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Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
***
You have fallen into art—return to life.
— William H. Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing
to compare it to now.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening…?
— William Gaddis, J R
1. Introduction
2. Form
the emergence of a postmodern technique
3. Practitioners
the authors and critics
4. Themes
moments in time
5. Post-postmodernism
back to the future
6. Creative Response
an interpretation
7. Conclusion
The questions we must first ask are: Can postmodernism be described as a distinct, self-contained entity? And, if not: Is it
important? While this is not to suggest there is no middle ground – between this and being undefined – any definition based on
little more than vague notions is an ineffectual one and should be avoided. Postmodernism therefore must be given both a
flexible and an evidence-based definition.
In many ways, it was the lack of grand theories to instruct (or limit) the writer that allowed postmodernism to be diverse and
responsive to a changing society. Today, it is these qualities that make postmodernism intriguing to study. Conversely, this leads
to many misconceptions and a need to retrospectively ‘place’ the movement in our literary history.
Postmodernist writing often shared common themes, whether consciously or not, and an innovative use of form which contrasts
with earlier literature. Through the use of form and themes, the postmodernist author attempts to create new experiences for the
reader. According to postmodernist theory, the author’s intentions cannot be received by the reader in a definite, uniform manner.
Therefore, the postmodernist text is a combination of many texts, both external and contained in the duplicity of each word’s
meaning. The postmodernist understanding is a reaction against modernist theory but is also a product of the historical context.
In the years since postmodernism’s dominance has faded – and with the rise of the social realist novel – there has been an
increase in titles that attempt to discuss or define this literary movement (Barry 2002, ed. Sim, p. 111). Some scholars, in their
sentimentality for a fallen giant, have professed postmodernism’s unique literary worth. On the other hand, there is no shortage
who view it as little more than an aberration, a misguided fashion.
However, with the advent of post-postmodernism, the future of postmodernist ideas and technique in literature may survive
intact. A little tweaked, with a fresh, invigorating coat of paint and perhaps some further genius but importantly, a literature aware
of its past.
The gift of postmodernism to all literature, if it was to be only one, is an emphasis on form. More than any other literary
movement, postmodernists experimented with words in new and exciting ways. Postmodernists thought about how words
appeared on the page, not through the prism of content, but written language itself; their writing “begins by speaking and only
sees and conceives afterward” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975 , trans. Maclean 1985, p. 591). Language, as they saw it, with all of its
limitations should be exploited to create a different kind of experience. Their efforts were not focused on the suspension of belief,
and at times, they even flaunted the fictionality and false reality narrative creates. Roland Barthes writes in his essay, The Death of
The Author:
“once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is,
finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — [. . .] writing begins.”
(Barthes 1968, trans. Howard 1989, p. 49)
This passage reminds us that writing is symbolic and, with the rise of cinema and later television, authors were looking for new
ways to interact with the reader. This new direction allowed the novel to compete in a world where realism, through written
description, becomes instantly inferior to film at replicating or recording life. The artistic worth may remain but the intention to
recreate ‘reality’ will fail from the first ink that hits paper.
Before Postmodernism
Many formal techniques, that became prominent in postmodernist writing, can be seen much earlier. Cervantes’ Don
Quixote (1605–15) is a text that addresses the act of reading itself. The protagonist has become obsesed with the tales of
chivalry he has read. Don Quixote, in his delusion, begins to perceive his world through these fictions and begins his own quest.
In need of armour he finds some which belonged to his great-grandfather. Having removed the rust he sets about repairing the
helmet with pasteboard. Don Quixote decides it is only fitting his horse be renamed, after all his master has become a knight-
errant. Deciding on the name Rozinante1 he imagines it is: “a horse before or above all the vulgar breed of horses in the
world” (Cervantes 1605–15, trans. Motteux 1993, p. 11). However, the narrator described Rozinante as a horse:
“whose bones stuck out like the corners of a Spanish Real, being a worse jade [a worn-out horse] than Gonela’s,
qui tantum pellis et ossa fuit 2 [was so much skin and bones].”
(Cervantes 1605–15, trans. Motteux 1993, p. 12)
It appears Cervantes is warning us of what can happen to our own understanding if we excessively indulge in another’s
storytelling – it is an irony that confronts the reader, as they read. Part II of Don Quixote, published in 1615, played on similar
ideas. Following the success , Cervantes had the innovative idea of continuing the story with characters who have read about the
protagonist in Part I.
“the sensations reading evokes remain scant compared to any sensation really experienced.”
(Calvino 1979, trans. Weaver 1981, p. 39)
The acknowledgment, which Cervantes shares, of the inescapable fictionality any text possesses is known as metafiction.
Cervantes’ use of form in Don Quixote places it “at the head of a long line of fictions of which fictionality itself is the principle
substance” (Patrick 2008, ed. Boxall, p. 33).
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen (1759–67) draws inspiration from farce, a
comic genre involving buffoonery in which highly unlikely characters and events occur, and has been described as “the
archetypal ‘experimental’ novel, prefiguring modern and postmodernism fiction” (Milne 2008, ed. Boxall, p. 61).
Forgoing a strict adherence to the plot in favour of digression would become common in postmodernist texts such as Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). It is suggested by the title that it is a story concerned with the biography and ideas of Tristram Shandy.
Instead, the title character becomes the narrator of wild, and numerous digressions. The characters are “amongst the most odd
and original in fiction” (Tuckerman 1894, p. 95).
Once past his third year, the digressions are only loosely linked with his biography and often focus on his uncle Captain Toby
Shandy:
“A sick brother-officer should have the best quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us, we could tend and look to
him. Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's, and his boy's,
and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set him upon his legs.
“In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby, smiling, he might march. He will never march, an' please your
Honour, in this world, said the Corporal. He will march, said my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed with
one shoe off. An' please your Honour, said the Corporal, he will never march but to his grave. He shall march,
cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without advancing an inch, he shall march to
his regiment. He cannot stand it, said the Corporal. He shall be supported, said my uncle Toby. He'll drop at last,
said the Corporal, and what will become of his boy? He shall not drop said my uncle Toby, firmly,Ah, well-a-day!
do what we can for him, said Trim, maintaining his point, the poor soul will die. He shall not die, by G—, cried my
uncle Toby.
“The accusing spirit, which flew up to Heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in; and the
recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
(Sterne 1759–67, pp. 339–340)
James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland on 2 February 1882 and is considered one of modernist literature’s principal
figures. His writing is known to have influenced many prominent writers, including compatriot Samuel Beckett. Notable works are
Dubliners (1914), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), “the master-text of modernism” (Munton 2006,
ed. Boxall, p.326). Experimentation in his writing is clear, beginning with the stream-of-consciousness technique, where – at the
expense of objective description and dialogue – the character’s mental events are continuous:
“Latin again, That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion corpus for those women. Chap in the
mortuary, coffin or coffey, corpusnomine. Wonder where that rat is by now.
(continues)
“Is that best side of her face? They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate [. . .] What do they think
when they hear music. Way to catch rattlesnakes. Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Turning up, Shah of
Persia, liked that best.”
(Joyce 1922, p. 283)
However, It was not until after Ulysses that his writing took a radical turn away from what was common to modernism. During the
composition, 4 and following the publication of Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce would receive criticism, including from his early
supporter Ezra Pound, for the novel’s experimental use of language. In terms of narrative, several ‘kernel stories’ replace a
coherent, character-driven plot and traditional characters with consistent names and descriptions are replaced by character-
types.
“— Are you to have all the pleasure quizzing on me? I didn't say it aloud, sir. I have something inside of me talking
to myself.
— You're a nice third degree witness, faith! But this is no laughing matter. Do you think we are tonedeafs in our
noses to boot? Can you not distinguish the sense, prain, from the sound, bray? You have homosexual catheis of
empathy between narcissism of the expert and steatopygic invertedness. Get yourself psychoanolised!
— O, begor, I want no expert nursis symaphy from yours broons quadroons and I can psoakoonaloose myself any
time I want (the fog follow you all !) without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer.”
(Joyce 1939, p. 610)
At times, the reader is left without any comfortable understanding, only the sounds of Joyce’s invented language system.
However, this is in part the aim. Finnegans Wake is a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life” (Mercanton 1988, p. 233) and, as
Joyce explained to William Bird, “it's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?” (Ellmann 1959, p. 612).
Regardless, the reader may still have difficulty appreciating such an experimental text. Postmodernist writers, some twenty years
later, would face similar reluctance to disorder in the text.
Intertextuality is also present in the text, with the suggestion of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “joys of ills for Armoricus Tristram
Amoor Saint Lawrence” (Joyce 1939, p. 230). Joyce makes use of phonetic association throughout Finnegans Wake and this is
not a likely coincidence. The first reference to Tristram Shandy is in fact on the first page:
“Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the
scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream
Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time:
nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone
nathandjoe.”
(Joyce 1939, p. 1)
The inclusion of these references suggests Joyce saw Tristram Shandy, which at the time would have been one of only a few
English texts that ‘played’ with the readers expectations, as a predecessor to Finnegans Wake. Many postmodernists were also
inspired by Sterne’s writing but few would feel the same of Joyce.
Kafka intended to hide nothing of the narrative to come when he wrote the
following opening lines:
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself
transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.”
Metamorphosis (Kafka 1915, trans. Freed 1996, p. 64)
Peter Kuper © 2003
“Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was
arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.”
The Trial (Kafka 1925, trans. Parry 2007, p. 1)
Written in the form of a fable, a fictitious story that deals with events or situations that are clearly fantastic, impossible, or
incredible, they are Kafka’s most famous works. Throughout these stories, no attempt is made to explain or solve the missing
links with reality, yet modernism would suggest this is the role of the author. Unlike Joyce, who with Finnegans Wake attempted
this through his commentary, Kafka intentionally avoided explanation.
In the case of Metamorphoses Kafka insisted on ambiguity, expressing concerns over the original cover illustration in a letter to
Kurt Wolff5: “Not that, please not that!..the insect itself cannot be drawn it cannot even be shown from a distance” (Preece 2002,
p. 289). Although Kafka wrote during the period when modernism was still in its ascendency, and he would die only two years
after Ulysses was published, his writing moved toward a rejection of the grand narrative.
In Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs (1870), Severin agrees to become the slave of Wanda Von Dunajew. She
renames him Gregor and compares him to Samson a number of times. However, Kafka’s use of intertextuality goes deeper into
the narrative than the naming of a character. Through a borrowed yet cleverly reengineered description, the ‘metamorphosis’
Gregor Samsa has undergone is not paralleled to reality but rather to another fictional account. In the second paragraph, as
Gregor attempts to ascertain the reality of his situation, we are offered a description of his room that subtly signposts the link
(Coyne 2002):
“Over the table [. . .] hung the picture he had only recently clipped from a magazine, and set in an attractive gilt
frame. It was a picture of a lady in a fur hat and stole, sitting bolt upright, holding in the direction of the onlooker a
heavy fur muff into which she had thrust the whole of her forearm.”
(Kafka 1915, trans. Hofmann 2007, p. 6)
“A beautiful woman with a radiant smile upon her face, with abundant hair tied into a classical knot, on which
white powder lay like a soft hoarfrost, was resting on an ottoman, supported on her left arm. She was nude in her
dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man, lying before her like a
slave, like a dog.”
(Sacher–Masoch 1870, trans. Savage 1921, p. 7)
The reader can perhaps further understand Metamorphosis through the many examples of intertextuality (with Venus In Furs)
rather than through a direct comparison with the world. By partly alienating ourselves from the present reality of the character –
e.g. Gregor’s longing for an imagined past – we can appreciate both interpretation as a voice “consisting of several indiscernible
voices” (Bathes 1968, p. 1) and the possible richness of the fable. Although his writing retained “a meticulous naturalism in the
description of architectural space and landscape” (Preece 2002, p.288). Kafka would inspire the Neo-Fabulists, writers of new or
revived fables, to incorporate the use of intertextuality, allegory and elements of surrealism into their own writing.
“Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman.”
(Gienrow 1993, ed. Allen, p. 17)
This is the opening line to a speech that announced Samuel Beckett as the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for
Literature. An important figure in literature’s transition from modernism to postmodernism, Beckett’s earliest writing reflected his
modernist influences 6 and his later style developed from these. 7 Today, he is best remembered for works that challenged his
audience. Notable plays are Waiting For Godot (1952), Endgame (1957). His novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The
Unnameable (1953) are also considerable achievments. Through his own writing he attempted to break down the expectation of
realism. Associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, with Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz And Guilderstern Are Dead), Harold Pinter
(The Birthday Party), Eugene Ionesco (Rhinoceros), his writing would attempt to confront man’s existence in an illogical world
where only death is certain.
“In his novels, as in his plays, there is a search for the self, and an achieving of nothing” (Lee 1969). Beckett relinquishes Ibsenite
characterisation, as well as plot and resolution, and instead concentrates on imagery. Language is useless, for he creates a
mythical universe of lonely individuals who struggle vainly to express the inexpressible. His characters exist in a terrible dreamlike
vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication,
then crawling on, endlessly.
Molloy, the first of the trilogy, a pastiche of detective fiction, is divided into two parts. The first part of the novel follows the title
character through a series of nauseating encounters only to end up in a ditch. The second half of the novel concern’s Moran and
his son’s search for Molloy, only to realise that no such resolution will take place (Sutherland 2008, ed. Boxall, p. 460).
Molone Dies, the second of the trilogy, continues Beckett’s reduction of language. Unlike in Molloy there is no plot but instead an
interior monologue. At times Beckett writes with the sole aim of mocking the modernist novel and its form. Molone Dies parodies
The Unnamable is the last in his trilogy and completes Beckett’s attempts, beginning with Watt (1953), to develop a unique style
of writing.8 Narrated by ‘the unnamable’ whose existence might be about to end or just begin – the reader is left unclear of
which:
“I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain,
strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have
carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it
opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.
You must go on.
I can't go on.
I'll go on.”
(Beckett 1953, p. 86)
The Unnamable relies intertextually on the first two novels for understanding. At the end of Malone Dies, with death having come
to the narrator, the form of the novel begins:
“spluttering and collapsing in a series of logical and syntactical breakdowns” to be replaced by a voice in the
darkness—’the unnamable’.”
(Sutherland 2008, ed. Boxall, p. 478).
Sutherland goes on to suggest that in the final novel of the trilogy Beckett:
“attempts formally to address a question he has been skirting around in his previous work: what is left of a novel
once the story, characters, fictional space, and narrator have been removed?”
(Sutherland 2008, ed. Boxall, p. 478)
What then can the reader expect? What can the writer offer? Postmodernism would suggest that in the rubble of the realist plot,
rounded characterisation, independence, intentions and (Promethean, socialist, fascist, religious) ideology there remains
experience. With each word existing alone, no longer a simple reflection on reality, the text becomes a reality itself. Language
becomes an intertextual entity and the novel an assemblage with freedom and a multiplicity of meaning. Thus the writer can offer
a huge amount to the reader in creating new techniques or reconstructing past ones.
The cut-up and fold-in methods were popularised by William S. Burroughs, a prominent writer of the Beat Generation.
His most notable work is Naked Lunch (1959). 9 Brion Gysin, who exposed Burroughs to the cut-up method, was influenced by
the Dadaist movement.10 In ‘Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love’ (1918) by Tristan Tzara there is a section titled ‘How to
make a Dadaist poem’ which gives a good explanation:
“Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your
poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a
bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they
left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility,
even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd."
(Tristran Tzara 1918, trans. Barbara Wright 2003)
The cut up method, similar to collage in the visual arts, is a semi-automated method of juxtaposition. The writer is able to create
fresh descriptions and suggest new meaning not possible with traditional writing methods. The method involves sourcing
material from one’s own writing or the writing of others – including newspapers and magazines – and then cutting these into
quarter pages, strips of a few words or individual words before rearranging them.
“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross
the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4…one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four
with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the
same thing. Sometimes something quite different.”
(William Burroughs 1978, p. 30)
A variation on the cut-up method is the fold-in method. With this method a page is folded down the middle and placed on
another page. The page is rewritten by reading across the combined text. This creates sentences, half the first page and half the
second, with unexpected juxtapositions. The method was used in The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964).
These are the last two novels which, along with The Soft Machine (1961), form Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy.
These methods reduce the control of the writer through ‘chance operations’ but there is still room for creative input, both in the
original choice of source material and the subsequent rearrangement. Here are some examples:
“Turndoorknob. Hazy blue photographs. At home a morning wife imagines: a skinny jailer with pig-iron fingers and
spit king. Wishing for my screams with her gun. But I am streets of time away. Dogs straightaway seeing me
sleeping – gun divorce learnt – God became her morphine.”
Created using a ‘travesty generator’. 11
“Magnetic silver flakes closed your account – nitrous screens crackling, genitals spilling scenic railways in sheep –
Recorders of the city rotting – vast music in the throat of God – Movie screens went out from darkened
restaurants – Juxtapositions of light made this dream.”
(William Burroughs 1962, p. 52)
“The dada weatherman comes out of the library after being beaten up by a bunch of hoods/ he opens up the
mailbox, climbs in & goes to sleep/ the hoods come out/ tho they don’t know it, they’ve been infiltrated by a
bunch of religious fanatics. . .the whole group looks around for some easy prey [. . .] & settle for some out of work
movie usher, who is wearing a blanket & pilot’s cap.”
(Bob Dylan 1971, p. 20)
Burroughs felt these methods allowed writing to go beyond the monotonous repetition of already told stories “All writing is in fact
cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead” (Burroughs 1978, p. 31). These techniques allow for us to escape our normal
thought patterns by introducing “the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors” (Burroughs 1978, p. 30).
At its best, this form can answer Roland Barthes’ call, in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), for writing with both jouissance and
plaisir. Providing the reader an avant-garde text with the shock of the unexpected (jouissance) and also elements of the traditional
novel; intelligence, mastery and delicacy (plaisir). For many readers these methods remain disconcerting but if read as the text
has been written – in a non-traditional manner – the writing becomes meaningful:
“We cannot know what the vision means unless we experience it totally, giving ourselves up to it [. . .] If we read
the book properly we can feel the pleasure also—or learn to.”
Reviewing The Ticket That Exploded. (Robert Gorham Davis 1963, p. 281)
Spontaneous prose is Jack Kerouac’s extension of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique. On The Road (1958) is
Kerouac’s most notable work yet not the best example of spontaneous prose. Unlike his later work, it was heavily revised before
publication. An example of spontaneous prose is the opening passage from the story ‘Railroad Earth’ published as part of the
collection Lonesome Traveler (1962):
There was a little alley in san Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsent in redbrick of
drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter
frenzy as soon they’ll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-
dressed thru workingman Frisco of Walkup ? ? Truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of
lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do
The principles behind Kerouac’s style are found in a manifesto called ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ (1959). His method is
described as:
“An attempt to discover form, not to imitate it, and to discover experience in the act of writing it.”
(Weinreich 1990, p. 4)
Kerouac suggests ideas and imagery should be written down as they come into the mind of the author; the words and
impressions left unedited – “Interesting, because not ‘crafted’. Craft is craft.” He proposes that the reader of a text will be
appreciative of writing that satisfies and excites the author – “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of
scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained.” The focus of a text should not be preconceived and should come naturally
as one writes from a “warm protective mind” (Kerouac 1959, ed. Ann Charters 1995, p. 57).
In spontaneous prose there should be no limitation or selectiveness of subject, nor the restrictions of grammar adhered to.
Instead, spontaneous prose follows the “rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on
a table with each complete utterance, bang!” (Kerouac 1959, ed. Ann Charters 1995, p. 57). Hence, his frequent use of en
dashes (–) in place of periods. This reflects Kerouac’s interest in replicating the sound of jazz music in the rhythm of a text.
According to the section on ‘Mental State’, the writer should allow the subconscious to find uninhibited modern language
through a state of trance (Kerouac 1959, ed. Ann Charters 1995, p. 58). Supposedly, this should lead to the most natural writing.
This belief could account for the substance abuse Kerouac often worked under. For example, his heavy use of amphetamines
allowed him to write novels in extraordinarily short periods of time. Big Sur (1963) was written over ten days in 1961:
“I could be a handsome thin young president in a suit sitting in an oldfashioned rocking chair, no instead I’m just
the Phantom of the Opera standing by a drape among dead fish and broken chairs – Can it be that no one cares
who made me or why? – ‘Jack what’s the matter, what are you talking about?’ but suddenly as she’s making
supper and poor little Elliott is waiting there with spoon upended in fist I realize it’s just a little family home scene
and I’m just a nut in the wrong place.”
(Jack Kerouac 1963, p.129)
Unlike many postmodernists, Kerouac also rejects genre-fiction, suggesting it is an illusion of new life that only becomes
necessary when language itself is overly restricted (Kerouac 1959, ed. Ann Charters 1995, p. 57). His ideas saw Allen Ginsberg,
Here is an excerpt from ‘Kaddish’ first published in the collection Kaddish and Other Poems: 1958-1960 (1961):
“Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night,
Talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
The rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—
And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing
How we suffer—”
Intertextuality is a literary device that appears frequently, and to far more radical ends, in writing after 1956.12 It was
the post-structuralist theorist and critic Julia Kristeva who drew attention to the phenomenon in postmodernist literature,
popularising the term in Séméiôtiké (1969). The concept is articulated well in the following:
“Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another text.
The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.”
The term refers to a writer’s use of external texts to add meaning to their own. Often this is achieved through quotation, allusion
and sometimes appropriation. Intertextuality sees the relationship with ‘reality’ become more indirect. By depicting a text within
the world of literature, rather than the physical world, the reading experience is transformed.
In terms of literary interpretation, intertextuality specifically relates to the influence past reading has on the reader’s understanding
of a text. The search for the ‘meaning’ of a text through consensus is undermined as readers will reference many different texts.
This results in highly individual and varied understandings:
“Postmodernism embraces an extreme notion of intertextuality [. . .] the limits of interpretation are set only by the
boundaries of the imagination.”
Examples of intertextuality range from brief descriptions that explicitly draw on another text, rewrites of earlier fiction or even
appropriations of entire passages. The former is found in John Barth’s ‘Lost In The Funhouse’:
When Ambrose and Peter’s father was their age, the excursion was made by train, as mentioned in the novel The
42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos.”
In Great Expectations the first paragraph (“My father’s name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip [. . .]”) is taken nearly
verbatim from Dickens. However, the reader is not, in any obvious way, informed of this. Great Expectations also includes
allusions to the work of writers as diverse as Madame de La Fayette, John Keats and Herman Merville.
Don Quixote: Which was a Dream reinterprets Cervantes’ work from a feminist point of view. There are intertextual references to
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Don Quixote (1752) as well. The text raises Acker’s concerns
about the historical depiction of romance, the dangers of political conservatism and the uncertainty of female identity – “She
needed a new life. She had to be named” (Acker 1986, p. 10). Set in the modern-day, a female Don Quixote has a revelation,
right before an abortion, to love. If she can love, she can save the world.
The events and tone of the beginning are based on the earlier Don Quixote. First, there is a description of ‘armour’ – “From her
neck to her knees she wore pale or puke green paper. This was her armor” (Acker 1986, p. 3). Then a passage similar to the
naming of Rozinante – “Her wheeling bed’s name was ‘Hack-need’ or ‘Hackneyed’, meaning ‘once a hack’ or ‘always a hack’ or
‘a writer’ or ‘an attempt to have an identity that always fails.’” Lastly, there’s the Sancho Panza-like character – “Simeon, Don
Quixote’s cowboy sidekick”15 (Acker 1986, p. 31).
According to post-structuralist theory, identity is a fictional construct of society. Both this and other post-structuralist ideas are
central in Don Quixote: Which Was A Dream. For her quest to succeed in a misogynist society, Don Quixote believes she has “to
become a knight, for she could solve this problem only by becoming partly male” (Acker 1986, p. 29). However, to continue
within the patriarchy is to prevent Don Quixote’s selfhood:
“Acker’s protagonists must move beyond the border of culture to conceive of themselves as individuals [. . .] This
quest cannot be completed, for even in Acker’s delirious narratives, it is impossible [. . .] to shed the culturally
constructed self.”
In an extreme use of intertextuality, Acker must write from within a male text, must subvert it, before a female text can exist—her
protagonist is forced to follow:
“BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE
COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS.”
Intertextuality presents new difficulties for the common reader. To have the fullest enjoyment they may first need a thorough
knowledge of literature. For the advanced reader, depth is added and the longevity of a text improves as meaning changes and
increases over time. This can be both challenging and exciting. To the casual reader, on the other hand, heavy use of
intertextuality may become alienating and difficult to comprehend.
Metafiction is a term that refers to the use of any narrative device within a text that is self-referential or represents a
self-aware acknowledgement toward the text’s fictionality. Metafiction in turn represents a rejection of realism, either because the
author considers such a goal ludicrous and unattainable or simply an undesirable, nor best, approach. 16 Metafiction can take
many forms, often written in a humourous or playful manner. The term is credited to writer and critic William Gass in an essay
titled ‘Philosophy and the form of fiction’ from Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) in which he states “many of the so-called
‘antinovels are really metafictions” (Gass 1970, p. 25). It was later defined by Linda Hutcheon and later this definition was
extended by Patricia Waugh:
“Fiction about fiction—that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic
identity”
“A term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an
artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”
From Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction (Waugh 1984, p. 2)
• Characters who suggest certain actions be carried out as such actions are
expected in a fictional text;
• The narrator may predict the reader’s reaction to an event unfolding within
the text;
• There may be extensive use of footnotes that act as a continuation of the story;
• The text incorporates chance allowing the story to unfold in a number of ways.
An example is Robert Coover’s ‘Heart Suit’ (2005);18
• A text may address specific conventions of fiction such as title, genre 19 and
dialogue.
Two memorable texts that includes metafiction are Ronald Sukenick’s Up (1968) and Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure
(1975). Sukenick complements the story by writing about what he is wearing or not wearing. At other times the author notes he
has crossed out the previous passage. Toward the end of the novel the reader is told how the novel is fictional, merely make
believe:
“Maybe you’ve begun to notice certain discrepancies, speaking of the story. I thought you weren’t married, I
thought your parents were dead. Very sharp [. . .] You want to find out about my personal life give me a ring in the
book [. . .] I’m going to finish this today, the hell with it. I’ve had enough of this. I’m just playing with words anyway,
what did you think I was doing. Just playing with words ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-goo-goo-gig-geg-gug-gack. I’m thirty
three I’ve got more important things to attend to, money, career, women [. . .] I just make it up as I go along.”
Jerome Klinkowitz writes, in Contemporary Novelists (1996), about Reflex and Bone Structure that it is a novel which:
“treats stimuli from social life and the output of a television set as equally informative[...]As a result, the action of this
novel takes place not simply in the character’s behavior but in the arrangements of words on the page.”
It is so unusual that the best way to demonstrate it is with an excerpt form the novel itself:
I am standing behind Cora,’’ he writes. ‘‘She is wearing a thin black nightgown. The backs of her legs are lovely. I
love her. The word standing allows me to watch like this. The word nightgown is what she is wearing. The
nightgown itself is in her drawer with her panties. The word Cora is wearing the word nightgown. I watch the
sentence: the backs of her legs are lovely.’’
(Major 1975, p. 74)
It can be suggested that metafiction provides a distraction, and certain elements of it, can be especially when they are over used.
However, it is a fundamental building block of postmodernist fiction and many other techniques are dependent or derived from
metafiction. When used well it can be exciting for a reader but when used poorly in a sense of gimmick to it. It is because of
these reasons that much of the discussion has been centered around metafiction, both in favour and against. While it may have
been remarked as wild and innovative in the 1960s and 1970s, Brian Reynolds Myers, writing in 2005, did not. He expressed this
in a review for Atlantic Monthly which he titled, leaving his opinion impossible to misinterpret, ‘A Bag of Tired Tricks’ (2005). Just
to make sure, if you were in any doubt of his opinion, Myers subtitles the article, in his unfair and condescending manner: “Blank
pages? Photos of mating tortoises? The death throes of the postmodern novel.” Although, and in his defence, Myers is writing
Poioumenon is closely related to metafiction, perhaps a mere nuance of it. The difference lies in how fictionality is
presented. Rather than accepting the fictional illusion and drawing it into the foreground, poioumena novels confront the
boundary between fiction and reality from the shadows. The technique consider the limits of narrative truth and creates “a
rhetoric of uncertainty” (Fowler 1989, p. 370) for the reader to unravel. In A History of English Literature (1989), Alastair Fowler
defines the term as when “the central strand of the action purports to be the work’s own composition” (Fowler 1989, p. 370). He
lists a number of novelists and texts which “interweave action with writing inextricably” (Fowler 1989, p. 370). These include;
Frederick Busch’s Mutual Friend (1978), John Fowles’ Mantissa (1982), Henry Golding’s Paper Men (1983), Doris Lessing’s The
Golden Notebook (1962), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and Salman Rusdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981).
“A creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth [. . .] one of the very great works
of art of this century”
These are two descriptions bestowed on Pale Fire following publication in 1962. It is not only partly responsible for later
poioumena novels, but also the exemplar of poioumenon. In the crudest sense, Pale Fire is a 999-line poem of four cantos in
heroic couplets 20 with a lengthy foreword, accompanying commentary – in which the narrative largely takes place – and an index.
Unremarkable as this may seem it is the concept framing Pale Fire that has won acclaim. Nabokov’s tale – beneath its obvious
form – is consumed by questions of authorship, the validity of assertions made by and to his fictional character-authors and the
struggle over the creative intention, as well as interpretation, of the poem.
The epic ‘Pale Fire', as suggested in the foreword by “scholarly ass” (TIME 1st June 1962) Charles Kinbote, is the work of “John
Francis Shade [. . .] during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, USA” (Nabokov 1962, p. 13).
Shade had been an academic at Wordsmith College whose work was focused on the English poet, Alexander Pope
(1688-1744). Shade, we are told, also happened to be – to use the term cautiously – a ‘close friend’ and neighbour of Mr.
Kinbote, having rented, Judge Hugh Warren Goldsworth’s house next door. 21
With careful reading, the first question regarding the credibility of authorship raised within the text, if one ignores Nabokov’s name
on the cover, is early on. Kinbote mentions a proverb, specifically a Zemblan proverb: “The lost glove is happy” (Nabokov 1962,
p. 17) and then a couple pages on further links himself with this mysterious nation, situated north of Russia: “February and March
in Zembla (the two last of the four “white nosed months, as we call them” (Nabokov 1962, p. 19). The reader begins to question
whether to trust this purported expert and, reading his rather bizarre interpretations, one soon begins to seriously doubt his
sanity.
"Well," I said gaily, "what were you writing about last night, John? Your study window was simply blazing."
"Mountains," he answered.
believing Shade, having wisely digested Kinbote’s stories, “was reassembling my Zembla” (Nabokov 1962, p. 91) in his epic
poem. In retrospect, having read the completed work and finding little explicit references, he suggests Sybil Shade is to blame:
“It also dawns upon me now that, just as regularly, she made him tone down or remove from his Fair Copy
everything connected with the magnificent Zemblan theme with which I kept furnishing him and which, without
knowing much about the growing work, I fondly believed would become the main rich thread in its weave!”
We are told the gardener saw Jack Grey, an escaped inmate from the Institute for the Criminally Insane, fire directly at and fatally
wound Shade. It is suggested the criminal mistook John Shade for Judge Goldsworth. The man who had seen Grey convicted
but Kinbote knows better. Jack Grey was none other than an undercover agent sent to kill the exiled King of Zembla, Charles
Kinbote. Yes, they are, at least in Charles’ mind, one in the same:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.”
Remarkably as it seems, having missed King Charles and killed another man, the killer calmly waited for the police to arrive. His
real name is Jakob Gradus a.k.a. Jack Degree, Jacques de Grey, James de Grey, Ravus, Ravenstone or even d’Argus and he’s
working for the Shadows, Zemblan’s secret police. It is interesting to note the revelation that Kinbote is on the run and his
colleagues at Wordsmith seem to have implicated him in the murder but, as with much of the rest of the novel, the reader is left
to contemplate this strange admission. However, what’s important is that Shade’s manuscript has been saved to thoroughly tell
the story, with Kinbote’s 236 pages of assistance, of Zembla. Regardless, as Kinbote concedes, the poem seems less about a
Zemblan king and his country and more of:
There are various interpretation of Pale Fire and conflicting clues are left by Vladimir Nabokov throughout the novel to suggest the
layer beyond what appears obvious but unlikely. A way to explain away the madness of Zembla and the curious links between
the poem, the commentary and the real world. Some readers attribute authorship of the poem and commentary to Shade,
I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with
three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that
king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between
the two figments.
The same disconcerting confusion of poioumena that makes its comprehension, and explanation, difficult is what can make it
brilliant in the hands of a master and rewarding for the committed reader. At the same time as it might become “a Jack-in-the-
box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game,
a do-it-yourself novel” (Mary McCarthy 1962) such a novel can also appear self absorbed in the current affairs and concerns of
the literary life. What works well in the absurdity, in the nicest sense, of Nabokov’s Pale Fire may not follow for serious
contemplation and my confuse those not sure how to approach such a labyrinth of a text. Of course, it is wrong to suggest it is
an invalid way or ineffective way to write and any argument to this aim both deprives readers and promotes the idea, so often
accepted and exploited by mass media, that the world needs to have its own For Dummies title. Pale Fire, and poioumena
novels, might just require more than a single read.
Historiographic Metafiction is a term that first appeared in Poetics of Post-modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988)
by Canadian literary critic Linda Hutcheon (Lewis 2001, ed. Sim, p. 124) but is related to postmodernist writing from the previous
two decades. It is often applied to novels which fictionalise historically important figures and events while in the process
incorporating literature, history, and literary theory (Hutcheon 1988, p. 5) in order:
“use and abuse, install and destabilize convention in parodic ways, [while] self-consciously pointing both to their
inherent paradoxes and personality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past.”
(Hutcheon 1988, p. 23)
Unlike a historical fiction, historiographic metafiction is intentionally anachronistic, mixes fantasy with history, or even relates a
history not always backed up by the facts (McHale 1987). The aim of historiographic metafiction is to broaden the scope of
According to Paul Myerscough, an editor of the London Review of Books, the sentences in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975):
“gather, like the fragments of a mosaic, to form a picture of American life in the early 1900s—an era whose
sensibilities [. . .] belong now to history”
(Myerscough 2006, ed. Boxall, p. 645)
The novel follows the relationships between African-American Coalhouse Walker, a wealthy caucasian family (Father, Mother,
Mother’s Younger Brother, the little boy) and a poor Jewish immigrant family (Tateh, Mameh, the little girl). It depicts various
encounters with famous historical figures including Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and J.P. Morgan.
“The offices of the J. P. Morgan Company were at 23 Wall Street. The great financier came to work one
morning dressed in a dark blue suit, a black overcoat with a collar of lamb’s wool and a top hat. [. . .] When he
stepped out of his limousine the car robe fell around his feet. One of the several bank officers who had rushed
out to meet him disentangled the robe and hung it over the robe rail on the inside of the door. The chauffeur
thanked him profusely. [. . .] In the meantime Morgan had marched into the building, assistants, aides and
even some of the firm’s customers circling him like birds. [. . .] He was at this time in his seventy-fifth year of life
—a burly six-footer with a large head of sparse white hair, a moustache and fierce intolerent eyes set just close
enough to suggest the psychopathology of his will. Accepting the obeisances of his employees, he strode to
his office, a modest class-paneled room on the main floor of the bank where he was visible to everyone and
everyone to him. He sat down behind his desk [. . .] and said to his aides I want to meet that tinkering fellow.
What’s his name. The motor mechanic. Ford”
(Doctorow 1975, p. 114–115)
Other notable examples include Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1976), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), Thomas Pynchon’s
Mason & Dixon (1997) and Donald Barthelme’s ‘Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning’ from the collection Unspeakable
Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). The first is set at the height of McCarthyism during the Eisenhower administration (1953-61)
and focuses on the execution of the Rosenbergs as seen through the eyes of then Vice President Richard Nixon. Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were convicted of espionage, for giving details of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, and executed by the electric
chair in 1953. The second looks at the conspiracies around the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the man arrested, but killed
before his trial, Lee Harvey Oswald. Pynchon’s ‘history’ of the men whom the Mason-Dixon Line is named after, Charles Mason
(1728–1986) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779, but in a rather revised fashion – Benjamin Franklin demonstrates electricity while
dressed as the Grim Reaper. Originally surveyed between 1763-67 to determine the boundary between Maryland and
Pennsylvania, the Mason-Dixon Line would later become famous, after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, for its use to delineate
slave-owning states from those which were not or would not be as new states were admitted to the Union.
Although used in novellas and full-length novels, faction can be more commonly found in literary journals and magazines like The
Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. In this context, faction texts often employ traditional journalistic forms including lengthy
essays or portraits of public figures. Being a hybrid form, faction is normally focused on ‘showing’ the story by using clever
description and giving an artistic feel. In other words, faction attempts to see “the facts come alive through narration and
setting” (Druker n.d.). This is as opposed to traditional non-fiction which, in an impersonal manner, focuses on ‘telling’ by listing
the facts, giving events in chronological order and bringing to attention a number of points of view.
The need to pursue a clear narrative in a faction text almost inevitably sees one point of view emerge dominantly. This element
of faction, because it concerns people who are alive, has caused some criticism. In one review of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize
winner The Executioners’ Song (1979), Diane Johnson suggests the author has created something equivalent to “literary
ambulance-chasing” and by “playing neither by the rules of fiction nor by the rules of fact, he is in danger of sinking in facile
sensationalism” (Johnson 1979). Daniel Miller suggests Mailer creates a “web of ambivalence” (Miller, D 2005, p. 228) that
ensures the audience will be unable to come to a decision on the morality – “[This] divides the audience, suspending them
between the unreachable poles of right and wrong” (Miller, D 2005, p. 228) – of his real-life protagonist, Gary Gilmore. This is a
man sentenced to death after killing two men during consecutive robberies even after both complied with his instructions. By
humanising Gilmore and emphasizing the effect his sentencing has on Nicole Baker, Gimore’s lover, Mailer negates the suffering
the victim’s family members while not needing to ignore Gimore’s actions. Some critics have suggested it has a similar “immoral”
effect in a format easily persuasive to an otherwise uninformed masses. While perhaps unfair of Mailer, in that his focus is not so
much on those sentenced to capital punishment but more on the fundamental morality and assumptions imbedded in the
institution of capital punishment, it does raise valid questions about the ethics of faction texts. The strength of any ‘truth’ as
perceived by the reader, regardless of whether this is intended, is unavoidably significant when a story claims to be non-fiction
but is presented in the emotive fashion of a narrative.
There are many more notable examples of faction, a form that seemed to usurp fiction as the
bringer of realism, which took journalism, as Capote puts it, from “the most underestimated,
the least explored of literary mediums” (Capote, cited in Plimpton 1966) to a higher level. One
is Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) which follows – the once junior Beat
writer turned psychedelic hippie leader Ken Kesey23 and his Merry Pranksters through the rise
and fall of LSD from within the 1960s counterculture. Another is The White Album by Joan
Didion which famously begins: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion 1979, p. 11)
and again covers charts the 1960s as it was experienced by the author. Lastly, there is Gay
Talese’s intriguing essay, published in Esquire, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ (1966) which took
over three months to write and, denied an interview with Sinatra himself, attempted to
“Some of Sinatra’s close friends, all of whom are known to the men guarding Jilly’s door, do manage to get an
escort into the back room. But once they are there they, too, must fend for themselves. On the particular evening,
Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close
enough to shake Sinatra’s hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they
merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he’d given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a
nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They
had checked in. They had paid their respects. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that
Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary.”
(Talese 1966)
Illustration, as mentioned earlier, is common in postmodernism and often adds to the playfulness of the work but separately
from the use of language. It can be found in the short-stories of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions
(1973), John Barth’s Lost In The Funhouse and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978). At the extreme it has also
seen the emergence of the ‘graphic novel’ which has its roots in the comic book form. A notable example is Alan Moore and
Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (1985).
‘The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when
then drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth
of all the sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores
and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”...and I’ll look down, and
whisper “no.”’
In aiming to be more than a pulp comic, Watchmen demonstrates the postmodernism’s openness toward forms traditionally
relegated to genre fiction. In addition to this there are indications of intertextuality, fragmented narrative, historiographic
metafiction and self-reflexive metafiction. This includes references to past comic book heroes, the use of symbolism and the
“a ragbag of bizarre, damaged, retired superheroes” that creates “a heart-pounding, heart-breaking read and a
watershed in the evolution of a young medium.”
(Grossman 2005).
Today, Watchmen remains an important measure for new graphic novels because writer Alan Moore and artsit Dave Gibbon
created the perfect example of the hybrid form, sharing the serious human dilemma often proposed in novels with the visual
possibilities of the comic book:
“Watchmen maintains a human heart in the face of Armageddon. Moore knows comics, their attractions, and their
pitfalls, and there is no place here for a simple tale of heroes and villains.”
(John Shire 2006, ed. Boxall, p. 746)
To summarise, the techniques employed by postmodernism are what fundamentally distinguish it from other movements.
The reading experience created is largely unique to this movement although to assert that it is a mere aberration from historical
precedents ignores the evidence of earlier experimental writing. However, these earlier writers were limited by the focus on
personal style that accompanied realism and modernism as literary movements. At times their experiments were even resisted by
the reading public, as in the case of James Joyce, because their innovation differed from what was identified as a the style of an
individual writer or school of writers such as the Bloomsbury Group. Postmodernism allowed writers to feed off each other’s
innovations, to borrow and advance, to push boundaries and have opportunities that would have in the past relegated them to
the footnotes of literary history. Worse even, prevented their publication.
In the mid-1960s, the universalist belief in one kind of literature was no more. Postmodernism’s rejection of the past spread to
more and more writers allowing for regional distinction and synchronous literary movements to emerge. This includes Africa’s
post-colonial literature and South American’s ‘magic realism,’ as typified by the emergence of Chinua Achebe’s with his debut
novel Things Fall Apart (1958) and Gabriel García Márquez with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The collective memory, or
rather amnesia, of postmodernism is a strange mystery. In philosophy, many of the post-structuralist critics and theorists remain
well-known. But the question remains: Why the lack of knowledge surrounding many of the most important postmodernist
writers, such as John Barth, amongst the otherwise engaged reader of fiction?
It is simply the arrival of other entertainment and the unsettled silence of major newspapers. Yes, in part. Among the masses an
attitude has emerged that art isn’t for them and amongst those in the arts there has been a retreat to the position art for the
masses isn’t really good art. It seems this is not the complete answer. Rather it remains more complex, needing something more.
Technique itself. For many readers there is a need for individual and identifiable style. Such readers need to be able to readily
associate postmodernist writers with their own work.
1 The alternative spelling of Rocinante is explained in the following footnote of the Wordsworth Classics edition:
“Rozin commonly means an ‘ordinary horse’; Ante signifies before and formerly. Thus the word Rozinate may imply, that he was formally an ordinary horse, and also,
that he is now a horse that claims the precedence from all other ordinary horses.”
(Cervantes 1605–15, trans. Motteux 1993, p. 12)
2 Cevantes quotes a description from Aulularia, III, 6, 28 a work by (Titus Maccius) Plautus (c.250-184 BC) who wrote comic plays with unrealistic plots and larger
than life characters. This intertextual reference has significant parallels with the protagonist’s own state of mind in Don Quioxte, as much as the text itself.
4 Finnegans Wake appeared in serialised form as Work In Progress in literary journals such as the avant-garde transition and Transatlantic Review from 1924 onward.
5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1975) argue that Kafka’s letters form part of the “literary machine.” The letters are an “indispensable set of gears” which become a
“a rhizome, a net, a spider’s web” essential for us to reconstruct the fragmented contents of the text or “the expression” (trans. Maclean 1985, pp. 591–592).
6 James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust. (Gienrow 1994, ed. Allen, p. 19)
7A close friend of James Joyce he had helped organise with Sylvia Beach, William Carlos Williams, et. al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination
Of Work In Progress (1929), a collection in defence of his close friend and the work that would become Finnegans Wake (Attridge 1990, p. 174). His own contribution
was called Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce.
In Proust (1931), a study of In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), shows both Beckett’s admiration for the work and signs his own
themes and ideas were developing:
“Proust is completely detached from all moral considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world...Tragedy is not concerned with
human justice...The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin...the sin of having been born.”
(Beckett 1931, p. 67)
8 Beckett began writing Watt eleven years before it published hence the misleading publication dates. The Nazi occupation of Paris and Beckett’s subsequent fleeing
to Vichy France was quite probably the event which pushed him toward further experimentation and a rejection of his earlier Joycean style. His earlier novel, Murphy
(1938), sold no more than one hundred copies in its original run (University of Delaware Library 2003).
9Naked Lunch did not use the cut-up or fold-in technique but his use of juxtaposition and lack as to concern at chapter order sign of his later ideas and as a result
can be considered a precursor.
10 An international art movement, Dada emerged during World War I in reaction against the artistic, social and political conventions that led to the war. Reflecting this
attitude is the famous performance of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’ Dance of the Curled Chicory. On 27 March 1920 at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris, the actors
– in response to interjections – began insulting the audience. The set was described as “consisting of a bicycle wheel and some signs hanging from a clothes
lines” (Motherwell and Arp 1989, pp. 174–176).
12 There is no doubt this technique extends far back in literary history as we saw in the previous sub-section.
13 Borges’ short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1944, Ficciones) is about a fictional French poet, Pierre Menard, writing Don Quixote. Albeit not:
“another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote...he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition
was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word, line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”
(Borges 1944, trans. Hurley 1998, p. 37)
14 Carter’s ‘Puss-In-Boots’ (1979, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) is a rewrite of Charles Perrault’s tale from 1697.
Carol Siegal suggests Acker was influenced by Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (Siméon le Stylite) (1965) which depicts a contemporary acetic in the Mexican
desert reliving the life of the saint while a woman Satan attempts to lead him astray. In one scene, appearing as an young girl in a sailor’s dress, she bares her thighs
and breasts to him only to be transformed, with Simon prayers, into a naked hag. Alternatively, the name be a reference to Henri de Saint-Simon (1769-1825), whose
feminist writing inspired the French women’s movement, ‘les saint-simoniennes’. (Siegal 2000)
16 The second justification for metafiction, often in conjunction with intertextuality, is evident in the writing of the Neo-Fabulists or Fabulators including John Gardner,
John Irving, John Barth and Angela Carter. This style of writing, and the writers of it, are famously discussed in The Fabulators (1967) by American literary critic and
theorist Robert Scholes. Postmodernist fabulists write gruesome, hilarious and sometimes moving fables. They are also specifically referred to, albeit it rather
disparagingly, by Tom Wolfe’s in his, previously mentioned, essay ‘Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast’:
“Neo-Fabulists wrote modern fables, à la Kafka, in which the action, if any, took place at no specific location. You couldn't even tell what
hemisphere it was, It was some nameless, elemental terrain—the desert, the woods, the open sea, the snowy wastes. The characters had no
backgrounds. They came from nowhere. They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed indicated any class or ethnic origin
and. Above all, the Neo-Fabulists avoided all the big, obvious sentiments and emotions.”
(Wolfe 1989, pp. 49–50)
Yes, Heller is responsible for the phrase. Prior to publication it went through various numerical revisions but they settled on twenty-two. The phrase is first
17
18‘Heart Suit’ is a story presented on a deck of oversized playing cards, from the Deuce of Hearts to the Ace of Hearts, first published in McSweeney’s Quarterly 16. It
begins:
“[The thirteen hearts cards may be shuffled and read in any order, with this card first and the joker last.]
***
All on one summer’s day, the King of Hearts calls for the tarts baked for him by his Queen, only to find they have been stolen.”
(Coover 2005, Title Card)
This means a sentence might begin on the last line of the Eight of Hearts and continue on the King of Hearts:
“The ambitious Viceroy/Greets the King of Hearts will all the deference due him, concealing the secret malice he bears him and his intimate
knowledge of the Queen’s private matters.”
(Coover 2005, Card 8–Card K)
"The writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds – they've already been
invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been thought of already. So the
weight of the whole modernist aesthetic tradtion – now dead – also 'weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,' as
Marx said in another context."
(Jameson 1983, ed. Half Foster 2001, p. 115)
The result of pastiche is that postmodernism can allow, in a bastardised form, genre or a misappropriated style to become an artistic expression in itself, one equally
as genius and inventive. Some examples include; postmodernist science fictions such as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhoue Five (1969), postmodernist westerns such
as Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster (1974) and postmodernist detective fictions such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1984) and Paul Auster's
The New York Trilogy (1987). A notable example that combines all three is Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs:
“Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede—sometimes attaining a length of six feet—found in a lane of black
rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camoflaged pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors
of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players.”
(Burroughs 1959, p. 45)
“I dropped to the floor on one knee, reaching for my suitcase. I pushed the suitcase open, and my left hand closed over the gun butt—I am
right-handed but I shoot with my left hand. I felt the concussion of Hauser’s shot before I heard it. His slug slammed into the wall behind me.
Shooting from the floor, I snapped two quick shots into Hauser’s belly where his vest had pulled up showing an inch of white shirt. He grunted
in a way I could feel and doubled forward.”
(Burroughs 1959, p. 178)
20 In poetry a heroic couplet is a single rhyming pair of iambic pentameter (Encyclopædia Britannica 2009). Notable works of poetry where heroic couplets are used
include Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ (c.1387) and Alexander Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’ (1733-34). The second and third line of the following are an example
of a heroic couplet: “Nor can one help the exile, the old fan/Revolving in the torrid prairie night/And, from the outside, bits of coloured light” From ‘Pale Fire’ (Nabokov
1962, 609-611).
21It is pointed out in the text (p. 82) by rearranging the names of the Judge and Shade’s college you can form the name of notable English poet, William Wordsworth
(1771–1850) and Irish poet, Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74). This hints at the intertextual reference of form, themes and imagery in Shade’s (really Nabokov’s) poem.
22 ‘Gonzo’ is a radical faction style referring to texts where the author, rather than simply reporting and remaining personally uninvolved in the events, finds it
impossible to extricate himself from the piece due to his own involvement and impact on events. The obvious benefit of this style, apart from being enjoyable to read,
is the overtly subjective nature. By not purporting to be objective, the reader is made aware of possible deficiencies and is more likely to maintain a healthy
skepticism. This is something Hunter S. Thompson, a fierce critic of the Nixon administration (1969-74), would have believed was lacking in the era of ‘plausible
deniability.’ Gonzo writer’s believe the suggestion of objective truth only hides bias and this is reflected in postmodernism’s understanding of history as being told
through a number of established fictions, traditionally at the expense of minority groups.
It is also worth mentioning that Thompson is perhaps a cult figure due to his reoccurring and vividly portrayed themes of illicit drug use, alcohol abuse and anti-
government attitude.
23 Kesey is also the renowned novelist who wrote One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).
“crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way – essentially television on the
page – that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.”
Writers
John Barth is an American writer born on the 27 May 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland. He
received his Bachelor of Arts (1951) and Master of Arts (1952) from Johns Hopkins University. He
would later return there to teach English and Creative Writing courses between 1973-1995
(Mahoney 2000). His notable works are The Floating Opera (1957), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960),
Lost In The Funhouse (1968), Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966) and Chimera
(1972).25 Reviewing Giles Goat-Boy, Elliot Fremont-Smith asks whether Barth is not:
“as so many people interested in original, funny, creative and brilliant writing agree
he is – the most original, funny, creative and brilliant writer working in the English
language today.”
(Fremont-Smith 1966)
His contributions have not solely been fictional. His critical essay, The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), first published in the
Atlantic Monthly, suggests that we move beyond the “literature of exhausted possibility” (Barth 1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 70)
present in “turn-of-the-century type novels” (Barth 1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 72). That is to say the traditional narrative that
aims to defy the limits of literary possibility and to create a wholly original work. The novels written by the likes of Saul Bellow and
John Updike, both contemporaries who gained notoriety early in Barth’s career, while topical and contemporary in use of
language are technically out of date. Their assertion that form is the least important quality to a writer “makes them considerably
less interesting than excellent writers who are also technically contemporary” (Barth 1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 72). Barth
While some suggest Barth is announcing the death of the Novel, a more radical assertion than Roland Barthes’ death of the
Author, he does not argue that, if it continues, postmodernism has failed. The two forms are not mutually exclusive and we see
this is true in today’s post-postmodernist literature, while at times for different audiences, both can be appreciated for their
respective qualities.
However, it is with the emergence of writers who place importance on representing not “life but the representation of life” (Barth
1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 79) that we will see the greatest works of our time. Writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis
Borges who in the end, will become the great artists. A designation historically defined as having the “combination of that
intellectually profound vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means” (Barth 1967, ed.
Bradbury, p. 77).
The postmodernist does not attempt in their writing to “add overtly to the sum of ‘original’ literature by even so much as a
conventional short story, not to mention a novel” (Barth 1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 80) but instead, works against this aim.
Paradoxically, it is only then do they transcend the limits that they have accepted in the old form. In order to make a profound
comment on our society the author need not write literature of exhaustion but “need only be aware of their existence or
possibility, acknowledge them, and with the aid of very special gifts [. . .] go straight through the maze to the accomplishment of
[their] work” (Barth 1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 83).
In essence, Barth writes from the perspective of his time; a world uncertain of truth, a world that seems near an end, a world that
has experienced the extreme horrors which can come from a single individual who holds power. The writers of Western liberal
democracies – an important post-WWII distinction – can oppose the Aristotelian vision of the artist, so dominant in earlier literary
movements, because “the very idea of the controlling artist, has been condemned as politically reactionary, even fascist” (Barth
1967, ed. Bradbury 1977, p. 71).
“George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology.”
(Barth 1966, p.1)
Giles Goat-Boy actually begins not with this opening line but with its two-part introduction. The first part is supposedly written by
four editors, who discuss whether it would be beneficial for them to publish the book in terms of profits to be made, prestige to
be gained and the effect this would have on office politics. This is followed by a fictional cover letter contributed by the discoverer
of the text—J.B. This letter explains the title and motivations for the work. It is suggested the text was originally authored by one
(or a combination) of the following; Stoker Giles, George Giles or WESCAC, a supercomputer.
The story concerns a boy (known by various names; George, GILES or Billy Bockfuss) born to his chaste mother Virginia R.
Hector after a computer error in the WESCAC programming room. He is adopted into a goat herd at the University farm. The
story charts his rise from life as an animal (Billy Bockfuss) to life as an at first reluctant human person (George the Undergraduate)
and finally as hero (George the Heroic Grand Tutor, saviour of New Tammany College).
The University in the Giles Goat-Boy is a microcosm of the universe. The plot is a mix of Christian theology, classical mythology
and events of the Cold War era. West Campus (run by New Tammany College), where Giles Goat-Boy is from, and East Campus
The language in the book is aimed satirically at the limits of academic language and confronts the intellectual dead end Barth
discussed in The Literature of Exhaustion. Writer and filmmaker, Garth Twa comments:
The entire language is corrupted, transmuted, a patois of academic terminology becoming the lingua franca.
At the book’s end, Giles Goat-Boy is handed over to a lynch mob. Before his death he vanishes – only to reappear in the middle
of a sex act over Founder’s Rock. We are left the mantra that accompanied him since it appeared on a punch card at his birth,
“to Pass All Fail All” (Barth 1966, pp. 108, 409). Here our anti-hero draws parallels to the Biblical “He who loses his life shall
preserve it” (TIME, 5 August 1966). Like Jesus Christ, Giles Goat-Boy is thirty-three years old.
In an act of intertextuality, Giles Goat-Boy – as messiah, hero, saint – lives out all the stages in Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’
which Barth had listed above his writing desk. Campbell’s structualist26 theory of mythology argues that there are fundamental
similarities in all our heroes:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are
there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the
power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Barth would return to the topic of mythology in Chimera, for which he received the National Book Award in 1973. It consists of
three related novellas (Dunyazadiad, Perseid and Bellerophoniad). He continued to abandon realism in his collection of short
stories, Lost In The Funhouse. Instead, the focus is shifted to parody, metafiction and contemplating the relationship between
artist (author) and perceiver (reader). This can be seen in the story titled ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A Self-Recorded Fiction’ which
opens:
“Barth cannot write a dull page [. . .] but by writing a great many very similar pages, and drawing so heavily on
material he has exhausted before, he becomes very quickly dull.” [emphasis added]
Donald Barthelme is an American writer and journalist best known for his short fiction.
He was born to Helen and Donald Barthelme, Snr., in Philadelphia on the 7 April 1931. His father
was a modernist architect and academic. These modernist influences would fuel a distaste for the
experimental nature of his son’s writing. Barthelme studied journalism, literature, creative writing
and philosophy at the University of Houston between 1949–1951 and 1954–1957. While he did
not obtain a degree, the subjects he studied would remain interests throughout his life.
His career as a professional journalist began at the Houston Post in 1951. He had earlier
contributed to the University of Houston’s The Cougar and, while serving with the US Army in
Korea between July 1953–December 1954 , edited the 2nd Infantry Division’s publication.
On his return to Houston he founded an interdisciplinary arts journal Forum. In 1961 he became the director of the Contemporary
Arts Museum in Houston, but left this and moved to New York City in 1962 where he edited another journal Location. For a time,
whilst living on West 11th Street in Manhattan, he was a friend and neighbour of the writer Thomas Pynchon. The New Yorker
began publishing his work in 1963 but due to the low income this provided, around US$1000 of royalties per annum, he
became an academic. He taught creative writing at Boston University, the University of Buffalo, the College of the City of New
York and the University of Houston. Two of his brothers, Steven and Frederick, are also writers and academics. Married four
times, Barthelme suffered from alcoholism and was a heavy smoker which resulted in his death, from throat cancer, on the 23
July 1989 in Houston. (Daugherty 2009)
We had been cordial colleagues, often bracketed together by critics describing what’s going on in fiction.
Donald’s death two years ago struck me very strongly for the obvious reasons. I guess I felt my first experience
of genuine “survivor’s guilt,” as they call it. After Donald’s death, here I am perfectly healthy and busy
publishing a new novel and drinking wine and eating food and making love and enjoying my friends, and this
guy’s dead! At least as good a writer as myself, and many would say better.
His most notable short story collections are Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1969) and
City Life (1970); his novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975). He won the National Book Award for Children’s
Literature in 1972 with The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971). 27 Other awards include a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972, and the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1982 following the publication of the omnibus Sixty Stories (1982).
“Barthelme’s importance as a writer lies not only in the exciting, experimental form, but in the exploration of the
full impact of mass media pop culture on the consciousness of the individual who is so bombarded by canned
happenings, sensations, reactions, and general noise that he can no longer distinguish the self from the
surroundings.”
‘The Balloon’ by Donald Barthelme was originally published in 1968 as part of the short story collection, Unspeakable Practices,
Unnatural Acts. It is one of his best known stories and one which the David Wallace Foster commented was “the first story I ever
read that made me want to be a writer” (cited in Miller, L 1996).
The story starts out with the narrator explaining that an enormous balloon has appeared over the city of New York. It having
started at a point on Fourteenth Street, “the exact location of which I cannot reveal” (Barthelme 1982, p. 46), and extended over
Central Park. The mystery surrounding the location at which the balloon begun harks back to a technique often used in realism. It
is an attempt to reinforce the truthfulness of the story through the need for anonymity. In other words, it is an example of pastiche
and in turn metafiction. In all, the balloon covers an area of over forty-five blocks north-south and as many as six cross-town
blocks on either side of the Avenue going east-west.
The narrator then begins to deconstruct his own phrasing giving us a clear feel for the story’s postmodernist qualities:
“But it is wrong to speak of “situations,” implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some
escape of tension; there were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there—”
The public attempt to decide on its meaning with little success: “Some people found the balloon ‘interesting’”(Barthelme 1982,
pp. 46–47) and “there was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the meaning of the balloon; this subsided, because we
Some people decorate the ball and others write messages on it. The balloon becomes an important part of New York life.
Children play on the balloon and its surface, with all its mounds and valleys, give them something other than hard streets and
concrete buildings. Yet, this is not the purpose of the balloon. It is simply a consequence of it being there. Not everybody is
happy with the balloon’s presence. The authorities, having been unable to remove it, eventually accept its place. Yet, there
remains a distrust, a lack of certainty toward the balloon. The unexplained nature of the balloon becomes less important as times
passes.
“Had we painted, in great letters, “LABORATORY TESTS PROVE” or “18% MORE EFFECTIVE” on the sides of
the balloon, this difficulty would have been circumvented.”
In other words, had the balloon been an advertisement it would have gone unnoticed without a second thought. This is the world
of Baudrillard’s simulacra, representations of representations. In the 2000s, many people take delight in
watching advertisements on television or billboards that distinguish themselves. Advertising is the visual art many are best
acquainted with. Would not madness break out if these were all replaced by works of ‘artvertising’ or art that tricked us into
believing it was for desireable products? Imagine if a person went out to purchase make-believe products which appeared only
as images on billboards without any obvious explanation. Barthelmesque mayhem.
But there is more to be learnt from this story yet. There are the psychological efforts the balloon has on people:
“Others engage in remarkably detailed fantasies having to do with a wish either to lose themselves in the
balloon, or to engorge it. The private character of these wishes, of their origins, deeply buried and unknown,
was such that they were not much spoken of; yet there is evidence that they were widespread.
Toward the end we find out that the balloon has become a landmark, changing the language of the city itself, and that why it
became so admired by the people was that it was an uncontrolled force. During its twenty two days of inflation, the balloon was
able to constantly shift and redefine itself and this was distinct from people who had very rigid lives.
With all of this speculation and importance that was placed on the balloon, it really had more to do with the narrator’s “sexual
deprivation” and “feeling of unease” toward a lover who had been in Norway (Barthelme 1982, p. 51). The balloon has filled an
empty hole in the people of the city but it is all false:
“I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it
was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure.”
Richard Brautigan is an american writer of short fiction, novels and poetry. He was
born to a single mother on the 30 January 1935 in Washington state. He never knew his
biological father and his mother lived with a number of men, often who were abusive, throughout
his childhood. He occasionally wrote pieces about the experience of the poor and childhood but
to what extent these are truthful is unclear. He graduated from secondary school in 1953 and did
not continue his studies. After relations with his mother became strained, Brautigan moved in with
a friend’s family. In 1954 he moved to Oregon and later the city of San Francisco where much of
his career would be centred.
In 1956, Brautigan was diagnosed with clinical depression and paranoid schizophrenia. Mental illness, in part related to his
traumatic upbringing, would plague his career and lead to his eventual suicide sometime between 14 September–26 October
1984. Brautigan’s badly decomposed body was found, on the 26th October by a private investigator, a firearm and a note beside
him that read: “Messy, isn’t it?” Subsequent investigations confirmed it was suicide and a forensic report suggested his death
may have occurred up to a month earlier. This fitted in with the last contact Brautigan is known to have had, a phone call made
to a former girlfriend on the 14th September. (Brautigan, I 2001)
In January 2009, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death, the Australian literary journal Torpedo released an issue
dedicated to Brautigan. It included examples of his poetry and short fiction along with tribute pieces written by other authors in a
Brautigan-inspired style and prints by visual artists that recreate some of his best writing. His daughter, Ianthe Brautigan-
Swensen writes in the foreword, a piece titled ‘Sharing My Father,’ about the power of his words:
“My father’s writing didn’t belong in the waning hours of the Twentieth Century. He was a writer of the 21st
century [. . .] He never lived on the spin of the past. My father never ‘got real’. His words are like illuminated
stones that I carry with me: when the path becomes dark, I cast them ahead and they illuminate the way into
the future. I have no interest in using the stones to find my way back. I have no clue of what the future will
bring, but I think some of the answers lie in ‘All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace,’ in which my
father envisions ‘mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.’”
“That the young should have taken so passionately to Brautigan is not surprising. He is the literary
embodiment of Woodstock [. . .] His exceedingly casual, off-hand style is wholly vogue, and I readily concede
that there is a certain charm about it and him.”
Trout Fishing In America is not a guide to trout fishing in America. Rather it is Brautigan’s second and most successful novel,
consisting 151 pages of Brautigan brilliance and only the occasional trout. The novel loosely follows the narrator to a number of
creeks and lakes in search of trout. His search begins, in the chapter titled ‘Knock On Wood (Part Two)’, with a failed attempt
when, as a young boy, the narrator believed he had spotted from a distance a creek and waterfall. Keen to go trout fishing, he
vows to return the next morning and does so. At home he creates a makeshift reel out of ordinary string and a bent pin. The next
morning, he wakes up early so as to get the trout when they are feeding or as he reasons when “they had something
extra” (Brautigan 1967, p. 6). Having eating his breakfast, he takes a slice of white bread for bait before leaving for the creek.
Unfortunately what he finds is something unexpected:
“But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was
a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what
the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wood stairs. [. . .] having trouble believing. Then I
knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. I ended up being my own trout and eat the slice of bread
myself.”
(Brautigan 1967, p. 4)
The novel continues through a series of loosely-related vignettes. Sometimes these take the form of letters between narrator and
other characters. TFIA, as it is occasionally abbreviated by Brautigan fans, takes the reader on a psychedelic trip through
Brautigan’s metafiction, uniquely used and laced with his famously inventive or juxtaposed descriptions:
“A shepherd walked in front of the car, a leafy branch in his hand, sweeping the sheep aside. He looked like a
young, skinny Adolf Hitler, but friendly.
Brautigan parodies the idea of a novel’s title coming from a line or character within the text. In TFIA, Brautigan reverses this, the
title being shared, for example, by a hotel, an opera and a character (Trout Fishing in America, Shorty). While rather treacherous
to use ‘Trout Fishing In America’ in this way, it being one of the less nimble titles, Brautigan exploits this kind of humour to create
a layered text which, at first, masks his serious doubts in the good of American society. In turn, this leads him to question the
hopes of the counterculture itself.
“Then a salesmen came up to me, and in a pleasant voice, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I’m curious about the trout stream you have for sale. Can you tell me something about it? How
are you selling it?’
‘We’re selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we’ve got left. A man
came in here this morning and bought 563 feet. He’s going to give it to his niece for a birthday present,’ the
salesmen said. ‘We’re selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and
ferns were also selling extra. The insects we’re giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of
stream.’”
Due to the fragmented narrative and use of temporal distortion in TFIA, it becomes difficult to demonstrate the wit and full effect
the novel can have on the reader. It is only possible, it would seem, if one were to quote entire pages, of which every line would
feature Brautigan’s humour, and underlying darkness, at its best. 29
“O beautiful
was the werewolf
In his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat Eirian Chapman created this visual
out on the dark interpretation of the poem in memory of
Richard Brautigan for Torpedo, January
water.”
2009.
His story ‘Women When They Put Their Clothes On In The Morning’, from Revenge of the Lawn (1971), is less than a page long
and follows a simple idea, that is love, but does so in a rather fresh and unexpected way. It begins:
It’s really a very beautiful exchange of values when women put their clothes on in the morning [. . .]
(continues)
You’ve been lovers and you’ve slept together and there’s nothing more you can do about that, so it’s time for
her to put her clothes on.
The repeated use, with small changes, of the those last few words has the same effect as a refrain in a poem. It is used four
times in this example of flash fiction. Many writers would try not to reuse the same phrase but Brautigan uses it to build emotion
and hold the story together. The narrator is woken up the reality of the world, of work and responsibility but there is love also.
“But anyway: It’s time for her to put her clothes on and it’s so beautiful when she does it. Her body slowly
disappears and comes out quite nicely all in clothes. There’s a virginal quality to it. She’s got her clothes on,
and the beginning is over.”
In summary, the lives of these writers often remain under explored, in part due to the nature of the critical mindset of the time,
and as result we have risked losing their words as well. They were motivated by different reasons to write and each had their own
unique qualities. For some readers, it is too much of an investment to be faced with a writer who believes in more than realism.
They may continue to ignore the ‘reality’ of what these writers felt about the world and which seeps into the words of every page.
These writers care no less about humanity but require different approaches in much the same way as one expects more frequent
jump cuts and special effects in an action film than in a slower paced film. Postmodernism often requires an openness which is
what makes it so difficult to define and discuss. It is as ludicrous to read a postmodernist text on the merits of its realism as to
read Henry James in search of metafiction.
Critics
Literary theories of post-structuralism, and in turn structuralism, can be linked to postmodernist literature although
cannot wholly define it. Blurring the line between these methods of interpretation, many French critic and theorists are associated
with both post-structuralism and structuralism at different times in their careers. The predominantly anglophone New Criticism,
while at its peak before 1956, had an effect on how postmodernism was received, specifically because it rejected that a text can
only have one intended meaning, but rather there may be a authoritative few, and the use of biography in criticism of a text.
However, there is also conflict between what New Criticism suggests can be considered art and what postmodernism does.
Structuralism, which similarly rejected meaning derived from biography, was distinct in suggesting that all forms of language are
united by a single system – whether they be advertising, oral history or a novel – made up of words, the signifiers, and the
concepts, the signified, which when combined created the sign, the object. While there remained no necessary connection
between a word and an object, there was still security of a relative meaning when this was invoked. In other words, one could
easily identify the structure concerning the relationship between a text and meaning. At least this was the ambition but within
literary studies a problem arose around play, ‘difJerance/différance’ – Derrida’s term – or the possible double meanings
embedded in the structure of language. For example, the auditory experience allows for two distinct words, of no obvious
relation in terms of definition, to be confused in conversation. According to post-structuralist theory, the make up of language
encourages two interpretations of the single event but structuralism attempts to ignore the presence of such a process.
“The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure–one cannot in fact
conceive of an unorganized structure–but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure
would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orientating and organizing the coherence of the
system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form.[. . .[Nevertheless, the
center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which
substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the
transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure is forbidden. At
least this permutation has always remained interdicted [. . .]
(continues)
“There are thus two interpretations of interpretations, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher,
dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the
necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other [post-structuralism], which is no turned toward the origin,
affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being who [. . .] has dreamed of
full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”
This idea appears in other studies also. Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
(1961) highlights the avoidance of the ‘different’ or socially disenfranchised—namely, prisoners, homosexual and the insane.
Underlying post-structuralism, and theoretically postmodernism, is a scepticism toward authority and claims of ultimate truth.
This has implications for the idea of positivism, and the reason of Enlightenment thinking, which relies on a claim to authority to
progressively build on knowledge through scientific discourse. It also suggests a disillusionment with the ‘answers’ offered by
other grand narratives. For example, Marxism which supposes an ultimate end – the socialist revolution and then communism;
equal outcomes and the disappearance of the state – to come. Jean-François Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge (1979), discusses the relationship between grand narratives, or metanarratives, and science:
Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them
prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks
the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces [. . .] a discourse called
philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with [. . .] an explicit an
explicit appeal to some grand narrative [. . .] For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and the
addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity
between rational minds[ . . .] As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of
history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions
governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well.”
In other words, Lyotard suggests that once a person, philosophy or an institution claims a wider truth, in the case of science a
cumulative end rather than just a sole finding, then the basis and process by which that claim comes out of must be examined
philosophically. Lyotard then goes on to define the postmodern, in the wider sense:”
I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly the product of
progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.”
Perhaps the most striking implication is the suggestion of post-structuralism is an acknowledgement that meaning suffers from
the same kind of instability as language, in fact meaning never maintains a fixed point but rather is changing all the time, over
time and being interpreted by many audiences. An example of this continued change would be the following: a conversation is
had one day about the importance of a public figure between two like-minded individuals. The next day, the second individuals
relates his account of the conversation to another who disagrees with both of them. The third individual happens to meet the
public figure months later and, learning of recent actions, the individual’s opinion changes. The week after she mentions her
changed opinion of the public figure with the first individual, whose views were recounted by the second individual, but the first
individual feels either the second individual has misrepresented his views to the third, or the third has misunderstood the second
individual’s account. What’s more decades later, the children of all three have never even heard of the public figure. This same
shift occurs with a novel. For a person reading today may not notice a then topical issue but might notice a coincidental
reference to an event which on the novel’s publication had yet to occur.
The rise of our consumer society created the ongoing shift, as a result of technological advances like television, toward what
Baudrillard termed hyperreality. This notion has implications for how fiction both depicts the world in addition to its technical
elements. Hyperreality is where lives are experienced through simulations, reproduced images and the play of signs (Kellner
2007). He suggests we have began to lose our ability to determine between real and imaginary, the clear distinction no longer
exist between what appears on the surface and what resides beyond, having imploded under the pressure of simulacra.
Baudrillard uses the example of Disneyland, a commodified ‘reality’ existing within the world but also in our imagination via
television – a third-order image. His term simulacra refers to when:
“commodity and sign have combined in order to form a self-referential loop within a closed ‘object system’.
While the collective imagination may be deceived into thinking that such signs refer to something real and solid
outside the system, this is an illusion.”
Barthes, in ‘The Death of the Author’, sets out to establish an interpretation of literature which rejects the assertion that with the
author lies a wellspring, a greater insight than attainable by the reader, in regards to the meaning of a text. He suggests literature
is a composite and trap in which identity is lost, especially that of the author:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the
‘message’ of the Author-God) but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various
kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources
of culture”
Barthes looks to earlier societies that relied on a storyteller telling the narrative as a performer and mediator rather than as an
individual. He asserts that the modern author is a product of the philosophies of the Reformation, English empiricism and French
rationalism which stressed the importance of the individual. According to Barthes, and he gives examples, this has led to a
corrupted focus:
“Tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history his tastes, his passions; criticism consists, most of
the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness,
Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if,
through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same
person, the author.”
Barthes points to past authors who have attempted to strip their role in defining the meaning of the text by suggesting the
accidental manner in which writing comes about. Such authors promote language itself as the source and rely on the reader to
intepret. This theme of empowering the reader is key to Barthes’ essay. For literature it may also suggest the futile nature of
writing. If no uniform idea can be expressed why write? In the manner of postmodernist literature such a concept is often played
off against. Yet this mild mockery, which comes out of an existentialist crisis, suggests a gap between between those who create
and those who write about the creation and the act of creation. Barthes’ scriptor is aimed at replacing the author:
“The modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text; he is not furnished with a being that precedes or
exceeds his writing.”
(Barthes 1968, trans. Howard 1989, p. 52)
“The reader is a man without history, witout biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds
gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.”
(Barthes 1968, trans. Howard 1989, p. 54)
Discussing the nature of a text in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
developed the concept of the ‘rhizome’, as applied to literary theory. Before distinguishing between different types of texts, they
suggest one definition for a text:
“In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata, and territories; but also of flight,
movements of deterritorialization and destratification. [. . .] All this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes
and assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity – but
we don’t know yet what the multiple entails [. . .] after it has been elevated to the status of substantive.”
Delueze and Guattari suggest here that, being an assemblage, a text necessarily loses attributable authorship and rather that the
common practice of doing this is rather a manner of speaking, much like saying – the example they use – the sun rises. Given
that a text forms an assemblage, the question of how that assemblage of form is then discussed. The classical text – in fiction
that comes out realism a.k.a. naturalism – is like a root which attempts to signify the world, or the tree, through imitation. This
‘root-tree’ text is a reflection, with nature between it and the world. The obvious problem with this is that the text is also physical
– “Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, trans. Massumi 1987, p. 2). Then there is the
fascicular root in which out of the death of the root-text a new text is born, made up of the multiple secondary roots that grow
out of the original. James Joyce is suggested as an example:
“Joyce’s words, accurately described as having ‘multiple roots’, shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to
invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought.”
The example of William Burroughs’ cut-up technique is also given but pointed out as flawed due to “its laws of
combination” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, trans. Massumi 1987, p. 3). It is a text “all the more total for its fragmentation” (Deleuze &
Guattari 1980, trans. Massumi 1987, p. 4) but it risks becoming an ‘overdetermination’, in other words having too much meaning
to the point of ambivalence.
Deleuze and Guatarri continue and discovering that what is needed would be like the biological rhizome. A rhizome-text has
continuously growing meaning and, unlike the tree-root text, extends meaning laterally or by chance:
“Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and
must be. This is very different from a the tree or the root, which plots a point, fixes and order.”
Deleuze and Guatarri continue the discussion outlining the other principles of the rhizome-text such as multiplicity – “it is only
multiply if effectively treated as substansive” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, trans. Massumi 1987, p. 5) – and the principle of
assigning rupture – “against oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure” (Deleuze & Guattari
1980, trans. Massumi 1987, p. 7).
In summary, it is helpful to consider some of the academic or philosophical arguments concerning literature in the period after
1956. There is a degree to which postmodernist writers acknowledged the contribution of critics and theorists and to which
intellectual justifications always influence the outlook of a period in time. However, remains a radical and inaccurate suggestion
to suppose postmodernism of literature was born of post-structuralism. No single critic has a manifesto that can be held over
postmodernism as proof of some design—although let it be said that parts of the whole do correlate with postmodern trends.
Rather the process was far more organic. Postmodernism in literature was a response to the historical context or at least to
historical movement, to avoid the Enlightenment idea of ‘progress’, within literature.
24Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. English, the language in which he wrote predominately, was in fact his third language. While
much of his career coincided with his time in the United States, Nabokov had also lived in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland.
25 Much of Barth’s fiction was originally published by Doubleday (New York) but is today reprinted by Anchor Books (New York).
26Began by Ferdinand De Saussure and extended by others – notably Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lecan and Claude Lévi-Strauss) – structuralism
asserts that language is:
“a system of interlinked units, each which had a meaning only in relation to the whole” it sought to identify and understand “the underlying
rules of language, the deep structures that must exist if language is to perform its function.”
(ed. Sim 2001, p. 365)
28 Brautigan’s original publisher was Delacorte Press (New York) but his work is being released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the anniversary of his death.
29But suffice to say I will express a human need and end this paragraph with the word Mayonnaise. For the experienced there will be a fundamental sense in this. My
apologies for those who are not but when you go and buy Trout Fishing In America, smile and bring back a jar of Mayonnaise (Brautigan 1967, p. 150–151).
To understand the origins of postmodernism in literature, it proves beneficial to discuss the historical context. Fiction is
often one of the better mediums for discovering the past. The reoccurrence of certain themes reflect important issues in the
history of a particular time. In this, postmodernism does not differ. If one is to condense the effects of history on literature,
between the period 1956–1989, a few realities stand out.
Firstly, it is was post-Auschwitz, post-Dresden, post-Blitz and post-Hiroshima. In the aftermath of these atrocities, questions
arose concerning the true nature of humanity. The existentialist arguments pursued at the Nuremberg Trials, if extended beyond
Nazi Germany, held great implications for both leaders and the individual. In time, writers too would begin to ask of literature’s
guilt. In depicting the events of war in fiction, was there a tacit encouragement? Was modernism complicit in the glorification of
war by way of an eagerness to frame fiction in ideology? It is certainly true many writers, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, had
radical politics. However, many also suffered in the experiences of the First World War. Perhaps even their style of realism, with its
clean progression and attractive language, was to blame. For even when faced with vivid description, the reader failed to
act. Faced with this dilemma, postmodernists looked to the absurd. They mocked the romantic visions of war, depicted the
military bureaucracy as one of contradictions and explored the extent to which government will manipulate the people it
represents.
Many of the theories of Cold War foreign policy raise eyebrows today and yet they continued for almost half a century. Not least
of these is mutual assured destruction. An idea by which a massive build up of arms was justified as a means to overt war. This is
the kind of paradox which postmodernists were unable to ignore. Between 1945 and 1996, US$8 trillion had been spent on
arms worldwide, and there were 18 megatons worth of nuclear stockpiles (Issacs & Downing 1998, p. 419). With this
expenditure also came bloodshed in the third world. Wars in Korea, South-east Asia and Afghanistan were fought by
expeditionary forces of one superpower while the enemy was supported by the other superpower. Fascistic dictatorships were
maintained in an effort to prevent the spread of communist tyrannies. All in all, postmodernist literature was written under the
conditions of an ideological world, a world of contradictions and paranoia.
The last factor to consider is the rise and rise of consumerism. Rising from the American success in the second was an
increased wealth and production capacity. Later, consumerism would also become an area of distinction between the opposing
sides during the Cold War. The benefits and disadvantages of which are encapsulated in the 1959 Kitchen Debate between
Khrushchev and the then vice-president, Richard Nixon. Some of the developments in this period include the global propagation
of television, the shift to suburbia from rural and inner-city areas and the increased importance placed on celebrity figures.
Aftermath of WWII
The Battle of Britain, or the Blitz, occurred between the 12 August–30 September 1940. It followed the surrender of France on
the 22 June. Under the command of Hermann Goering, the German Luftwaffe fought against the Royal Air Force in preparation
for a planned invasion of Britain. In the end, Hitler called off the invasion due to the failure of the Luftwaffe to defeat Royal Air
Force and having lost 597 more aircraft in the process. The reasons for the British success include; the sophistication of British
radar, better arming of the British Spitfire and Hurricanes and the diversion of Luftwaffe aircraft to bomb London when the
pressure was on the British (Lowe 2005,p. 93–94).
The initial aim was to bomb harbours, radar stations, airfields and munitions factories. However, on the 24 August 1940, the
Luftwaffe, against Hitler’s orders, bombed the city of London, costing many civilian lives (Siebert 2001). In response Churchill,
who had already been planning to do so, bombed Berlin. The Germans then retaliated and “so it goes” (Vonnegut 1969, p. 47).
Slaughterhouse Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut is a fictionalised account of his experience of the Second World War, including
when he was a prisoner of the Germans in Dresden during the fire bombing. It is an example of how postmodernism is
influenced by history and also concerns for humanity. Vonnegut specifically sets out with the intention of depicting the horrors of
war and drawing attention to morally contentious acts committed by the Allies.
The plot follows Billy Pilgrim, an American infantry scout of German ancestry in the Second War World, who claims he was
abducted by aliens in 1967 and has now become caught in a world of disjointed time:
“LISTEN:
BILLY PILGRIM has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door
in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in in 1963. He
has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.
In other words, Vonnegut has placed science fiction and a war story, in a use of pastiche, beside each other. The subtext of this
approach, is the suggestion both are as absurd as each other. The horrors and justifications of war are equivalent in their
madness to unbelievable stories about aliens and flying saucers. One other possible reading is Vonnegut is attempting to portray
the trauma and havoc created by the experience and memories of war.
The text, which has the alternative title of The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, 31 begins with a chapter from the
author about his real life experience of Dresden and his problems writing the book – coming to terms with the memory but feeling
a sense of triviality in writing the story:
‘I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,’ I said. ‘The irony is so great. A
while city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And this one American foot
soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing
squad.’
‘Um,’ said O’Hare.
‘Don’t you think that’s really where the climax should come?’
As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and
confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the
prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.
(Vonnegut 1969, pp. 3–4)
This section is a clear example of metafiction. In the context, the technique forces a sense of guilt upon reader for delighting in
the tales of war. Vonnegut knows that these ‘thrills’ are in no way comparable to the real life experience. In discussions of war,
Vonnegut is clearly aware, death is different than in peace time. There is a cheapness of death in war and Vonnegut wishes to
depict this. In Slaughterhouse Five the reoccurrence of the phrase, “so it goes” after every death, becomes a chilling use of black
humour. Vonnegut acknowledges, what he sees as, the inevitable shortcoming of a war novel, when he writes:
“It is short so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a
massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever after. Everything is
supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.”
(Vonnegut 1969, p. 14)
The timing of the novel’s release is also significant. The years leading up to publication in 1969, were when the anti-Vietnam War
movement was at its peak. The wife of a friend, expresses these concerns, when she remarks about Vonnegut’s attempts write a
war novel:
“‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by
Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just
wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’”
(Vonnegut 1969, p. 11)
The slaughterhouse of the title refers to the building where Pilgrim, and Vonnegut in real life, had been put by their captors when
the bombing of Dresden took place. The result of which saw them survive but being put to work first burying the bodies and later
burning them. Reviewing Slaughterhouse Five, Seb Franklin writes:
The failure of Operation Barbarossa at Stalingrad – the invasion of the U.S.S.R. begun on the 22 June 1941 – and the
success of the D-Day landing on the 6 June 1944, the Germans looked to Wernher Von Braun,32 who led a team of 2000
scientists in developing a secret weapon at Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea. In September 1944, in a last ditch effort to destroy
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is an extraordinary work of postmodernist literature. It consists of four parts, is almost a
thousand pages long and includes hundreds of characters. There is no clear plot, but rather the fragmented narrative consists of
a series of digression and intertwined stories. The majority of the text is set in England, France and Germany between 1944–
1945. However, there are also flashbacks to the First World War, the period between the wars, the concentration camps and
revolts in Africa at the turn of the century and finally the 1970s.
The text is written with the experience of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s in mind. An example is the title page of The Counterforce,
the forth part of the novel, which includes an accompanying quote attributed to Richard Nixon, it reads simply: “What?” (Pynchon
1973, p. 731). Pynchon included this quote, just before the Gravity’s Rainbow went to the printers, in the wake of the unfolding
Watergate scandal.
A central focus is on the V–2 rocket and its creation. There are frequent allusions to the military-industrial complex. At one point,
the text suggests the war was engineered by major companies for their own profits. This includes I.G. Farben – who produced
the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Pynchon often writes about such fantastic conspiracies in his work,
employing the techniques of historiographic metafiction and intertextuality.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, as in all of Pynchon’s work, there are absurdly named characters, frequent descriptions of drug use,
unusual sexual encounters, discussions of paranoia and references to pop culture, including parodic songs:
“From the glassless bay window of a dress shop, in the dimness behind a plaster dummy lying bald and
sprawled, arms raised to the sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail glasses they’ll never hold again,
Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding
tunes in 3/4:
Love never goes away,
Never completely dies,
Always some souvenir
Takes us by sad surprise.
You went away from me,
One rose was left behind –
Pressed in my Book of Hours,
That is the rose I find . . .
Though its another year,
Though its another me,
Under the rose is a drying tear,
Under my linden tree . . .
The text opens in London on the 18 December 1944. Capt. Pirate Prentice, collecting his illegally grown bananas on the rooftop,
watches as a German V-2 flies through the air:
“What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just the last
fortnight . . . It’s a vapor trail. Already a finger’s width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not
launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb.
(continues)
“Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over there, just risen over Holland, is striking
the rocket’s exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea . . .
The white line. Abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cut off, end of burning, what’s their word . . .
Brennschluss. We don’t have one. Or else it’s classified.”
(Pynchon 1973, p. 7)
Luckily, the rocket fails, and Prentice can return to make his banana breakfast for the men downstairs. He is then called to
Greenwich to receive a message.
At ACHTUNG 33 headquarters, the character of Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is introduced, when Teddy Bloat photographs and
unusual map on his desk. Slothrop becomes the major characters in the text. Later, he assumes a number identities including
Rocketman, dressing up in a white zoot suit. On the map are the names of Slothrop’s many sexual partners. They are; Darlene,
Gladys, Katharine, Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys, Carolines, Marias, Annes, Susans and Elizabeths. The reader later
finds out, in a conversation between Pointsman and Kevin Spectro, that wherever Slopthrop has had his last sexual encounter,
the next rocket will land.
Pointsman – a Pavlovian psychologist – Brigadier General Pudding, and others are involved in the secret project called The White
Visitation, aimed at controlling Slothrop because of his use to the military. It becomes evident that Slothrop is somehow involved
with the development of a mysterious rocket with the serial number 00000, the component Schwarzgerät, and a mysterious
plastic called Imipolex G, which had been invented by a Dr. Laszlo Jamf. Jamf is responsible for the psychological conditioning of
Slothrop when he was child. This resulted in him becoming hypersensitive to loud noises, signalled by his sexual arousal.
Slothrop attempts to investigate the matter, resulting in a series of hilarious scenes throughout Europe, American and Africa.
Then the text begins to implode as Slothrop seemingly descends into madness. The reader later discovers that the Schwarzgerät
Reviewing the novel on its release, Richard Locke reflects on the character Slothrop and the cultural and historical context
Gravity’s Rainbow represents:
“Chased and chasing rockets in a doped-up manic state of fear, he begins to call himself Rocketman, and
dresses in a cape and Wagnerian opera helmet. It is Slothrop who falls among French gangsters, German
black marketeers, renegade American drug dealers, and is persued by the evil American Army Major Duane
Marvy, who epitomizes America’s go-get’em capitalistic frontier killing ways. In one sequence that parodies the
rocket motif, Slothrop and Marvy, in a baloon and a creaky prop plane, duel with custard pies and guns while
crossing the Harz mountains in Germany. Slothrop’s madcap peregrinations take up most of the narrative
space in the book. His adventures on the Riveria or in an undeground V-2 factory in Nordhausen are among its
least demanding comic sections.
(continues)
“Throughout the book there are brilliant set pieces and episodes that play exquisite variations on earlier
scenes. For example, one of the finest extended surrealistic excursions in modern American fiction is a journey
searching for a harmonica lost down the toilet in the men's room of the Roseland ballroom in 1938. As Harvard
boys come and go outside the stall (where the young Malcolm X is the rag-snapping shoeshine boy) the
drunken Slothrop crawls down porcelain sides, into the bowl, deep into the clogged and rusted pipes, thinking
of classmate Jack Kennedy and fearing imminent Negro buggery and death by excremental tidal wave.
Hundreds of pages later, totally adrift in the mountains of Europe, strung out too far on his paranoid quest for
the secret rocket ever to reassemble an identity, Slothrop reaches down into a purling mountain stream to find
the same harmonica, the water flowing freshly through its mouth holes, bending blue notes of water, and he
thinks–or rather Pynchon inserts–the last peaceful pastoral lines of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus." Then
Slothrop sees the Rainbow linking earth and sky and stands crying, at peace, with nothing in his head, "just
feeling natural." He has completely dropped out. This use of Rilke and the Rainbow is deliberately opposed to
the Rilke and Rainbow of Blicero's rocket. Such symmetry is dazzling.”
(Locke 1973)
“The Last image was too immediate for the any eye to register. It may have been a human figure. Dreaming of
an early evening in each capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the
first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of
screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see . . . It is now a closeup of the face, a face we
all know –
And it is just here, just at this dark silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per
second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old
theatre.”
(Pynchon 1973, p. 902)
When it became known that the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb in September 1949, suspicions of espionage
grew. A year earlier, allegations of espionage had been raised against Alger Hiss in the House Un-American Activities Committee
by Whittaker Chambers, an editor of TIME and a known former Communist. Alger Hiss, a prominent member of the State
Department, had been a close advisor to President Roosevelt and had helped set up the United Nations. Few initially believed it
could be true.
When Hiss appeared before the HUAC on the 5 August – two days after the initial allegations – he denied ever having met
Chambers. Richard Nixon, then a first-term congressman, took over the question of Hiss and was soon convinced of his guilt. In
the following weeks further information was extracted from Chambers. On the 25 August, in a televised session of the
committee, Hiss was questioned for five hours and he began to falter, the discrepancies in his story becoming further apparent.
In an unusual turn of events, Hiss then sued Chambers for libel. However, this backfired when sensitive documents passed on to
Chambers were proven to have been made with Hiss’s typewriter. This and other cases, such as the investigation of famous
Hollywood figures, continued to stir up public paranoia.
In early 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury. Around the same time Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s would begin making accusations
against members of the State Department, the United Nations, academics and many others. However, McCarthy soon began to
loose credibility as his accusations became more wild, at one point he began accusing senior Army personnel of espionage. In
December 1954 the Senate voted to censure him and his short period of notoriety was over.
“The net goes out and draws in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, described by J. Edgar Hoover on one of his daily
press releases as ‘important links in the Soviet espionage apparatus’ —Rosenberg, Hoover declares the day
he arrests him, had ‘aggressively sought ways and means to secretly conspire with the Soviet Government to
the detriment of his own country!’ Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass to Rosenberg—quadruple play!—and now
what next? Praise pours in.”
(Coover 1977, p. 19)
The hysteria surrounding communism in the late 1940s and 1950s would become known as McCarthyism. However, the
paranoia would continue at all levels of American society, easing slightly during the period of détente in the 1970s, before
peaking again in the early years of the Reagan Administration (1981-1989). Also, at different times, there were great divisions
between different groups within American. This is highlighted by the Anti-Vietnam War movement, African American Civil Rights
movement, the emergence of gay liberation, the drug counter-culture. Other examples of division in the West include the May
1968 riots in Paris and the emergence of terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Weathermen/
Weather Underground in the United States.The theme of paranoia became widespread in postmodernist literature. This often
aimed at large, secretive institutions including the U.S. Government.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) is a text heavily steeped in paranoia and black humour. The plot is a lethal combination of
dictator, the Bomb and a Caribbean island. The atom bomb is represented by a substance called ice-nine, the island is called
San Lorenzo and the dictator Papa Monzano. 34 Invented by the Nobel Prize winning scientist Felix Hoenikker, ice-nine is capable
of freezing the world’s water the instant it comes into contact with the ocean. Written in the science fiction genre, Cat’s Cradle
manages to capture a moment in time vividly.
On the 14 October 1962, an american spy plane flying over western Cuba had photographed the construction of a nuclear
missile launch site. Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defence, informed President John F. Kennedy that in fourteen days
the site would become operational. A group of senior officials came together as the Executive Committee of the National Security
Council to aid the President in deciding what action should be to taken. At first it looked as though an air strike would be called
to destroy the site. However, questions soon arose as to whether this would satisfactorily prevent retaliation. It was eventually
decided to blockade Cuba rather than attempt the air strike. However, a blockade would be an act of war and so it was decided
to call the move a ‘quarantine’. In Europe and elsewhere in the world, American forces were prepared for a nuclear war and on
the 23 October so too were the armies of the Warsaw Pact. In the following days the world came close to nuclear war on a
number of occasions. Fortunately on the 28 October, following tense diplomatic negotiations, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle
the Soviet weapons in Cuba in exchange for a similar removal of U.S. weapons based in Turkey.
One of the more complex stories of paranoia is Thomas Pynchon’s novella, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). It concentrates the age-
old American fear of secret networks. Some examples of this include fears of British spies, then Freemasons – which led to the
“Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero
beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it
seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed,
assumed full, circle into some paranoia.”
(Pynchon 1966, p. 126)
Rise of Consumerism
Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) is a text which bring together the dominant anxieties of late 20th century society.36 There is rise
of secularism, fears of inadequacy, marriage breakdown and death.There is increasing reliance on pharmaceuticals to prolong
our lives and the influence of the media and faceless corporations in our every day lives.
Jack Gladley, the protagonist, is a professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill. He suffers great anxiety because of his
inability to speak German. With an upcoming conference to be based at his university, he fears loosing his credibility as an
academic. He begins to take German lessons secretly.
His fourth wife, Babette is another point of contention in the text. She is taking an experimental drug called Dylar and her efforts
to obtain the drug, which include being unfaithful to her husband, result from her extreme anxiety over her eventual death.
Although she and her husband often joke over who will die first, their is an underlying anxiety which neither want to face.
Another major concern of the text surrounds the spillage of a toxic chemical called Nyodene D. During the evacuation that
results, DeLillo describes a wide cross-section of surburban life. In the process of the evacuation, Jack is exposed to a lethal
quantity of Nyodene D but its effect won’t occur for many years. This exacerbates his concerns and he begins to have trouble
sleeping. In an effort to relieve himself of this fear he searches out Willie Mink. This was the doctor who had an affair with Babette
and supplied her with Dylar. Jack arrives at Mink’s hotel intent on killing him. He shoots him and then attempts to make it look like
a suicide. The gun in Mink’s hand, Jack is ready to leave. Just then Mink manages to fire a shot off and he injures Jack.
Overcome with guilt, Jack takes Mink to the hospital and he survives.
“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and
panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go,
clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic,
trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The
scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments scattered. The older the man or woman, the more
carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and
fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the aisle, peer along the
shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was,
white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now,
an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutenize the small print on
packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients.
Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient
roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end
it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners,
which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radation, or how the
dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly
colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the rack. The tales of
the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity.
The cults of the famous and the dead.
In summary, when reading postmodernism there is often a strong reminder of the historical period in which it took place. It
occurred at a time of global upheaval, in the aftermath of one of the greatest bloodbaths, and as result the themes of writers
such as Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon reflect this. Strong themes of black humour, paranoia and an an emerging
consumerism come out of a reality that is unique to the period between 1956–1989. For this reason, some writers and critics
have suggested postmodernism is irrelevant to the realities of the 21st century.
30 However, the tactic had already been employed by the Condor Legion when the town of Guernica was bombed during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The
attack, carried out by Germans aiding Franco’s Nationalists, killed over 1600 civilians (Lowe 2005, p. 334). It was the first example of this type of an attack during
warfare, albeit one which has since become common.
31The original Children’s Crusade took place in 1212 with the aim of reaching modern-day Israel. Most of the children never made it to Jerusalem but instead were
sold into slavery.
32Incidently, following the Second World War, Von Braun would be taken to the United States to develop rocketry for the U.S. Army and later N.A.S.A. Eventually, he
would go on to design the Saturn 5, the rocket used on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.
33 The acronym stands for Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany, a division of the British military.
34 The name is possibly an allusion to Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, who with American support, ruled ruthlessly over his people.
36The term white noise refers to the sound emitted by a radio or television when not tuned into a station. This gives you a clear indication of the influence of consumer
culture on Don DeLillo.
In 1961, Philip Roth argued in an essay that the reality of the Cold War world was so absurd fiction could not be
expected to remained trapped by realism (Lewis 2001, ed. Sim, p. 121). If one considers the news of the day – construction of
the Berlin Wall would begin that June – it is understandable that writers felt uncomfortable creating a world of reason. They did
not known such a world, not in any real sense, because over their head forever hung the threat of the Other and fears of the
Bomb. In the Post-war era, structure could now be associated with oppression, for it was present in the Nazi Reich, the witch
hunts of the McCarthy era and the Kafka-esque experience of the Communist Bloc. To write of conflict as having a clear
progression toward resolution seems even more preposterous when, in recent history, political and military conflict had led only to
further political and military conflict.
With the end of the Cold War, and half a century of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, this justification for postmodernism disappears. Tom
Wolfe’s ‘Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast’ argued for “the New Social [Realist] Novel” (Wolf 1989, p. 45). He suggests that
American literature had stagnated and entered a “neurasthenic hour” (Wolf 1989, p. 56). To Wolfe, postmodernism doesn’t
represent a valid rejection of an “exhausted literature.” No, realism is more than a literary device; realism is Literature and literature
is Realism. Wolfe suggests to reject it is like an engineer “discarding the principle of electricity, on the grounds that it has been
used ad nauseam for a hundred years” (Wolf 1989, p. 51).
Wolf sees postmodernism as an intellectual phenomenon – “the intelligentsia have always had contempt for the realistic novel—a
form that wallows so enthusiastically in the dirt of the everyday life” (Wolf 1989, p. 47) – that alienates readers and derides
successful novelists as genre novelists and their novels dismissed by the “curious epithet” of ‘popular fiction.’ Misguided by an
idea they were refreshing literature, postmodernists writers were in fact bringing American literature close to destruction. After all
it was realism that in 1930s “put American literature up on the world stage for the first time” (Wolf 1989, p. 48). Dismissing the
realist novel as pointless is to show ignorance. It is even irresponsible because not even good journalism can illuminate a time of
“convulsive social change” in the way the social realist novel can. Wolf feels postmodernism uses the novel as a literary game
and this isn’t to achieve its full potential to affect change. So the question is: was Tom Wolfe right?
While highly successfully, Tom Wolfe’s debut novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) didn’t make him the first writer of realism to
emerge since the 1950s. In fact, new writers of dirty realism or minimalism were published throughout the postmodernist period.
A few examples are Tobias Wolff (1945–), Raymond Carver (1938–1988) and Charles Bukowski (1920–1994). These writers, who
drew inspiration from earlier modernist and realist writers such as Anton Chekov and Ernest Hemingway, 37 all achieved a degree
of critical success during the height of metafiction writing. John Updike, who Wolfe had praised, cited such examples and
disagreed with the essay stating:
“Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic."
In addition, many of the postmodernist tendencies came from writers, who moved away from their literary forebears out of
respect. Such writers held a belief the masters could not be bettered at their own game. By following the rules that had seen
them so perfectly depict an age, what substantial achievement could young writers make? There were others, admittedly with a
high degree of contempt for realism. These writers often felt there was something unique about the post-WWII era and this
required its own literature. John Barth, “the peerless leader” (Wolfe 1989, p. 49), suggested Wolfe’s:
“Is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in
which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in
Whether any of these justifications are true or not, all writers should acknowledge when any set of ideals becomes widespread it
is at risk of becoming a dogma – precluding diversity and in turn making literature static and formulaic. At such a point, it is
literature who is harmed first.
Tom Wolfe’s novel and essay came at the right time. The combination of an audience tired by postmodernism and the final
victory of Western liberal democracy, as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), ushered in
a new decade of clarity, confidence and certainty. To an extent the extremes of postmodernism did, as Tom Wolfe and other
since have suggested, go too far. They neglected the reader’s yearning to contemplate our society with seriousness and “by the
end of the 1970s postmodernism had degenerated from a startling assault on traditional narrative into a style as predictable as
any other” (Myers 2005). But what is Wolfe’s social novel, or more spookily, contemporary neo-realism, if not a retreat back to the
earlier styles of realism and modernism?
During 1990s, there were a number of younger writers who resisted the rapid shift toward neo-realism. They had admired and
been influenced by postmodernism or even taught by postmodernist writers. 38 Some of the best managed to find publishers, but
were an uneasy presence within mainstream literary fiction. At first, the success of such writers were mere after shocks,
inevitable in the immediate period after the fall of postmodernism. But it continued. In the eyes of many, it then seemed the
postmodernist style belonged and would soon assume a position equivalent to genre fiction.
and The Believer. The market being what it is, soon followed. By the
2000s the likes of Harpers’ Magazine, The Atlantic and The New Yorker
were chasing after a taste of ‘cool.’40 The young writers, all the while
sitting back and winking, happily obliged.
Post-postmodernism is the last of these definitions and is the least burdened with rigid criticism, albeit also with the least
imaginative name. Post-postmodernism shows an interest in postmodernism – especially the narrative devices associated – but
doesn’t see earlier movements as wholly tired or misconceived either. It maintains the same openness toward a certain kind of
realism in writing as to science fiction. Nonetheless at the same time, it seeks to create the best conversation between author
and reader, which may or may not exclude realism, in order to be absent of the contempt shown both by avant-garde and
commercial fiction (Wallace, cited in Miller, L 1996).
Writers such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rick Moody, Will Self, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace 41 are great
examples. They are all proud of fictionality, and, to varying degrees, non-standard form. Yet, they are also aware of the ability of
literature to affect change, no matter how small. They provide more than an insight of ‘what it must be like for others’ – the
marginalised, the poor, the ill, etc. – but also an insight into the rest of us with our relative crises. They are, at times, the writers at
the edge of an edge occupied by literature itself.
They write of uncertainties, of cynicism at both extreme and centrist politics, of a lack of clarity at what is what, of a lack of
satisfaction at compromise in work, life or dreams – they write for the majority of us, who have nowhere else to turn. Those who
want and live by moral principles but who cannot be certain they’re right. For those who are afraid of Islamism but know they
must hold some responsibility for its existence. We love consumerism but we hate it. We live environmentally unsustainable
lifestyles but our basis for such lifestyles is comfort. Our contradictory selves.
They are also wholly aware of the literature that came before; classicism, Romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism,
neo-realism and so forth. It is intriguing to find one Rick Moody, a relatively young writer 42 remark:
“Writers my age (mid-thirties), however, don’t have the luxury of choice. Our problem is how to confront the
influence of a single novelist: Thomas Pynchon”
(Moody 1997)
That he considers Pynchon important an important writer of his generation is not such a radical statement, the mainstream press
acknowledges this, but that he considers him the single most important novelist is something different all together. It is this
mindset that will allow diversity in fiction and the critics of both extremes are welcome because it is in that situation that the novel
stands a chance against the combined onslaught of new technology and even, in the case of journalism and non-fiction, old
technology. It is a mindset that allows the internet to act as a digital paper. A paper comparable to physical paper but just as with
thicker and thinner pages with its own advantages. It is also a mindset that ensures writers will not remain undiscovered, even if
only known by a small population on the internet. It is the mindset of the future, that will allow fiction to maximise its variety and in
turn its readership in a way the cost of films often prohibits. It is a mindset acting as a counterweight to those not just
announcing the death of the author, but the death of art.
He then moved to California, where his older brother and sister lived and could provide support.
He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a number of years, working as a freelance graphic
designer, a cartoonist and a journalist. He then went into partnership, with his friend David Moodie,
on Might, which was a magazine aimed at those in the 20–30 age bracket. This venture, although
the magazine folded in 1997, set the path for his later career as an editor and publisher. (Flanagan
2009)
In 1998, the first issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, 43 or commonly just McSweeney’s, was published. Reviewing
the first issue for Metroactive, an online weekly based in Silicon Valley, Tai Moises wrote of a unique style that has continued up to
the present day:
“McSweeney's is a brilliant, irreverent, doggedly bumptious parody of the revered institution of the Little
Literary Magazine. In pitch, it resembles its illustrious but ill-fated ancestor Might. But Eggers has given his new
lit-mag a sort of retro Men in Tights atmosphere: it has the old-fashioned gentility of silly people wearing funny
clothes. The editorial voice is articulate, courtly and waggish: imagine George Plimpton in a Groucho Marx
nose and glasses.
(continues)
“The fiction, in particular, is of a sort one rarely finds in literary magazines. In an area where people try so hard
for meaning, for profundity and resonance, it's invigorating to read the work of talented writers who revel,
cavort and wallow in glorious, flamboyant absurdity. There's no poetry, no autumn leaf imagery; no stories
about loved ones wasting away from cancer.”
The literary journal was founded by Eggers to focus on the style of writing more mainstream, and timid, publishers avoid. It is
accompanied by the independent publishing house McSweeney’s Books which begun releasing books in 2001, His most notable
works include A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a collection of short stories How We Are Hungry (2004), What
Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) and most recently the non-fiction Zeitoun (2009). Eggers has
also written – occasionally under pseudonyms – song lyrics, screenplays, co-authored children’s books with his brother, and
otherwise been a prolific editor and contributor to many publications. In August 2009, The New Yorker published an excerpt from
his forthcoming novel The Wild Things which, in an act of intertextuality, is inspired by Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things
Are (1963). In 2006 he was finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and in 2008, for his work with 826 Valencia, a
TED Prize recipient. On the future of the written word his is quoted as saying, in a speech to the American Writers Guild:
Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed.
It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have
established an e-mail address[. . .]if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a kind of faction memoir, is heavily influenced by the postmodernist tradition and is
also an exemplar of post-postmodernism. It’s many playful additions prefacing the book, including the copyright page and a
section titled ‘Rules and Suggestions For Enjoyment Of This Book’ which includes the following points:
“4. Actually, many of you might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 239–351, which concern the
lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they
seemed interesting to those living them at the time.
“5. Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you
to page 123 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length. Those first four chapters stick to one
general subject, something manageable, which is more than can be said for the book thereafter.
This is followed by a lengthy acknowledgements and with drawings and diagrams included. The text also employs metafiction
through the use of self-referential passages and the overall fragmented narrative. The following is an excerpt that gives a good
demonstration for a post-postmodernist’s concern with emotion. The interesting technical angle is how Eggers does not rely on
the reader, as is common in realism, for the suspension of disbelief — i.e. toward the fictional nature of a text. The passage
describes the author’s puzzlement at what it means to be young, in the context of his personal circumstance, at the end of the
20th century. The scene takes place at a bar, having organised a baby-sitter for his brother, on the one night of the week when he
is able spend time with friends:
“We watch the crowd below. They are wearing clothes they bought secondhand in the Mission or, for twice the
price, in the Haight. They have unbuttoned the first two buttons of their tight synthetic-fibered shirts, worn over
T-shirts with logos for non-existent companies. They have shaved heads or carefully messy Westenberg hair.
There are young men up from Stanford in light blue oxfords with shortshorn, shiny heads, hard with gel. There
are small women in big shoes, with snug, ribbed shirts.
“Everyone is talking. People have come with friends and are talking with the friends they’ve come with. They’re
out with people from work. They are looking into the faces they see every day and are saying things they’ve
said a hundred times. Like us, they have in their hands beer that has been brewed on the premises.
“[. . .] they mouths are moving, but their words are only groans, one continuous, monotonal groan, a sort of
mooing,, punctuated by the occasional squeal—‘Ohmygod!’
“There are too many of them, of us. Too many, too similar. What are they all doing here? All this standing, all
this standing, sitting, talking.
“Something needs to happen. Something huge. The taking over of something a building, a city, a country.[. . .]
Or rioting. Or no: an orgy. There should be an orgy. [. . .] That would make it all worthwhile, that would justify
everything.
(continues)
“But this—this is obscene. How dare we be standing around, talking about nothing, not running one huge
mass of people, running at something, something huge, knocking it over? Why do we all bother coming out,
gathering here in numbers like this [. . .] We are wasting this.”
In the post-postmodernist, in writers like Dave Eggers and those he publishes, the aesthetic of postmodernism lives on. Many of
the ideas follow. Not least of all, is a concern for humanity. In post-postmodernism, there is a less a sense of victimisation in the
world and more a focus on the individual’s ability to contribute. It responds to a new political order, but it is not naive in thinking
we are without problems, whether they be abroad in the form of a new Other, at home in our leaders or within one’s own soul.
Post-postmodernism is engaged in the discussions of society, responsive to events, open rather than closed, but most
importantly, it is writing worth being read.
37 If there are any doubts to Ernest Hemingway’s minimalism, and the reader is not persuaded by The Old Man and the Sea (1952), there is an anecdote centred
around his invention of the ‘micro-story’. In a bet, Hemingway was challenged to write a story in six words. It was to be a conventional dramatic narrative, following
the Freitag Triangle i.e. with an exposition (beginning), complication (middle; conflict) and finally dénouement (climax and resolution). Hemingway came up with the
following: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He won the bet.
38 Rick Moody, is case in point, who while studying at Brown University was taught by Angela Carter, Robert Coover and John Hawkes. discusses the effect this had
on his writing, and in turn the future of the writers’ workshop, in ‘Writers and Mentors’ an article published by the The Atlantic for the 2005 Fiction Issue.
39 In fact, McSweeney’s was created with the expressed purpose of published writers rejected by other journals.
40 These prominent publications, based on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, had made a similar mistake in the early 20th century when they were unwilling
to publish writers of the West who wrote in the. Vernacular. This includes John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize for Literature.
41 Sadly, David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008. He was a writer of great talent paying homage to postmodernism through his use irony, black
humour, faction in his journalism and metafiction in his short fiction. The two novels published during his lifetime, The Broom of the System (1986) and Infinite Jest
(1996) are considered cult classics. Formally, Infinite Jest is an example of fragmented narrative and maximalism at 1079 pages. David Eggers, in his 2006
introduction writes:
“It’s long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic
undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their
time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love. Which is, after all [. . .] what an author is seeking
when he sets out to write a book — any book, but particularly a book like this, a book that gives so much, that required such sacrifice and
dedication. Who would do such a thing if not for want of connection and thus of love?
[. . .]He is from the Midwest – east-central Illinois, to be specific, which is an intensely normal part of the country (not far, in fact, from a city, no
joke, named Normal). So he is normal, and regular, and ordinary, and this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a
thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us — how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other
and why.”
(Dave Eggers 2006, pp. x-xi)
1 writer between the ages of 18–50 years : Zadie Smith is a young wrier who published her first novel at 23 years old.
2 a vain so-and-so who searched and found a job in which, at least in radio interviews, has resisted the passage of time.
3 informal derogatory a deluded writer of crime-fiction, over 40 years, who frequents a solarium and has hair that is an artificial, jet black.
4 a misleading or imprecise definition. Often formatted in a manner intended to deceive the reader if not thoroughly read : I slipped this
definition of ‘young writer’ into my SDI without being noticed, by way of it having similar appearance (and syntax) to New Oxford American Dictionary.
USAGE Young writer means 'handsome, habitual carrier of paper and pen, perhaps a little grey hair but only above the ears,' while
emerging writer means 'born-again literati, habitual carrier of papyrus and quill'. In discussions of writing, young writer is the term
for a pre-geriatric writer without 20-something offspring : : Dave Egger, a young writer and publisher, grew up Lake Forest, Illinois. In describing the
author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), however, employ emerging writer:: Marina Lewycka is an emerging writer, her first novel
was published when she was 59 years old.
ORIGIN Old English g(e)ong wrītere, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch meaning ‘an imprecise quantity of used pencils.’
43In Australia, McSweeney’s inspired the creation of Torpedo and The Lifted Brow. While only in their early issues they have attracted positive reviews from media
outlets such as ABC Radio National on their program The Book Show, which airs on weekdays. International success like that of McSweeney’s may yet remain just
ambition. However, it is worth taking notice when an already successful writers such as Rick Moody contributes to an independent Australian literary journal. This
refers specifically to Issue 4: Fake Bookcase of The Lifted Brow, which with an echo of Brautigan’s The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971), in which the title a
story was given to the author to then write.
Rick Moody’s story was called ‘Advanced Praise For: The Atonement Murders’. It is a series of eleven absurd reviews about a novel attributed to an author called
Aldrich Simmons. The protagonist of the supposed novel, D. L. Sweeney is a literary critic and also, according to a Mrie Norquist Ames, author of Red Creek Precinct:
“a particularly merciless serial killer eliminates, apparently randomly, people he witnesses in public spaces reading a particular novel.”
(Moody 2009, p. 257)
Namely, those reading Ian McEwan’s Atonment (2001). Moody goes on to lampoon those great series of adjectives quoted on the front covers of books:
reason, for it seemed as though all of his thoughts and actions were controlled by an invisible hand. Quite remarkably, everything
was strange.
He had woken on top of, not under, the covers of his bed. He lay there, not in his usual fetal position, but flat on his
stomach, his face pushed into the pillow. He spat out the feather he was unintentionally chewing. The belt around his waist dug
into his hips. He was was still dressed in the same clothes from the day before.
“How embarrassing, how could I let this happen?” But he couldn’t remember much of the past twenty-four hours. His
head felt like someone had mistaken it for an egg and placed it in the microwave. It spun around, and around, at a slow but
disconcerting pace, feeling as though it might burst in all directions—sloppy and unidentifiable.
His retinas were furious too. They screamed at his eyelids for allowing the sunlight in, like my sister over the six-thirty time
slot.
(“Neighbours,” she says to me.
“No,” I say with the remote control held tight.
“Yes, Neighbours!” she glares at me.
We watch Neighbours.)
And his stomach ached—
NARRATOR:
Mind you, this isn’t because our protagonist is hungry.
READER, looking annoyed:
Hmmm, yep.
NARRATOR:
Well OK, it’s just he’s one of those people. When he gets
hungry, he thinks with his stomach...so I’d kinda understand
if you’d thought that.
In postmodernist literature, there is a keen desire to move beyond straightforward depiction of the world. When critics and
theorists suggested the world had moved on, to a different level technical innovations, writers attempted to respond. It remains
unclear whether or not they were successful sculptures of a postmodern hyperreality. What is clear, that the epoch of
postmodernism in literature has passed.
Be that as it may, postmodernism continues to have an influence on writers in the 21st century. This is despite the efforts of some
to dismiss postmodernist literature as an isolation fashion. The reason for this is that the origins of postmodernism and the
underlying architecture, have grown in relevance in the digital age. It is clear in forms beyond writing, where techniques in hip-hop
and dance-punk music have seen today’s youth exposed and subconsciously appreciative at the innovations of postmodernism
in literature.
In the history of postmodernism in literature is a solution to fears writing must wither and die. However, it must come at the
acceptance that neither realism or postmodernism are to blame for the decline of literature as the dominant form of
entertainment. Going forward the internet will complement literature, whether in digital or print formats. In their online existence,
niche markets will continue to grown stronger because it is here they occupy a global space and so too should the market for
post-postmodernist literature. Courageous publishers will acknowledge niche markets for literature and focus on products for a
number of these groups. Doing so will allow literature to maintain a strong position alongside television and film.
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