The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Dan takes up a worthwhile question I’ve seen pondered variously, whether or not postmodern literature is actually distinct from modernist literature:
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.
I’ve more or less come around to the view Dan advocates here, that in terms of the purely literary, there probably isn’t much to postmodernist literature that hasn’t been tried before. If there is any difference between it and modernist lit, I’d have to say it’s in the subject matter.
That said, I do think there are authors that consciously try to write a kind of fiction that is a response to modernism, and that can’t exactly be seen as indistinct from modernism. My first best example of this group would be Enrique Vila-Matas, although he does take extreme measures to notify us that his is, in fact, a response to modernism. This has the odd effect of putting all his work into a frame that either feels critical, aware of its inadequacy to match up to modernism, or both.
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i like the general line of thought but it seems like to most conflicting tendency is the pop one: the more pop a piece of ‘postmodernist’ literature is, the more it seems like it’s something distinct from a continuation or revival of modernism.
(and note, i’d count the democratic or populist or everyman tendencies in modernist lit as distinct from ‘pop’ as it focuses on a certain mass-culture sensibility.)
I would agree that “there probably isn’t much to postmodernist literature that hasn’t been tried before,” but I see the connection being not to modernism as much as it is with the early novel (such as Don Quixote, say)–that is, a return to the celebration of story as story, an acknowledgment of the artifice. In that sense, postmodernism in literature feels like a rest. Where modernism refined the aim of late 19th C. realism (or more accurately, modernism actually sought to do what realism sounds like it does, which is depict [or attempt to] actual life) is a retreat (not a bad thing). But I don’t know that I have anything to back this up.
j.,
I agree with what you are saying insofar as developments in pop culture that did not exist in modernism’s heyday have been used by certain authors that are often seen as synonymous with postmodernism. Though, I do think that the idea of mass culture and the “flattened” image of a person that it implies was known to and used by the modernists. Queneau’s first novel riffs on this beautifully.
DCN,
Absolutely. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are as postmodern as they come. So too with Bouvard and Pecuchet. But I do think that one of the recognized strengths of each of these books is that is communicates something deeply human; not in the way that 19th century realism would come to depict the world, but definitely something more humanistic than the mere consciousness of artifice that postmodern lit is often unfairly pigeonholed with.
“But I do think that one of the recognized strengths of each of these books is that is communicates something deeply human…” Ah, but I do find these book (Don Q., etc. And you should also at the works of Shakespeare to the list too–full of wordplay, bad jokes and metatextual nods, it counts as well) to communicate something deeply human. Perhaps this is another link to postmoderenism–they are unfairly tagged as something they are not (and if I didn’t make it clear, I find postmodern literature to be moving and deeply human and humane. Gravity’s Rainbow, Lolita, JR–they all make me tear up). So, I apologize if I wasn’t clear.