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Postmodernism
A self-referential world where there is no escape (DeLillo, The Names, 1982: the price of oil = an index to the western worlds anxiety s. Jamesons postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism) Expression:
Fragmentary Reinterpretative
John Barth, from The Literature of Exhaustion (The Atlantic, 1967 a manifesto of Postmodernism)
Barth disciple of Nabokov and J. L. Borges: Postmodernism as the literature of exhausted possibility or, more chicly, the literature of exhaustion By exhaustion I dont mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities by no means necessarily a cause for despair. That a great many Western artists for a great many years have quareled with received definitions of artistic media, genres, and forms goes without saying: Pop Art, dramatic and musical happenings, the whole range of intermedia or mixed-means art bear recentest witness to the romantic tradition of rebelling against tradition.
Novels
V. (1963) The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Gravity's Rainbow (1973) National Book Award for Fiction Vineland (1990) Mason & Dixon (1997) Against the Day (2006) Inherent Vice (2009)
The Crying of Lot 49 the muted post horn, symbol for the secret Tristero society
From Ethos-based Postmodernism to LatePostmodern Stylistics (Robert Kohn, Style 43.2, 2009)
The Crying of Lot 49, published by Thomas Pynchon in 1966, influenced American postmodern art of the 1980s. That art in turn influenced Pynchon's 2006 novel. Against the Day. The early novel was driven by the ethos or guiding beliefs of postmodemism, while the subsequent art was expressed in styles inspired by that ethos. That there would be synergies between his novels and postmodern American art of the 1980s is not surprising given Pynchon's professed interest in art in Slow Learner, where he recalled during his college days "taking one of those elective courses in Modem Art and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention (20). His own artistic inclinations are evident on the double-spread title page of the first edition of The Crying of Lot 49, on the right-hand side of which the number 49 is underlined and flamboyantly displayed in broad numerals four inches tall, suggesting the influence of Jasper Johns, who began his number paintings in 1956 and established an influential prototype for representing numerals as subjects. (194)
Pynchon building alternative worlds (s McHale) + the modern political thriller genre Gravitys Rainbow: web of links among characters and actions, doubles, role-playing and role-reversing, coordinating systems and parallel ideas. V. ideas about entropy, dehumanization and theoretical ideas put in fiction The Crying of Lot 49: Pynchons most metafictional novel to date
The contemporary meaning of hierophany American jeremiad (Sacvan Bercovitch): denouncing America for backsliding from its chosen status as Gods model theocratic/democratic/economic society Instead: a society of generalized control
Oedipa as textual critic: what passes for reality is actually a highly encoded text The novel = a story whose plot is a plot Messages left in WASTE baskets: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system. From the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, the law deduced the principle of the increase of entropy and explains the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature.
The quest for the lost America of spirit vs rationalized corporate America (San Narcisos Yoyodine corporation):
She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. (p. 6)
Slaughterhouse-Five
- The overlap of history and fiction + authors organizing part both: All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names. (p. 1)
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 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. (...) Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this: 'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (pp. 26-27)
Sight
Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry. Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy. They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon. The man assigned to the bed next to Billy's was a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time. (p. 100)
It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed. He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk. Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the wardlike flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew. Kilgore Trout became Billy's favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read. Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy., but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater., for instance, had shot a fourteen-yearold fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more.' said Rosewater. Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living. (p. 100-101)
SF as salvation
Americana (1971) End Zone (1972) Great Jones Street (1973) Ratner's Star (1976) Players (1977) Running Dog (1978) Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell") The Names (1982) White Noise (1985) Libra (1988) Mao II (1991) Underworld (1997) The Body Artist (2001) Cosmopolis (2003) Falling Man (2007) Point Omega (2010)
White Noise (1985) an Airborne Toxic Event just after the 1985 chemical spill in Bhopal, India => an uncanny commentary on the environmental disaster, even though the novel was in press even before the accident occurred. Jean Baudrillard: if the Gulf War was a non-event, 9/11 was the absolute event (The Spirit of Terrorism) Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), Falling Man (2007) 9/11 terrorist attacks Running Dog (1978) political thriller (sexual activity in Hitlers bunker towards the end of WWII) Libra (1988) a transitional moment in Am. Consciousness: JFKs assassination, which ends an age of political innocence + a moment when the effects of the media serve as fundamental mutation in Americans lived relationship to the world. Underworld (1997) an anatomy of the emergence of paranoia as a constitutive feature of American identity during the Cold-War period.
History
John Duvall: DeLillos fiction is an invitation to think historically Even though Am PM novels, Libra, Mao II and Underworld promote a social critique that often proceeds from Linda Hutcheons historiographic metafiction (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988: the PM novel blends the reflexivity of metafiction fiction that calls attention to itself as fiction with an explicit questioning of what counts as official history => the fiction/history boundaries are blurred) DeLillo recognizes the power of history, but insists on the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery + the role of the artist in a consumer society
Influences
Post-modern seems to mean different things in different disciplines. In architecture and art it means one or two different things. In fiction it seems to mean another. When people say White Noise is post-modern, I dont really complain. I dont say it myself. But I dont see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe its the last modernist gasp. I dont know. (interview, 1998)
a college professor forced to realise that he is just every man in any city + DeLillos own task of finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it. Consumption in the late 20th c: global, yet American (Jameson: technology as shorthand) Crowd control: the supermarket offers spiritual consensus (WN p. 18)
Falling Man
Nickname given to a man who actually fell from the North Tower on 9/11 (emblematic for a more general human condition, like Bellows Dangling Man), inspired from a press article (s. photo taken by Richard Drew, Sept. 11, 2001) Choosing ones death A survivor of the 9/11 attacks, whose fall is then dubbed by an artist all over the city.