I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
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