Literature after Postmodernism

Reconstructive Fantasies

I. Huber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137429919
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

Literature after Postmodernism explores the use of literary fantastic storylines in contemporary novels which begin to think beyond postmodernism. They develop an aesthetic perspective that aims at creation and communication instead of subversion and can thus be considered no longer deconstructive but reconstructive.

Part I
Tracing Shifts

1

Post-post, Beyond and Back: Literature in the Wake of Postmodernism

In his 2008 novel Man in the Dark, Paul Auster has his narrator spend his sleepless nights imagining an alternative world in which the US is torn up by a savage civil war. In what has become an all too familiar postmodernist metaleptical short-circuiting of narrative levels, Owen Brick, the protagonist of this inset narrative, is sent on a mission to murder the narrator himself in order to put an end to the war for which the latter is in every sense of the word responsible, being, after all, the one who is dreaming it all up. After nearly half a century of postmodernist literary experiments and philosophical revisions, such metaleptic breaches of ontological boundaries may seem all too familiar and could easily strike one as just another tired narrative trick.

Obviously well aware of this, Auster has a surprise up his sleeve. After the inset narrative has been intermittently spun out over about two thirds of the novel, and readers might just about begin to expect Owen Brick to wander into the narrator’s home in flesh and blood, he is suddenly killed quite unceremoniously, abruptly bringing the inset narrative to a close. The narrator dryly comments:

Does it have to end that way? Yes, probably yes, although it wouldn’t be difficult to think of a less brutal outcome. But what would be the point? [ . . . ] The only solution is to leave Brick behind me, make sure that he gets a decent burial, and then come up with another story. Something low to the ground this time, a counterweight to the fantastical machine I’ve just built. Giordano Bruno and the theory of infinite worlds. Provocative stuff, yes, but there are other stones to be unearthed as well. (118–19)

Brick’s story ultimately fails as a remedy for the narrator’s insomnia because it does not adequately address the emotional problems the narrator needs to come to terms with in his relation to himself and his family.

Brick’s sudden and off-hand demise, I would claim, is nothing less than symbolic. Alongside his assassinated body, postmodernism’s paradoxes are given their (more or less) decent burial. Increasingly, attention is turned to other issues, more down-to-earth stuff, the grit of war and loss, human belief and betrayal and the endless variations of inter-human relationships. Immediately after Brick has been so abruptly done away with, the narrator accordingly recalls three war stories he has been told by various acquaintances during a trip in Europe, all of them evoking testimonial accounts of ostensibly real events. At the same time, these three inset narratives insist on their nature as stories, accounts that are being told and retold, refracted through multiple narrators, exponents of oral history. In a very decided and marked way the novel thus turns away from postmodernist fantastical machines towards ‘[s]omething low to the ground,’ which it finds in the mimetic stance of testimonial realism. It no longer indulges in the imaginative freedom of fiction’s possible worlds, but reclaims its fictional world as coextensive with experiential reality. Nevertheless, it always remains aware of the constructed nature of its testimonial claims, emphasising at all times the mediating role of the storyteller. The decision to forego the ontological conundrums of Brick’s metaleptical story and to turn to realism and testimony eventually enables the narrator to reconnect to his family and to address the pain, guilt and regret that haunt the relationships in his home.

While much more could be said about Auster’s novel, I will restrict myself in this context to suggesting that the decisive volte-face in the novel’s narrative development is, in many of its aspects, paradigmatic for a general tendency in contemporary literature’s engagement with postmodernism. We are, it seems, moving beyond postmodernism, which might still be ‘provocative stuff,’ but is also understood to have its limitations. A considerable critical agreement maintains that recent literature has tired of postmodernist concerns and is starting to look elsewhere for its topics. Quite in keeping with the direction the narrator of Man in the Dark opts for, this ‘elsewhere’ frequently takes the form of a reinforced commitment to realism and to the responsibilities and difficulties of intersubjective relations and communications. Meanwhile, the novel’s continuing engagement with postmodernist ideas and aesthetics, even while they may be eventually rejected or turned to different ends, likewise emerges as symptomatic of a recent literary trend to explore possibilities and paths beyond postmodernism.

But is it even possible to move beyond postmodernism? Robert Rebein brings the multiple difficulties which beleaguer such a project to a point:

what could possibly come ‘after’ postmodernism? Does not postmodernism itself connote a kind of finality, ‘the end of things’ – not least of which would be the end of innocence with regard to language and mimesis? Does not the term refer to a period of time we are still, demonstrably, in? And anyway, doesn’t a denial of the dominion of postmodernism amount to a de facto admission of artistic and cultural conservatism? Are we not speaking here of a kind of regression, aesthetically speaking? (Dirty Realists 7; original emphasis)

Every attempt to think beyond postmodernism has to consider these questions. And indeed, many of the attempts to chart the landscape of literature after postmodernism might seem to imply a kind of regression, a conservatist counter-reaction to postmodernist subversion.

David Foster Wallace, both one of the earliest voices prophesying such a literary generation of anti-rebels, and an important literary influence on a whole generation of young writers, is well worth quoting at length here:

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. (“E Unibus” 82)

What Wallace envisions in this passage resonates in multiple ways with various attempts to understand recent literary reactions to postmodernism. Having reached the limits of irony and scepticism, there seems to be a general agreement that literature is struggling to recover a sense of commitment and sincerity. Such a struggle, as we will see, can indeed at times seem blatantly anachronistic, desperately futile, hopelessly naïve or embarrassingly optimistic.

An increasing number of scholars are currently attempting to make sense of what is happening in literature at the present moment, but so far little agreement on a new label or even on what the specific characteristics of an emergent literature after postmodernism might be can be found. In what follows, I will map some of these attempts in order to suggest a wider context of contemporary literary production within which the analyses of recent novels in the subsequent chapters have to be situated and understood. Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of the current discussion, which cannot yet profit from the perspective granted by temporal distance from the process it endeavours to describe, Wallace’s prediction already hints at some common denominators beyond the individual forms and aspects the literary reaction to postmodernism can be seen to take: on the one hand, the conscious engagement with, but transformation of, postmodernist attitudes, as an act of impossible rebellion against revolution; on the other, a fiction that is no longer centrally concerned with unmasking, dissolving, subverting and unsettling, but sets out to gradually displace postmodernism’s fantastic paranoia by attempts to reconstruct, (re-)connect, communicate and engage.

Return to realism?

In the attempt to describe and define a perceived shift beyond postmodernism, one of the most frequent foci is on what Rebein calls a ‘revitalisation of realism’ (Dirty Realists 7). Thomas Claviez joins this assessment in the introduction to the a special journal issue on ‘Neorealism,’ assembling discussions of work by Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, E. Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson and Jonathan Franzen. Claviez suggests that a ‘change has occurred within the landscape of American literature – or so it seems. The fabulators of postmodernism are on the demise and about to be displaced by a literary mode and generation that have become known as Neo-Realism and Neo-Realists respectively’ (Claviez 5). The ‘neo’ implies a return to what has been done before and the rejection of postmodernist aesthetics would quite obviously follow from such a new textual politics. Mentioning a similar neo-realist tendency in British fiction and art, Alan Kirby, in fact, points out that the various movements he reviews (Dogme 95, New Puritans, Stuckists, cf. 18–27) mostly lack their own distinctive aesthetic profile. According to Kirby, the neo-realist rhetoric frequently owes its main force and coherence from a ‘shared perception of the decline and fall of postmodernism’ (44). Being essentially oppositional, many neo-realist positions eventually fail to suggest effective alternatives.

Rebein, however, takes pains to argue against such an exclusively reactionary logic. For one, he categorically rejects the idea that literature develops teleologically, reminding his readers of the continuity of realist literary production even during the heyday of postmodernist experimentation (cf. Dirty Realists 6).¹ Furthermore, he joins those critics who argue that the renewed realist trend in recent literature does not simply and naïvely return to pre-postmodernist innocence, but takes post-structural and postmodernist arguments into account:

contemporary realist writers have absorbed postmodernism’s most lasting contributions and gone on to forge a new realism that is more or less traditional in its handling of character, reportorial in its depiction of milieu and time, but is at the same time self-conscious about language and the limits of mimesis. (Dirty Realists 20; original emphasis)

Even while they return to a largely traditional style, these neo-realist texts acknowledge the contingency of the narrative act and thus frame their return to realism as a conscious choice in the plethora of possible language games (cf. also Burn 51).² As Toth explains, ‘[t]he defining feature of neo-realism [ . . . ] is thus its apparent evasion of the paradoxical idealism implied in the postmodern claim that a responsible narrative must overtly acknowledge the absolute contingency of all narrative acts’ (119; original emphasis; cf. also Versluys, “Introduction”). The basis of mimesis in conventions, Rebein suggests, is freely acknowledged by neo-realist authors like Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann or the Don DeLillo of Underworld:

The question, however, becomes what we do with this knowledge. Do we back ourselves into a corner and insist, as so many of the postmodernists have, on a completely different set of conventions with their own peculiar limitations? Or do we simply accept the mimetic limitations of realism [ . . . ] as obvious and move on from there to build what Tom Wolfe insists will be a bigger, better realism? (Dirty Realists 19; original emphasis)

This is a realism of defiance that knows its truth claims to be contestable but nevertheless does not eschew them, fully aware of the conventions that guide them. Indeed, this realism knows that it relies on precisely those genre conventions in order to signal its attempt at sincere representation.

Instead of denying the insights into the constructions of language and meaning which postmodernist philosophy has offered, they are accepted as givens by the neo-realists who, according to Rebein, start from this premise to move beyond it. If all narrative acts are contingent, the choice of mimetic realism at the end of the day is just as valid as any anti-illusionist metafictional disruption: it’s just a different kind of game to play. The focus in such recent literature, as McLaughlin puts it, is

less on self-conscious wordplay and the violation of narrative conventions and more on representing the world we all more or less share. Yet in presenting that world, this new fiction nevertheless has to show that it’s a world that we know through language and layers of representation; language, narrative, and the processes of representation are the only means we have to experience and know the world, ourselves, and our possibilities for being human. (“Post-Postmodern Discontent” 67)

If there is really nothing beyond the text, text itself presents itself as perhaps the most adequate way to communicate about our world.

Accordingly, where neo-realist texts use such typically postmodernist devices as metafictional comments and explicit textual self-consciousness, they are not primarily a means to disrupt aesthetic illusion but mainly serve for further authentication of the authorial voice. Arguing along these lines, specifically in relation to the fiction of William T. Vollmann, Rebein explains that ‘[i]nstead of entering the work to declare it is a trick, [Vollmann] stands inside it as a witness – vouching for its authenticity’ (Dirty Realists 58). Footnotes, metafictional comments and authorial involvement are not used to undermine fiction’s truth claims, but rather to acknowledge them as precisely that: as claims which are both conscious and contentious.

This is not a simple return to the extradiegetic authorial comment Victorian realists were fond of. While the Victorian narrator typically assumes an omniscient, controlling and judging (as well as predominantly male) confidence, neo-realism knows its perspective to be limited and contingent, circumscribed by the constraints of the subject. But the authenticity and sincerity of the narrative voice is asserted in the act of exposing its construction. However, this kind of authenticity does not return to modernist desires for universal experiences; nor does it elevate a subjective perspective to ultimate truth. Rather, it is predicated on its own individual contingency. Neo-realism, as Winfried Fluck suggests, no longer pivots on the epiphanic moment in a search for deep knowledge and ‘existential truths but [on] accidental occurrences in a dehierachized sequence of daily events’ (72). Instead of investing in the confident authority of the detached omniscient narrator of Victorian realism, neo-realist truth claims are fragmented ones of an entrenched, involved and subjective sincerity of first-hand experience. While largely eschewing objective or metaphysical truth claims (and thus, according to Rebein, taking postmodernism into account) neo-realists do return to mimetic assertions and the communicative value of narrative which is, eventually, based on a trust in the authenticity of the speaker’s voice.

Accordingly, Rebein specifically celebrates the work of authors like Dorothy Allison and James Welch, who give credence to their fictions by their own embeddedness in the milieu they describe, be it in form of regionalism, poor ‘white trash’ realism dealing with the life of underprivileged classes, prison narratives or tribalism. It appears that what comes beyond postmodernism turns towards a revival of authenticity, an authenticity that is often anchored in the subject of the author. If postmodernism was heralded by Roland Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, the ‘bigger, better realism’ which Rebein evokes comes along with a ‘renewed importance of the concept of place, and the expansion of our traditional ideas of authorship to include those who in the past would have appeared in our literature only as characters, and stereotypes at that’ (Dirty Realists 7). The authorial subject is here reinstated – not as an interpretative authority controlling the meaning of the text but as a guarantor for the sincerity of the act of communication.³

Such a replacement of capitalised Truth with individualised authenticity is quite paradoxically in keeping with postmodernism’s agenda of fragmentation and the privileging of petit récits that Jean-François Lyotard famously championed. At the same time, the attempt is to recover a confidence in the ultimate possibility of meaningful intersubjective communication based on a notion of referentiality that has been ostracised by postmodernist thought. What Zadie Smith criticises as the ‘lyrical Realism’ of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is a perfect illustration of this trick of the neo-realist novel ‘to have its metaphysical cake and eat it, too.’ The final scene of this authenticity-obsessed novel establishes the characteristic communal construction of a world in spite of postmodernist ironic awareness as the protagonist, reunited with his family after extended separation, rises to the top of the London Eye ferris wheel. In face of the gradual breakdown of reference as the city seen from above turns into an unrecognisable and unnavigable labyrinth, it is the loving other that provides support:

I join [my wife] just as we reach the very top of our celestial circuit and for this reason I have no need to do anything more than put an arm round her shoulder. A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. (246)

Rather than a return to realist aesthetics, I would suggest it is just such a profession of faith in the ultimate possibility of communication, established in intersubjective relations and based on a shared awareness of its own conventions and limitations, that seems to inform recent literature more generally and that can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Epitaph on a Ghost, or the Impossible End of Postmodernism
• Part I Tracing Shifts
• Part II Reconstructive Readings
• Conclusion: The Coming of Age of Reconstruction
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index