This Is Postmodernism?

I don’t expect a grad student-worthy thesis, but Cynthia Crossen’s Wall Street Journal column about what postmodernism is is just too clueless:

I often see the term postmodern to describe books. I’m not sure what it means, but it usually doesn’t make me want to read them. Do you have an opinion?

Postmodern is a probably a word that could be retired from the language without any great loss to readers or writers. It’s a catch-all adjective, used promiscuously to describe books that seem a bit odd, experimental, challenging. More specifically, it’s used in opposition to realism, or as one writer put it, to “classic bourgeois realism.” Postmodern writing tends to be ironic, self-conscious and self-referential, nonlinear and digressive.

My own problem with postmodernism—in fiction—is that its champions don’t believe readers should get lost in a book. If the classic advice to novelists has been not to get in the way of the story, the postmodernists set up roadblocks on every page. The reader isn’t passively absorbing a tale like a child at bedtime; the reader is actively colluding with the writer, always conscious of who’s telling the story and how they’re doing it.

All the stuff about “opposition to realism” etc is bad enough, but postmodernists don’t expect readers to get lost in books? But wait, wait, I thought everyone’s favorite caricature of postmodernism was to say its practitioners are too caught up in playing games and making puzzles. I was also surprised to discover that Samuel Beckett is postmodern, along with Tim O’Brien and Ursula K. Le Guin.

I understand that postmodern is one of those terms that people like to toss around at virtually anything these days, and I get that it’s a difficult concept to pin down. If you really want to use it intelligently, you’re going to have to do some reading. But the Journal isn’t doing anyone any favors printing stuff like this. They’d be much better off pointing readers at Fredric Jameson and Francois Lyotard (and maybe even Jean Baudrillard) than further muddying the waters with this condescending, unintelligent stuff like this.

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