don't enjoy the fiction, or that they don't see interesting correspondences between, for example, Baudrillard's treatment of Disney and Richard Powers's Prisoner's Dilemma, or between postmodern feminist theorists and Kathy Acker's novels. But it is to say that every attempt to define postmodern fiction in stylistic terms -- as a form of writing that defeats readers' expectations of coherence, as experimental narrative that plays with generic conventions, as fiction that dwells on ambiguity and uncertainty -- winds up being a definition of modernist fiction as well. Or a definition of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century masterwork, Tristram Shandy. Or a synopsis of narrative techniques in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Want to talk about authorial self-reflexivity? Try the second half of the Quixote, in which every character has read the first half of the book and humors the old knight-errant accordingly. (There's even a surreal scene in which Don Quixote catches another character reading a "pirated" version of Book Two that had been written by someone other than Cervantes.) Fictional narrative flaunting its own fictionality? Been there, done that, seen that, not only in Andre Gide's modernist classic, The Counterfeiters, but also in key moments of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Experiments with traditional genres? Read Ulysses. Infinite circularity? How about The Thousand and One Nights?
Oh, sure, every once in a while these days you get a literary character who slowly dissolves into neutrinos, or a subplot built in the shape of a tetrahedron or something, but the fact remains: There's nothing uniquely postmodern about most of the experiments conducted in contemporary experimental fiction.
The standard rejoinder to that statement runs like so: Yes, there were experimental works in other eras and other centuries, but they were exceptions, not representative of the vast majority of works produced at the time. Tristram Shandy aside, most 18th-century fiction remains interested in more or less realistic renderings of individual consciousness and social settings. True enough. But then again, so-called postmodern works of fiction are still singular exceptions to the contemporary rule. As William H. Gass once put it, the dominant form of fiction in the 20th century has been the 19th-century novel, if by "dominant" you mean the kind of literature most people actually read.
There's nothing postmodern about most of today's popular writers, like Maeve Binchy or John Grisham. More tellingly, there's nothing especially postmodern about most critically acclaimed writers of "quality fiction," either. Richard Ford, E. Annie Proulx, Mary Carr, Madison Smartt Bell, Oscar Hijuelos -- those are some of the most prominent writers of our time, and you can't plausibly call them postmodernists. For the most part, they seem to be capable, mimesis-minded chroniclers of contemporary life, and their subplots are never tetrahedronal.
What an embarrassment; so many of our accomplished novelists just don't write the kind of stuff that fits into college seminars on postmodernism. It's even more embarrassing to consider the efforts of literary critics in the past two decades -- and those would include my own. We have spent all too much time and energy insisting that uncertainty X or narrative instability Y makes novel Z indelibly postmodern. Why, I'll even admit to having tried to argue that Pynchon's similarities with Kafka suggest that Kafka was postmodern well ahead of his time. Oh, the shame of it all ...
Such efforts usually involve some nervous coughing and jingling of keys in the coat pocket, as we acknowledge that modernist fiction is fragmentary, experimental, and self-reflexive, but that postmodern fiction is, um, well, more so. In fact, in the 1980's, things got so bad in my neck of the woods that, when Steven Weisenburger published his indispensable reader's guide to Pynchon, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, he damn near apologized to his readers for having found, in the novel's chronology and geographical settings, a coherent pattern. Of all things -- a structure. Legions of Pynchon critics gasped: a structure, by gum! a spatial/ temporal plan!! Something that makes Gravity's Rainbow look like ... like ... Ulysses, for God's sake!!! Now what are we supposed to do?
Well, one thing we can do is rethink the categories into which we separate 20th-century literature in English. This doesn't necessarily mean that we should give up on the idea of postmodernity in toto, as Richard Rorty, among others, has urged us to do. After all, there really are some remarkably salient differences between the prewar and the postwar world, between the financial crash of '29 and the computer crash of '87, the phonograph and the Internet. Though some critics prefer 1945 and some prefer 1973 as postmodernism's Year One, there seems to be a fitful consensus that something like postmodernity does indeed exist -- and that it involves the incomplete, deeply contested globalization and digitalization of capitalism.
Postmodernism, in this sense, is based on an electronic global economy and what David Harvey, the geographer and cultural critic, famously calls "the regime of flexible accumulation" -- by which he means a world in which part-time labor, adjunct professors, and just-in-time production lines supersede the Fordist logic of modernism, in which laborers were assured wages high enough to allow them to buy the products they made. The important question for cultural critics, then, is also an old question -- how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.
Postmodernity is extraordinarily diffuse, ranging from A.T.M.'s to MTV. Nevertheless, in retrospect, it is no surprise that the most coherent manifestoes of postmodernism in the 1970's and early 80's concentrated on architecture, the art form most sensitive to large-scale economic transformations. A distinct postmodern style can be seen in architecture, derived from a turning away from uniform urban planning and those rectangular steel-and-glass skyscrapers in the style of Le Corbusier.
There's a similarly distinct postmodernism in the visual arts, not only in the break between the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism and the fun and games of Pop Art, but also in the wider sense of what happened to modernism once its favorite myth of the lone avant-garde artist ran up against the phenomenon of corporate trustees who liked having de Koonings and Rothkos in the company boardroom. When abstract artists like Robert Motherwell are feted in major museum shows underwritten by I.B.M. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, surely something has happened to modernist art that modernism itself can't quite account for. If postmodernism is widely considered to be the order of the day in architecture and the fine arts, it's precisely because we can clearly see the imprint of contemporary economics on contemporary practices.
Simply put, my sense is that no one has made as convincing a case for postmodern literature as for postmodern art and architecture.
Perhaps, however, that's because we've been looking in the wrong places.
We've been trying to find the imprint of cybercapitalism in the narrative techniques of a handful of contemporary North American writers. What if we looked at the 20th century's literature with a different gauge? What if we stepped back from the minutiae of experimental narratives, and asked where on earth English literature is being written these days?
The answer, I think, would be both obvious and striking: The crucial difference between the major English literature of the first half of the 20th century and the major English literature of the second half is not that one was modern and the other postmodern. The crucial difference is that one was produced largely in the United States, Britain, and Ireland, whereas the other was written in the United States, Britain, Ireland, and South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head), India (Salman Rushdie), Nigeria (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka), Guyana (Wilson Harris), Kenya (Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Canada (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje), and Trinidad (V.S. Naipaul).
When we pose the question that way, it's not hard to correlate the development of a global English-language literature with the economic and political developments on our planet. The conditions under which the English language is spoken in Asia and Africa, of course, have everything to do with the legacy of colonialism.
And so, if we understand the past century's English-language literature not in formalist but in global terms, we can reframe the question of how to understand the relationship between economic and cultural developments and the reading and writing of literature. But then, of course, we have to ask whether the global expansion of literature in English is as double-edged as the global expansion of capitalism. Amitava Kumar, the literary critic and photojournalist, has spoken wittily of a "World Bank Literature" as the corollary to the World Trade Organization, but it's not as if the writing of novels requires international summits and the passage of free-trade agreements. Or is it?
When Indian writers write in English, are they somehow perpetuating the legacy of colonialism? In African literatures, the question of whether to write in colonial or indigenous languages has been a political minefield for decades; surely, in some sense, a writer who forswears English in favor of Igbo is resisting linguistic homogenization. There's a useful analogy here with the ways that some non-Western nations resist the free-trade policies of the International Monetary Fund. The emergence of world literatures in English is one of the more striking geopolitical features of contemporary culture, but is it worth losing what gets lost in translation? Are we "one world," after all? And should we be?
Such questions seem to me more important for understanding the future of literatures in English than the question of whether postmodernist antirepresentationalism is more antirepresentationalist than modernist antirepresentationalism. Such questions would also seem more intelligible to the world's ordinary readers, whether they were looking at Rushdie's Midnight's Children because it made the Random House top 100 novels of the century, or reading Ondaatje's The English Patient because they liked the movie.
Postmodernism? Globalism? The century's over. Let the debates begin.
Michael Berube is a professor of English and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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