The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism

Linda Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351719315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding, and appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day.

1
The Origins of the American Postmodern—Barth, Gass, Barthelme

American modernism changed the literary world, eventually on a global basis. The writing of such American modernists as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.D., and countless others made readers the world over attend to what American poets, playwrights, and novelists were creating. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature could not keep up with this prominence,¹ but the fact that, especially in fiction, American books were translated into thirty to forty languages became the true marker. The world was reading writing by Americans.

The world, however, cared less for what came to be known as the postmodern. If modernism in the United States ended with World War II, and there are those critics who make such a claim, it took at least twenty years more for the term postmodern to come into play with any meaningful linguistic agreement among the word’s users.

Differences existed not only in language. American modernism was seen to be, largely, a movement of epistemological purity—a world view rooted in language and style choices, usually marked by a clearly stated intention. Postmodernism, however, came to incorporate wider-ranging cultural concerns. Language here was often harnessed to impact empirical meaning in ways seldom attained by modernist writers. What had been a purely literary innovation within the modern grew into some less-than-predictable political narratives. Postmodernist writers were likely to be taking sides—and in the postwar world, sides proliferated.

Like the modernist principles so clearly expressed by Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, an early use of the term postmodernism occurred in Randall Jarrell’s review of Robert Lowell’s collection Lord Weary’s Castle, as well as in Charles Olson’s essays on poetics. Even though more than thirty-five years separated the establishment of these stylistic principles—whether modernist or postmodernist—readers fixed their attention on the ways poems employed esthetic principles (Cornis-Pope Benet 874).

This early use of the term postmodern fed into formal literary criticism (of all genres of writing) by such important postwar critics as Lionel Trilling, William Van O’Connor, Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, and William H. Gass. The repetition of the term postmodern in such critical circles as Partisan Review, Harper’s, The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and the newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D. C., brought readers throughout the country into a remarkably sophisticated critical alignment. Susan Sontag’s rapid rise to the standing of public intellectual is one example of a swift-moving (and largely epistemological) cultural critique. In the words of her recent biographer Carl Rollyson,

Sontag embodied the contradictions of her time—at once a serious and sometimes abstruse thinker and yet a highly quotable writer whose words made good newspaper copy… . The titles of her first books, such as Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will, were provocative and prescriptive… . In the economy of publishing, Sontag was the total package—essayist, novelist, playwright.

(Rollyson Sontag 2)

The same kind of impact could be ascribed to the writings of William Gass, who focused the use of the term postmodern more exclusively to fiction. Like Sontag in his philosophical expertise and his fluid yet dense style, Gass claimed an intellectual following that belied his Midwestern origins. A Navy veteran, he finished his interrupted undergraduate degree at Kenyon College and—after completing graduate work in philosophy at Cornell—taught briefly at the College of Wooster in Ohio. At the time of his first published essays and his first novel, Omenstetter’s Luck,² Gass taught at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Years later he moved to Washington University in St. Louis. The circulation of his philosophical writing, as well as his fiction, occurred because of its unusual and insistent quality. By 1970, the time of his mixed-form novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, printed on differently colored and differently textured paper, including photographs and art pieces, Gass was as “camp,” to use Sontag’s term, as William Burroughs had seemed a decade earlier, when that novelist’s Naked Lunch appeared. Of more significance in 1970 to the cohesive study of postmodernism, however, was Gass’s first book of philosophical essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life.³ A few years later, in 1976, Gass’s next book, On Being Blue (Meditations) received high acclaim. It was well-named; the entire text was about the quality of blue-ness.

More philosophical essays followed, including his 1985 Habitations of the Word: Essays and, in 1996, Finding a Form. As the philosophical underpinning for the cascade of experimental writing that would dominate much of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Gass’s books of thinking about writing were consistently valuable.

In 1995 Gass published, again with Knopf, his long-awaited novel that would become a classic of the postmodern. The Tunnel illustrated words used insistently, cohesively, with little regard for narrative movement.⁴ As a large and somewhat unwieldy fiction, The Tunnel would take its place beside the other acknowledged tomes of postmodernism, Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Coover’s The Public Burning, and, later, among others, DeLillo’s Underworld, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

In the writings of Susan Sontag and William Gass, any emphasis on American esthetics and literature was likely foregrounded in European, English, and South American worlds. Ideas of philosophy as well as poetry and fiction stem as often from Sterne as Melville, and may track in a chronological sense as often from Henry James as from James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jorge Luis Borges. There was, however, no easy or immediate transfer of the term postmodern from its early uses to mainstream literary commentary. Even though John Barth would publish both The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in the late fifties, reviewers did not use the term postmodern: they were much more often inclined to trace whatever influence they saw within Barth’s fiction to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

The relative ease with which twenty-first century critics apply the term postmodern to some kinds of American fiction since the middle of the twentieth century and beyond is a comparatively new development. The word is still vexed as to appropriate dates and text characteristics, as well as genres and movements. For example, the appearance during the 1950s of “Beat” poetry and fiction is seldom absorbed into postmodernism, even for a writer like Gilbert Sorrentino, whose novel Mulligan Stew⁵ was often paired with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Neither is the large body of poetry known as “confessional” writing. The comedy of the now famed World War II novels—Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—is often separated from the ironic malaise that could still be linked to modernism. That comedy created a political category known as “black humor” (which later, more appropriately, became known as “gallows humor”). The wry and inventive fiction and poetry produced by members of New York’s Black Arts group—chiefly by Clarence Major and Ishmael Reed, who paid his homage to the earlier African-American novelist Charles Wright—whose novel The Wig Knopf published in 1966—was also left alone in its African-American ghetto. Similarly, all the comic and inventive poetry and fiction written by so-called “feminist writers” such as Erica Jong, Marge Piercy, Judy Grahn, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker, and Marilyn French was equally segregated into gender camps. Yet each of these groups could easily have been labeled postmodern in one aspect or another.

Generally speaking, postmodernism had two consistent qualities: “the first emphasized existential spontaneity, process art, and ontological pluralization.” The second direction was marked by “narrative disruption and a radical epistemology based on indeterminacy, multiperspectivism and a ‘new immanence of language,’ ” to use Ihab Hassan’s words. Given more immediate descriptors, Cornis-Pope stresses that he came to see

two varieties of postmodernism: the first one—complacent, hedonistic, playfully antireferential—deserves the criticism that it has alienated fiction from “significant external reality.” … The second variety, more radically innovative and “resistant,” has contributed significantly to a critique of the basic mechanisms of storytelling.

(Cornis-Pope 874)

Much of this study will treat literary works that have come to be considered postmodern.

In twentieth-century America, during the years John Barth and William Gass, William Gaddis and Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Kathy Acker, and Robert Coover were publishing their early writing, critics and writers were in clear disagreement about what was, or was not, postmodern. A decade after his first novel, John Barth commented about what he called “the death of the novel,” even as critic Richard Kostelanetz repeatedly questioned the meaning of “post”: “the assumption that modernism has died, to be replaced with something else.”⁶

The body of criticism concerning American postmodernism is not just one long lament, however. Part of the problem with this national separation, in trying to focus on postmodernism as it existed in relation to American arts and writing, was that literature and its study was becoming more and more global; delivery methods were expanding so that print or hard copy was something of a rarity rather than the primary delivery method. For example, when Brian McHale published his most recent book about the postmodern, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015), he specifically set his discussion within global perspectives. Here McHale is targeting the mid-1960s, a time when American postmodernism was dominant. McHale opens with a paragraph describing the importance of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, then moving to Canadian writer-musician Leonard Cohen, to visual artist/painter Andy Warhol, and then to British writer J. G. Ballard, emphasizing his science fiction (and such films as Crash in 1973).

One of McHale’s points is that esthetics during the 1960s, regardless of field, was an international statement. In McHale’s words, “On or about the year 1966, something changed in culture; something ended, and something else began.” McHale’s chronology is marked by

career changes, impasses and renunciations, interruptions and breakdowns, crashes literal and figurative, endings and beginnings: these are the hallmarks of the year 1966 at the cutting edge of culture. Nowhere is this pattern of interruption and breakdown more conspicuous than at the conclusion of what many regard as the signature novel of 1966, The Crying of Lot 49… . Pynchon’s heroine, a suburban housewife named Oedipa Mass, has inadvertently uncovered what she suspects might be a centuries-long international conspiracy to subvert the postal service—unless it is a hoax, or pure paranoia on her part. Proof, one way or another, will be forthcoming at a stamp auction where agents of the conspirators—if they exist—will bid for a “lot” of counterfeit stamps.

(McHale Cambridge 24–25)

Other critics agree with McHale—postmodernism was a movement that was truly global; it crossed geographical lines; it crossed the linguistic lines between avant-garde and post-many things. It has grown today to occupy as many library shelves worldwide as the critical work about modernism. Yet at its heart rested the American novels that seemed to mark its parameters, beginning with either Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which came after his V., or John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. Barth or Pynchon become a central nexus, attended by works by Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass—postmodernism appeared to find its root within American experimental fiction. Whether to claim that national origin or to leave the postmodern a global phenomenon seems irrelevant in the midst of these first decades of the twenty-first century. Critics agree that modernism was the twentieth century, but they disagree about how much of the twentieth century remained to initiate, and then to harbor, postmodernism.

Attempting to locate the movement of postmodernism within the United States leads to a retracing of earlier definitions. Beginning with the 1950s, these terms may give the reader an array of not just the single word postmodern but these various, related terms:

1. Self-reflexive fiction
2. Neorealism
3. Anti-realist fiction
4. Metafiction
5. Post-contemporary fiction⁷

Each term pointed to work that included an unexpected dimension of political awareness, a kind of emphasis that had previously been less visible in any kind of fiction except perhaps the historical novel. Fredric Jameson, like Linda Hutcheon, Paul Maltby, and a number of European philosophers, insisted that any kind of writing would, in the necessity of the times of late capitalism, speak to the human concern with the state of the world. What resulted from the atomic disasters that ended World War II was not only the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States: it also encompassed “the erosion of the public sphere; the diffusion of concept-poor discourses which limit social understanding; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda apparatuses; [and] the corporate management of mass communications” (Maltby Dissident 1)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Origins of the American Postmodern—Barth, Gass, Barthelme
• 2 The Books That Shaped Directions—Coover, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace
• 3 Other Dominant Authors
• 4 Postmodernism in Generations
• 5 Morrison, Doctorow, Kingston, and Chabon
• 6 The Fusion of Genres in Modernism and Postmodernism
• 7 “9/11” as Insistent Game-Changer
• 8 Postmodern Writers in the Twenty-First Century
• Selected Bibliography
• Index