The Reading Experience

Detecting a Wrongness

In his review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, Hari Kunzru maintains that what separates this novel from the postmodern novels Lethem clearly admires is that "it’s too good-humored to attain real satiric bite and is often content to drop a name instead of wrestling with the slippery ideas that might make Lethem’s heroes worthy of a true fan’s regard." This is probably right, although to say that the novel lacks "satiric bite" doesn't mean it is not still essentially an attempt at satire, just as it's true that while Chronic City doesn''t especially wrestle with "slippery ideas," the claim that so-called "systems novels"--a term coined by Thomas LeClair in his book on Don DeLillo, In the Loop--can be defined by their own grappling with such ideas is altogether questionable.

Lethem's work is often associated with the first generation postmodernists, particularly Pynchon, Barth, and DeLillo, as mediated by the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and superhero comic books. This amalgamation of high postmodernism and popular literature seems to be, in fact, what most readers and critics take to be his signature variation on postmodernism in fiction. However, while it may be the case that Lethem is inspired by the postmodernists to create his brand of literary fantasy fiction, there isn't much that's especially innovative about a book like Chronic City. It seems more like a tired pastiche of postmodernism than an attempt to extend the reach of postmodern experiment into a different era and changed circumstances.

Kunzru maintains that Lethem "knows he’s writing belatedly and wants us to know he knows" and that this gesture perhaps makes the novel "a conscious tribute of some kind, a love letter to the writing that inspired Lethem to become a writer." If John Barth initiated postmodernism by positing a "literature of exhaustion" that exploited the "used-upness" of fictional form to generate new forms, Kunzru's suggestion might indicate that Lethem is in his own way converting postmodernism itself into an "exhausted" source of formal development, at least for his own work, except that, where Barth and company forced a new attention on form, style, and narrative strategy, Lethem settles for vaguely surreal machinations of plot (providing what some want to call an "alternative reality") and loudly "colorful" characters (most of them given obviously Pynchon-derived names). There is otherwise nothing that could be called formal innovation in a novel like Chronic City, nothing that really challenges readers to examine their assumptions about the form.

Lethem's status as an experimental writer, then, seems entirely based on his incorporation of genre fiction narrative conventions into novels that have generally been accepted as "serious" fiction.  The plot devices of detective stories and science fiction allow Lethem to ostensibly bypass the requirements of ordinary realism, providing for an approach that blends caricature and pseudo-fantasy to produce what in my view can best be described as whimsy. But whimsy is not exactly a postmodern mode, and in Chronic City it betrays a certain aesthetic timidity. I think I agree with William Deresiewicz, who in his review of the novel comments that Lethem "wants realism, with the credibility it brings--wants us to take the world of the novel as a faithful copy of the world we know--but he also wants to stack the deck by deploying supernatural elements whenever he finds it convenient." Thus the New York City portrayed in the narrative needs to be recognizable enough as New York City that we are able to associate the events and themes with the real place but not so much that the author can't introduce runaway tunnel robots, an illusory space mission doomed by the presence of Chinese space mines, or snow in August.

This sort of contained fantasia can't really be what the postmodernists had in mind as an alternative to conventional realism, nor is it credible as a revision or reorientation of postmodern challenges to inherited practice. It implies that postmodern experiment was simply a strategy designed to undermine the principle of verisimilitude, so that any work not strictly observing the rules of traditional realism could be called "experimental." And while Lethem's work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn't so much that the novel is short on "satiric bite" as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists. The postmodern comedy in the work of Pynchon or Barth or Barthelme doesn't seek to "correct" behaviors and institutions that threaten individual autonomy or impede social progress; it portrays such threats and obstructions as inherent to human life and thus unfortunately not much subject to amelioration.

Darby Dixon expresses his disappointment with Chronic City as perhaps the consequence of his own inability as a reader to "patiently dissect its meaning and formulate its connections," to "place [its] ideas and themes on pedestals in whose shadows lurk plot and character." This assumes that what is really at work in this novel is an underlying deep structure of "meaning" and "ideas" the reader must uncover. It further implies that what must make it a suitably postmodern work is precisely this deep structure of "connection." But neither does Lethem's novel conceal any deep meaning not made apparent through choice of satirical targets, nor is this undertow of supposedly abstruse "matter" what animates postmodern fiction. The story of the relationship between narrator Chase Insteadman, former child actor, and Perkus Tooth, former bohemian intellectual now pothead, allows Lethem to canvass his "alernative" New York from top (Insteadman is something of a mascot for the city's high-society types) to bottom and to adjust his satirical focus accordingly. That the purport of the novel's "ideas and themes" doesn't go much beyond this surface satire is in its favor, as we aren't subjected to the kind of tedium the exploration of "ideas" in fiction usually entails. In this way Lethem is actually faithful to his postmodern predecessors: to the extent Barth or Pynchon or DeLillo incorporate ideas, they do so as inspiration for formal or narrative devices ("entropy" in Pynchon's story of that name, for example) rather than as abstractions with which to "wrestle."

However, Chronic City nevertheless suffers from its own kind of tedium, exactly of the sort Darby Dixon identifies when he admits he found it simply "boring." Chronic City never attains the structural or stylistic vitality that would be required for us to suspend our disbelief in its plot contrivances. Its narrative drags along and its narrator's language is leaden and unnecessarily prolix to the extent that I mostly had to force myself to finish the book. The narrator is himself an unengaging figure whose status as a blank slate on which his friend Perkus inscribes a more capacious understanding does not make him a character with whom one wants to spend over 450 pages. And Perkus himself is much less interesting than Lethem wants him to be. He's an essentially stock countercultural type--he likes to discourse on "Monte Hellman, Semina Culture, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, the Mafia's blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists, Chet Baker," etc., etc., etc.--and his recurrent cluster headaches and other mental problems make him seem merely pathetic, not heroic.

In his review of Chronic City, Ron Charles acknowledges it is "a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity," but he nonetheless thinks Lethem "proves he's one of the most elegant stylists in the country," offering "perfectly choreographed sentences." I have in the past found Lethem a pleasing enough stylist, but the style exhibited through Chase Insteadman produces sentences that are anything but "perfectly choreographed." Here's Chase in one of his moments of reflection:

I'm outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don't mean only to myself; it's frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social facade--to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I'm like fudge. Or maybe I'm like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I'm screaming inside, for if I was, I'd soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate. He wouldn't have meant it kindly.

I could have settled for the first sentence. Or perhaps "Perkus would have called me inchoate." These descriptions tell me what I need to know about Insteadman (to the extent I need to have Insteadman telling me about himself in the first place). The rest is just prattle, and by the time I get to "I detect a wrongness" and the politeness infesting a layer "between me and myself" I just want him to shut up.

This sort of inexhaustible self-examination and droning exposition occurs throughout the narrative and more than anything else accounts for the lackluster reading experience Chronic City turned out to be. Perhaps it is a sign of the author trying too hard to create "meaning" and forge "connections," but I don't think so. I think it's just Lethem's failure to execute his "alternative reality" into something more than a labored fantasy.

A Tradition of Anti-Traditional Writing

Jonathan Mayhew questions whether there is such a perceptible difference between the "modern" and the "postmodern," both in fiction and poetry, as we are sometimes led to believe. As Jonathan observes, "the term [postmodernism] took on a different meaning after Lyotard and Jameson. Basically, the word was hijacked as a term for 'poststructuralism' or for 'late capitalism,' respectively."

It is certainly true that "postmodern" was transformed from a term descriptive of an identifiable set of writers and specific literary practices to one that increasingly took on heavy historical and philosophical baggage. Critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan initially used the word to track developments in 20th century literary history, and it became an umbrella term to gather together "experimental" writers such as Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, etc. Theorists such as Lyotard and Jameson did indeed appropriate "postmodernism" to their own extra-literary agendas, although theirs did not become the widespread use of the term until well into the 1980s. Prior to that time, "postmodern" was mostly an adjective attached to "fiction," a formulation that could encompass both of the nonrealist strategies invoked by Robert Scholes as "fabulation" and "metafiction."

Jonathan suggests that poets from this period were really "continuers of a tradition" extending back to Williams and Pound, that these "new" poets' work still essentially belonged to the "modernist period." I think the same is true of what was postmodern fiction. "Post-" modern meant not just after modernism but more specifically a return to the spirit of modernism understood as the attempt to expand the possibilities of form and style in fiction, an endeavor that to some extent had been interrupted by a resurgence of realism and naturalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. Insofar as writers such as Barth accepted "postmodern" as a meaningful label for their work, they almost always themselves situated the work as a continuation of modernist experimentation and epistemological skepticism. This may have led in some cases to formal experiment that called into question the stability of all narrative conventions, that stylistically exceeded the limits of "fine writing" and comedically deflated fiction's pretensions to transparently representing "reality," but however much these practices might have seemed to challenge the less audacious experiments of the modernists, they were ultimately as much tributes to the inspiration provided by the modernists as attempts to displace modernist fiction.

There's no doubt that "postmodernism" is now overloaded with the connotations of cultural change brought to it by the likes of Lyotard and Jameson, so much so that its utility in measuring the continuity of 20th/21st century fiction--or its disruptions--probably has been lost. There still persists a tradition of anti-traditional writing, but to identify new works that exemplify this traditon as "postmodern" no longer offers much illumination. It only reinforces the stereotyping that passes for critical thinking among critics unsympathetic to experimental writing and links that writing to bloated theoretical speculations with which it has almost nothing in common.

The Inner Needs of Writers

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"--if anything they have only increased in intensity--concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term--the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention--of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.--can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"--Lethem, Saunders, Wallace--are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.

First-Growth Postmodernism

The newest issue of Bookforum has lots of good stuff in it, although unfortunately much of it remains inaccessible online. The quality of the reviews in this issue, however, well justifies shelling out the cost of a print copy, with which you can spend several hours, if not days, enjoying one of the few national book reviews that doesn't consider books an excuse for allowing reviewers to natter on about their "ideas" and that provides ample space for reviews of current fiction alongside the well-chosen nonfiction reviews also included.

If you pick up a copy, you might want to look especially at Mark M. Anderson's thoughful examination of A New History of German Literature (a review which raises a number of important questions about current academic approaches to the study of literature), Robert Polito's brief essay on Harry Mathews, and Marjorie Perloff's review of two books by Nobel-winner Elfriede Jelinek, which provides a useful corrective to the witless musings on Jelinek by, among others, Stephen Schwarz and Ruth Franklin. There's also Christine Schutt on Aimee Bender and Maggie Paley on Nicole Krauss.

Of the content available online, I found James Gibbons's essay on William Vollmann especially judicious. I have tried reading Vollmann on several different occasions, but frankly I've been unimpressed. Gibbons's piece makes me want to give Vollmann another try. This, for example, is something I would not have deduced given the public persona created by many other reviews of Volmann's books:

For all his audacious travels, Vollmann's feats never come across as exhibitionistic. Acutely aware of human vulnerability, he seems incapable of swagger. He never attempts to hide his physical awkwardness. As a reporter confronting degradation and atrocity, his forthright, unidealized self-presentation is alien to the school of writer-adventurers to which he belongs. We know from his fiction that he can write in any register, delighting in baroque metaphors and elaborate prose fantasias, so the account of his 1992 visit to besieged Sarajevo in The Atlas is all the more powerful for its plainspoken restraint. . . .

The centerpiece of this issue is undoubtedly Gerald Howard's reconsideration of Gravity's Rainbow. It's certainly well worth reading, although I have to say I question some of Howard's assumptions. I am especially puzzled by his recollections of what first drew him to the work of American postmodernists such as Pynchon, which he presents as mostly sullen and full of gloom ("Malamud was a downer, but not our kind of downer"), a kind of social fiction full of ideas about the horror of American culture.

These ideas were our mental tools as we romped in the forest of first-growth postmodernism. What was strange and gratifying was how completely in sync this writing was with our educated baby-boomer sense of squalor and betrayal. Then, no less than today, a culture war was being fought—but the battleground was an interior one, within our minds and souls.

I find it hard to think of the postmodern fiction of the 1960s and 70s as any kind of "downer," or as engaged in any kind of social commentary (advocating either inward or outward change) except in the most indirect and contingent way. It seems to me that what postmodern fiction shares with the social climate of the 60s is a spirit of excess and playful innovation, a sense that old forms are bursting at the seams. The work of such writers as Barthelme and Barth, Coover and Elkin, Sorrentino and Hawkes (all named as among Howard's favorites at the time) is most notable for its formal and stylistic energy, almost exuberance, which transmits to the reader at least as much excitement about the untapped possibilities of fiction as it does criticism of political and social arrangements. (This is true even of Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow surely does critique the Western technosystem, but it is also stylistically ebullient and great fun to read.)

I also think Howard is wrong to describe GR as less "a novel in the generally accepted sense" than "a text, intended for moral instruction"--or if he is correct, then he has actually identified one of its most serious flaws. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Gravity's Rainbow a "Menippean Satire," as a number of Pynchon scholars have pointed out, but one of the great accomplishments of the novel has been its ability to incorporate other and multifarious literary (and non-literary) forms without sacrificing its own integrity as an identifiable (if omni-directed) literary form in its own right. In this way, the novel has proven itself to be almost inherently experimental in the opportunities it affords to the adventurous writer. To restrict "novel" to something more conventional and domesticated than Gravity's Rainbow is to deny the actual history of the novel as a structurally unstable form.

And as a Menippean satire (which is "chaotic in organization" and in which "it's usually difficult (if not impossible) to pin down the specific targets of ridicule"), Gravity's Rainbow resists being used as "moral instruction." Unlike the more familiar kind of "corrective" satire, Menippean satire is not a mode of moral discourse. It does not urge us to change our ways. It's closer to travesty or farce--it depicts human behavior as just hopelessly ridiculous. I would argue that GR at its best rises (or sinks) to this level. However, to the extent this novel does leave readers feeling they've been delivered a lecture, admonished to stop participating in the global system of mechanical destruction, it probably does fail to carry through its postmodern version of the Menippean satire thoroughly enough. (In my opinion, V does a better job of embodying this kind of postmodern satire, and is thus an even better book than Gravity's Rainbow.)

If GR is becoming "dated," as Howard speculates it might be, this would be the reason, at least in my view. Finally I can't agree with Howard that "Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them." That "pure" goes too far. If Gravity's Rainbow can't be appreciated except as a specific response to the cold war--even more particularly as a meditation on the Western worldview as it mutates through World War II and, at least implicitly, comes to inform political debates in the postwar era--it will indeed become merely a strange historical document, although at least it will probably continue to seem strange. But if its strangeness--its aesthetic singularity--is able to be explained away as tangential to its "intervention" in cold war politics, as merely a curious (albeit frequently hilarious) supplement to its value as "moral instruction," I'm not myself sure how much of the blame would be borne by Pynchon himself and how much by what seems to be our culture's insistence that even complex works of art like Gravity's Rainbow be explicable in simplistic political terms.

Getting the Joke

In his latest post on William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Bud Paar remarks that

The world Gaddis created is ours, a look in the mirror, certainly, the way a good comedian can be so funny because they make fun of some little quirk that we identify with because we thought that idiosyncrasy was ours alone.

It is notable that Bud compares Gaddis to a "good comedian," because it is often overlooked that Gaddis is a very funny writer. (If anything, JR is even funnier than The Recognitions.) Certainly it's true that Gaddis has a reputation as a "difficult" writer, and "difficult" often translates into "heavy-handed," or "deadly serious," but it's also true that Joyce's Ulysses is a "difficult" novel, which doesn't prevent it from being one of the funniest books ever written. In my opinion, those who accuse such books of being inaccessible usually mean by it that they aren't plot-driven in some obvious way, or that the authors don't signal to us clearly enough "what happened," or at least how we're supposed to interpret what happened. Such impatient readers don't seem to realize that most of these ostensibly difficult works are essentially comic novels, their comedy intended as a kind of substitute for other more obvious "entertainment" devices.

Indeed, many of the postmodern mega-novelists--Barth, Coover, Pynchon, even some of DeLillo--are basically comedians, and would, I'm sure be quite content if one of the lasting judgments of them as writers was that they wrote some very funny books. This doesn't mean that laughter is the only response readers might have to their work, but it does mean that the critics of modern/postmodern comedy ought to themselves lighten up a bit. Postmodernists want their books to be enjoyed just as much as any formula novelist; although the comedy in these books can sometimes be unsettling, even extreme, finally they just show us how much of human existence is mostly worth a good belly laugh. And even that most notorious technique of postmodernism, self-reflexivity, is really as much a way of poking fun at the pretentions of fiction writers, their claims to adequately represent the world of experience in a direct and unmediated way, as it is to frustrate the expectations of unwary readers. Although admittedly it is also way of mocking the sobriety of a certain kind of reader, who can't finally accept that even serious fiction might occasionally aspire merely to tell a good joke.

(Bud points out in his post how Gaddis occasionally pokes fun at himself as well.)

Postmodernism

In a comment on my recent post about "metafiction," Nick Kerkhoff (whose relatively new blog can be found here) wonders about the precise relationship between metafiction and postmodernism:

Meta-fiction does not seem to require a social understanding, for the self-reference is inherent to the story (am I right about that?). Whereas postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate. (If I could make an analogy to painting: any human in the world should possess the prerequisites to understand a Pollack (if they let themselves), and even though it's illusionary, most people who have seen a regular drawing before, should be able to understand the meta-tricks of MC Escher, but only a person immersed in our culture could understand the point of a enlarged Warhol soupcan (otherwise they'd be appreciating merely the original Campbell Soup-employed artist)).

In the post I had stated that metafiction was really the original movement in the contemporary arts to be called "postmodern." In fact, arguably the first substantive use of the term was by the literary critic Irving Howe in 1959 to describe a kind of postwar fiction that was, in Howe's view, clearly departing in its assumptions and methods from prewar modernism. (Howe and his fellow New York Critics always felt that this rupture was a mortal one, as most of them had first become prominent literary critics through their championing of high modernism.) Only later--in the 1970s and even 1980s--did "postmodernism" become the label for a broader cultural tendency that theorists of all kinds found convenient in their analyses of, variously, consumer capitalism, identity politics, and historical change, or for engaging in a certain kind of highly abstract "philosophical" debate. Postmodernism in literature, or in the arts more generally, in turn became merely illustrative examples that one could handily appeal to as embodiments of one's favored theory.

It is, I think, this version of postmodernism that Nick has in mind when he says that "postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate." Warhol's paintings, in this view, can be called postmodern because they "say" things to us about consumerism, about the fetishizing of objects or the artistic tastes of "elites," etc. One would indeed need to be "immersed in our culture" to get all this, but it is, of course, a central tenet of postmodernism-as-cultural-analysis that everyone is inescapably immersed in it, so the problem of interpretation is not acute.

Nick also asks "if metafiction could be labeled a piece, a subset, in the overall postmodern impulse." Indeed it could be, as long as we restricted our use of the term to mean the kind of literary postmodernism Howe was talking about and that later was applied to Barth and Coover, Barthelme and Pynchon. All of these writers were in one way or another responding to the challenge laid down by the high modernists, and in most cases they were trying to experiment further with the innovative techniques associated with modernism, not to overturn or abandon them. If "postmodern" can no longer be reclaimed from the school of cultural analysis I have described, however, I would rather discard it altogether, since I don't think metafiction, or experimental fiction more broadly, has much to do with that kind of politically-motivated criticism. Although it is certainly true that such fiction potentially has much to say about such things as the slipperiness of our notions of "identity" or the way in which stories are often used to give order to a chaotic reality in ways that are often more dangerous than the underlying chaos.

I prefer to think of metafiction as indeed existing outside the immediate requirements of "social understanding." That is, reading it, like reading any worthwhile fiction, is first of all a literary experience, not an experience in social criticism or cultural recognition. While there are some things about the "postmodern" critique of culture with which I agree, one of its most baneful conseqeunces is the way in which it has swept up what was postmodern fiction into its smothering arms and blocked our view of what this fiction is really like. It has little to do with Marx, or with Boudrillard, or with Jameson, or with any other so-called postmodern theorist. It has much more to do with Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett. Or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding.

Postmodern Beckett

Two interesting posts at the weblog acdouglas.com--interesting in large part because in tandem the one seems to contradict the other. The first, an "archive of the day" post from 2003, discusses a televison production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It speaks in glowing terms of the play and of Beckett, an appraisal of this writer with which I agree (although I would also say I think Happy Days is just as good). In essence it discusses Godot as if it were, perforce, a classic.

The second, an account of Douglas's attempt to write a piece of "literary fiction," is interesting enough in and of itself--I particularly like his description of the amount of work that was involved--but what struck me most strongly was this apparently offhand comment: "I loathe -- heartily loathe -- the studied conceits of PoMo fiction, and just as heartily adore the antediluvian form of the omniscient, intrusive, third-person narrator, and a story with beginning, middle, and end, that last preferably with a wrenching twist."

In light of Douglas's admiration of Beckett, one does wonder what he would make of Beckett's own fiction, the work for which, in my opinion, Beckett will be most enduringly remembered even beyond his groundbreaking drama. This fiction, even his earlier work such as More Pricks Than Kicks or Murphy, is characterized by nothing if not its "studied conceits," to the point that Beckett's late work becomes almost nothing but such conceits. Perhaps Douglas likes Beckett's plays but not his fiction (although I must say I find the same sensibility informing both) and at any rate he is thoroughly entitled to his preference for the kind of old-fashioned (as in 19th century) fiction he describes.

But in the final analysis, can we even have literature--presuming we consider fiction to be a form of literature--without "studied conceits" at its core? Does poetry exist without them? Why should fiction not use them as well? Isn't any writing that resists this sort of imaginative transformation something other than "creative" writing, something other than literature? Maybe the postmodernists Douglas loathes take it all too far, forget their putative obligation to "entertain." This is something different, however, from creating carefully considered "conceits" in the first place. And if entertainment is the issue, Beckett himself probably fails this test, perhaps, for many people, in Godot itself.

Somehow the term "postmodern" as applied to contemporary literature has, I think, become conflated with the worldview or "philosophy" of academic postmodernism,--although perhaps not for Douglas, who may understand the distinction perfectly well. But postmodern fiction is not postmodern because it is "leftist," or "relativistic," or "self-reflexive" or any of the other bad things (some of them bad indeed) academic postmodernism has been called. The original postmodern writers--and the term predates its adoption by acdemic scholarship--simply believed themselves to be continuing the challenges to conventional, formulaic thinking about literature begun by the modernists. Loathing them for it seems an overreaction, to say the least.