The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction

Resisting Master Narratives

T.V. Reed

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350010826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.

1

Introduction

Chapter Outline

Terminal Confusion

Postmodernist Realism

Is Postmodernism a Zombie?

How to Use This Book

There is no such thing as postmodern fiction. But that doesn’t mean I can’t write and you can’t read a book about it. Postmodernism is not a thing. It does not exist, at least not the way a tree, or a building, or even a book of fiction exists. It is a concept, a way of organizing disparate things into a category, and it is a notoriously slippery category at that. There are hundreds of magnificent literary works published during the postmodern era, roughly from the 1960s to the present. There is considerable disagreement about which works get to count as postmodernist, however. This is partly due to the fact that critics have often sought one narrow definition of a postmodernist style or approach. In my view, anyone seeking to write about postmodern fiction needs to note that in practice there is not one postmodernism, but many different postmodernisms. Postmodernism is also a global phenomenon, with writers hailing from all continents (with the exception of Antarctica, though that might be an excellent place to write without disruptions). In one sense there are as many postmodernisms as there are postmodern authors, or even postmodern works, since the same author may do very different things in individual works.

The existence of this myriad of possibilities allows for quite different generalizations about what postmodernism is, and thus quite different possible introductions to postmodern fiction.¹ Virtually every aspect of postmodernism has been subject to intense debate: not only which particular artefacts of culture are or are not postmodern but also what its political or cultural origins are, what its key features are, whether it is progressive or regressive politically, when it began, and whether or not it has ended. Indeed, there are those who argue that postmodernism never made sense as concept at all.

This all points to the fact that the label “postmodernist” is very much a category of convenience, one that allows literary critics and literature professors to organize their scholarship and teaching. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but it can also be misleading. Few of the actual producers of various works of fiction labeled “postmodernist” embrace the concept. This is hardly surprising. Most fiction writers of any era hate to be placed into literary categories or schools. They believe, rightly, that being grouped in such a way tends to move away from the particular, even unique, qualities of each author, each novel. Perhaps the best way to think about these issues is to imagine looking through an adjustable telescope; the scope lets you focus far out and see broad patterns, or close in to see the uniqueness of each piece of writing. In this book I am primarily interested in broad patterns, but I try to strike a balance by acknowledging the unique ideas, sensibilities, and styles of particular writers and works.

Postmodernist fictions range from ones that seem to seek the pure aesthetic joy of wordplay with little apparent connection to world play, to texts that attempt precisely to find ways to engage the social world through the force of their narratives. There are dozens of texts of each type, and many other types that could be elaborated. Any book about postmodernist fiction is therefore itself a fiction, a necessarily selective, invented collection. The selection I have chosen represents what I call postmodernist realism, works that use the realism-disrupting techniques of postmodernism in order to treat substantive social issues in the real world.

Postmodernist fiction is part of a broader body of phenomena labeled “postmodern.” More ill-informed and totally misleading things have been written about postmodernism than about almost any aspect of contemporary culture. Some of this stems from legitimate confusion arising from the obscure style of some postmodern theorists and fictionists. But much of it, especially in the last decade or so, is a politically motivated attack on aspects of postmodern thought and practice because they challenge elements of religious, political, and cultural authority.² Attacks on distorted versions of postmodernism, often joined to attacks on certain forms of multiculturalism, have sometimes played a role in the rise of new waves of right-wing pseudo-populism and the revival of white supremacist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic discourses. In that context, a book seeking to introduce postmodern fiction bears a special responsibility to address not only aesthetic but also political issues swirling around this body of work.

The bad rap on postmodernism, that it consists of obscure and cynical wordplay, lacking both substance and moral values, strikes me as deeply mistaken. Postmodern fiction writers have offered some extraordinarily rich explorations of the social conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have addressed the challenges of forming a coherent identity amid the massive in formation overload provided by TV, the internet, and other forms of mass communication; they have treated the immense dislocations of people caused by war, famine, poverty, climate change, and political repression; they have explored the psychic roots of terrorism and religious extremism; they have celebrated the emergence of social groups previously marginalized by gender, sexuality, and race; they have raised the issue of what it means to be human in an era when the rise of biotechnology and the prospect of artificial intelligence profoundly challenge the borders of our bodies and minds—indeed they have addressed virtually all aspects of life in this era in ways that deal concretely with the world as more than a collection of words. Postmodernist fiction is certainly not the only, or in all cases, best form of writing through which to explore each of these issues, but as a body of work it does provide unique perspectives that can prove vital to a fuller understanding of how these phenomena shape our lives. These works do for our era what fiction has always done; they get beyond theoretical and sociological generalizations to address social conditions at the level of our daily emotional and intellectual experience.

Terminal Confusion

Before I outline my chosen approach to postmodern realist fiction, it is important to separate out three aspects of the term “postmodern” that, when not separated, account for a good deal of the confusion surrounding these concepts. These three distinct aspects of the postmodern, while interrelated, refer to quite different things: postmodern theory, a set of philosophical arguments; postmodernist aesthetics, a set of forms and styles in literature, film, music, theater, architecture, and the visual arts; and postmodernity, a set of claims about the particular social issues defining the last several decades.

Each of these aspects of the postmodern shapes and is shaped by the others. But they do distinct things. Our immediate subject, postmodernist fiction, is both a reaction to earlier aesthetic style and a reaction to social conditions that form postmodernity as a distinct era, and some (but not all) postmodern fiction is influenced by postmodern theory. In turn, fiction has had an influence on some strands of postmodern theory, and has not only illuminated but also helped to shape postmodern social conditions.

I outline the characteristics of postmodernity as social conditions, and the typical elements of postmodernist style, in the next chapter. So let me very briefly here point to the third part of this triad, postmodern theory. While postmodern theory informs some of the interpretations I offer in this book, I explain the relevant concepts in context so that substantial knowledge of this often philosophically dense, not to say obscure, body of work isn’t necessary for readers to understand my analyses. But it can perhaps be useful at the outset to at least acknowledge who some of these figures are. Postmodern theorists include a number of writers associated with the intellectual terrain known as poststructuralism, especially Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes. In addition, prominent theorists associated with postmodern theory include Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. There is also an influential school of postmodern theorists collectively known as the French feminists, including Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig. In the English-speaking world, prominent theorists associated with postmodernism include Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Richard Rorty, among many others. Each of these authors offers a different set of conceptualizations of things postmodern, and each has been influential on at least some postmodern fiction writers.³

While it is impossible to find commonalities among all these varied theorists, Arkady Plotnitsky has offered a useful triad of concepts that cover a rather large portion of the terrain of postmodern thought: “1) irreducible multiplicity; 2) the irreducibly unthinkable in thought; and 3) irreducible chance.”⁴ I take these to mean, first, that no single belief system can encompass all reality, or contain all of the truth; second, that no system of thought (including postmodern theory) can fully get outside itself to understand its own limits; and third, that because reality always has an element of randomness, our notions of historical and social causality should always contain an element of cautious doubt. What should be underscored about these three principles is that far from the stereotype of postmodernism as an “anything goes” philosophy, each is about recognizing limits, about the impossibility of perfect knowledge.

These principles also stem in large part from the position that languages offer not a transparent window on the world, but rather a set of self-enclosed, culturally variable systems for constructing representations of an ultimately only imperfectly knowable reality. Virtually all the common complaints about the nature of postmodernism are off the mark. The claim that postmodernism is godless, or atheistic, misses the fact that there are postmodern theologians representing every major faith group. The claim that postmodernism is all about the new, that it claims to be some unprecedented historical phenomenon was already refuted by the first major book written on the subject. Jean-François Lyotard makes clear in The Postmodern Condition (1979) that postmodernism is a recurring historical phenomenon dating back to at least the ancient Greeks, a phenomenon that arises whenever segments of a culture develop an intense self-consciousness about language as a force in creating the world. Likewise, claims that postmodernism arrogantly sweeps aside all previous cultural expression are nonsense given that postmodernism’s commitment to pluralism means that it can make no claim to be superior to the realisms and modernisms that preceded it, but must instead be seen as one of the many alternative forms of representing reality that coexist in this or any other era.

At base, postmodern theory is about challenging all absolutes, all fundamentalisms—religious, philosophical, and political. It is not a denial of reality as some mistakenly claim; it is a call to take responsibility for the social processes through which we construct (imperfect) interpretations of reality, rather than claiming to know some unchallengeable truth. Rather than try to summarize further this large, complicated body of theories in the abstract, I try in each of this book’s thematic chapters to introduce, where relevant, some aspects of postmode rn theory, while noting that those theories never tell the whole story of the fictions represented.

Postmodern fiction has at times critiqued poststructuralist and other forms of postmodern theory, and postmodern theory itself was from the outset influenced by a number of different fiction writers especially early-twentieth-century modernists, some of whom were clearly forerunners of postmodernism. Indeed, some of the perceived obscurity of postmodern theory stems from the fact that many of these theorists mix experimental literary form with more traditional forms of philosophical discourse.⁵ Among poststructuralists, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was immersed in literary avant-garde movements, especially surrealism; Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva were part of a circle of experimental writers in France, the “Tel Quel” group, that produced an influential strand of postmodern fiction (le nouveau roman); and Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze were deeply influenced by avant-garde French modernist writings and by other proto-postmodernist figures like Czech-German Franz Kafka, American Gertrude Stein, and Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. Likewise, US postmodern theorist Donna Haraway has acknowledged her deep debt to feminist science fiction, to cite just a few examples.

While postmodern theory has undoubtedly influenced some postmodernist fiction writers, many others seem unaware of, indifferent to, or even hostile to elements of these theories. There are works of fiction that seem virtually to illustrate aspects of theory, but others that parody, challenge, or sidestep issues deemed central to postmodern theorists. To the degree that postmodern theory has become part of the repertoire of literary critics, it has illuminated some works of postmodernist fiction, but also obscured other aspects. The strengths and limits of postmodern theory arise from the high level of abstraction that characterizes it, as well as an almost exclusive focus among some on language as a determining force in social life to the neglect of material realities that while inevitably shaped by language also exist outside of it. Much postmodernist fiction, on the other hand, approaches some of these same concerns from the level of everyday, lived experiences that ground, complicate, and often challenge some elements of theory. Put differently, when theory is applied too broadly to the fiction, when fiction is seen as simply echoing aspects of theory, something vital is lost. Fiction itself has theoretical dimensions, but it is usually a different kind of theorizing, one that brings an equal or even greater self-awareness regarding the nature of language in touch with the material world and lived particularities that generate different kinds of knowledge embedded in different kinds of experience, thought, and feeling. In this light, it is important to see theory and fiction as generally having very different roles to play in the ecology of discourses, even if sometimes those roles overlap.

An overemphasis on certain strands of postmodern theory can obscure the ways in which a whole host of writers were engaged in thinking in ways related to postmodernism long before poststructuralist theory rose to prominence. This includes writers from marginalized social groups like African Americans and First Nations/Native Americans who were in many ways postmodernist before the term arose. African American postmodern novelist Ishmael Reed, for example, was deeply influenced by the deconstructive art form that is jazz music. Long before Jacques Derrida coined the term “deconstruction,” jazz musicians were engaging in something very much like that process. Before Derrida showed that the seemingly stable surface level of a text, fiction or nonfiction, belied instabilities and even contradictions within itself, jazz musicians were taking seemingly simple popular melodies and revealing in them complexities, including full-fledged contradictions (a sweet song with hidden depths of anger), that at some level existed within the text. And with regard to a different set of cultural traditions, Anishinaabe fictionist and critic Gerald Vizenor has made a strong case that Indigenous/Native American Indian storytelling trickster figures have been postmodernists for centuries.⁶

I will endeavor throughout this book to keep these three dimensions of the postmodern—theory, aesthetic style, and social conditions—clear to readers. I want to note here that there is also a related terminological confusion that can arise around the term “modern.” When theorists are talking about being postmodern, what is the modern they are posting? If we are talking about postmodernity as a social condition, the modern that is being talked about is several hundred years of the modern era, a period of European history usually said to have begun either with the sixteenth-century Renaissance or the seventeenth-century Enlightenment. By contrast, when the subject is postmodernist fiction, the modern being posted is usually the era of modernism in literature and the other arts, a period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Postmodern theorist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Usage
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Postmodern Conditions and Postmodernist Styles
• 3 Identities
• 4 Bodies
• 5 Postmodern Families
• 6 (meta)Histories
• 7 Re-Visions
• 8 True Lies
• 9 Displacements
• 10 Futures? Digital Dangers and Climate Crises
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright